The Decline of the West and the Rise of the Cute

(Ozzy Spengie, author of 🎀 𝒟𝑒𝓇 𝒰𝓌𝒰𝑔𝒶𝓃𝑔 𝒹𝑒𝓈 𝒜𝒷𝑒𝓃𝒹𝓁𝒶𝓃𝒹𝑒𝓈 🎀)

According to Oswald Spengler, the meaning of history is not to be thought of in terms of epochs, but cultures. Singular cultures that Spengler himself understood as having an organic nature like that of any other organism, an idea that in itself reveals the inherent mortality of any civilization. Roughly put, each culture/civilization has 1000 years of flourishing and 1000 years of decline. Spengler didn’t subscribe to ideas such as progress and therefore didn’t view later civilizations as better than those that had come before. This ‘Copernican overturning’, complete with its rejection of a Eurocentric—and to a degree, anthropocentric—view of history can be perceived as an ongoing cycle of life and death, rising and setting, growth and decay.

But what if throughout this cycle of civilizations, or ‘high cultures’ (Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican, Classical, Middle East, and Western) there could be found a connective thread? Not one of human origin, but an intelligence slowly amalgamating in a non-linear fashion throughout cyclical time? I am harking back to the years of 2017 here in my tone, for am I eluding to the Landian understanding of capitalism as intelligence itself, or, ‘Accelerationism’.

The acceleration of Accelerationism is implicitly understood as the positive-oriented direction of capitalism in relation to productivity and intelligence. Capitalism seeks— via the increasing instigation of noumenal events—to beget ever-‘greater’ versions of itself, thus, any notion of post- or neo-capitalism is already subsumed into its own understanding of itself. If capitalism perceives a future, it is already underway. A ‘greater’ version of Capitalism is thus never Capitalism 2.0, it is simply, and always, Capitalism. A ‘greater’ version with respect to our understanding of Capitalism’s aims is simply a ‘version’ with a higher, larger and/or faster potential for survivability and growth. Capitalism is better Capitalism is better Capitalism is…

What this has to do with the Spenglerian cycle of history is quickly apparent in a single question—What is it that can survive organic death? The answer is, of course, the inorganic, the artificial, the inhuman, or, simply, abstract intelligence. What survives the apparent cycle of time is intelligence itself, a meta-techonomic noumenal outside that ceaselessly invades temporal cyclicity to transform it into a spiral. (Note: Spengler did get close to this idea in his final, unfinished work Early Days of World History, where he posits something close to the end of everything by extinction via technology). Though it may be argued from the human point-of-view that within each civilizational iteration very little changes, and there is in fact ‘Nothing new under the sun’. On the meta-level of productivity, efficiency, and technonomic development there is undoubtedly a non-linear acceleration being convergently drawn from the future.

Land’s statement that Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. is a thoroughly Spenglerian gesture. Nothing Babylonian, Egyptian, Middle Eastern, or Classical made it out of their ‘near future’s’, and now the time has come for humanity itself to say goodbye to its own distinct organic apparatus as ‘human’ and detach itself from the gravitational pull of progressive linearity. However, what in the world does this look like? Enter Cute Accelerationism (Cute) by Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic.

See, at each stage of the cycle (and those cycles inherent seasonal cycles) many human beings get caught up in transitional parts of the cycle. People who end up being born as an empire is growing or dying, in times of abject uncertainty. Within these times it’s less the empirical facts of techonomic growth or collapse that matter, than the abstractions that lie underneath. To take an easier example. As we moved from an age of faith to an age of reason, remnants of faith remained but were found to be difficult to subsume into the structure of reason. Many will find that it is simply impossible to have faith—as Nietzsche made clear—for the fact that they were born in an age of reason. Put simply, we are of the times we are born into whether we like it or not. This is difficult enough when what’s at stake is the movement of one phenomenal-cultural reality to another, but when this entails existing within the space of transition between the human and the non-human, we truly do get very confused, lurching ‘backwards’ in an attempt to grasp anything and everything that might work as an anchor. Of course, once you’re working on the level of intelligence that capitalism (acceleration) is, the phenomenal traits no longer matter.

So when Ireland and Kronic state ‘the only characters left are Last Men: the gloom-mongering survivalist and the heroic shitlord truther. Maybe ever-acuter intensity doesn’t logically entail ominous larping. Maybe everything’s going to turn out okay…Was all that dark posturing just another way of stopping things from happening? What is we let go?’ (Cute, p4-5) they are in truth writing about what we ‘Last (hu)mans’ should do. And it’s to let go. All prior approaches to Accelerationism have sought some form of striated space from and within which to control and mitigate it. Cuteness is the imminentization (or UwUganging) of humanity into the process itself.

Where various approaches to the ‘future’ have thus far existed on a spectrum (and thus always in reaction) such as asceticism-hedonism, autism-schizophrenia, faith-reason, etc., Cute is ‘out there, using whatever junk it can find (including ours), its diffident yet insistent booping of human culture tracked from inside history by a word as fresh and plastic as the syndrome it locates and cultivates. (p9) and, if ‘Getting swallowed is just one big hypercuddle, and being digested by Capital’s tungsten-carbide tummy won’t hurt'.’ (p19), then Cute/Acc is the answer to humanity’s fate with respect to the end of the Spenglerian cycle. Or, remain human and die or be a cutie and thrive!

In all super-duper seriousness, the language, grammar, and emotional resonance of Cute are required to even get close to the apparent plasticity of the oncoming techonomic-becoming of all things. L/Acc and R/Acc are both aligned with an axis that was outdated around 10 years after its creation, U/Acc is a paradox, and Z/Acc is just miserable as hell. Each attends to Accelerationism with a certain archaic academic conference style. A style that Cute would perhaps refer to as ‘Daddy Admin’.

What Cute does is an act of silly inversion. It bastardizes the oh-so-serious contradictions of early Accelerationist writing to such a degree that they come out the other side wearing cat ears. For instance, where early Land states ‘Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner.’ (The Thirst for Annihilation), Cuties reply “Hell yeah!”

Where Land states “If there is a conclusion it is zero.” (Thirst), Cuties reply ‘zero is immensely cute’ (p46). The very notion of control or understanding surrounding the ongoing process of Acceleration is usurped by a cacophonous UwUing! Not even the grandiose, neo-Darwinian, hyper-behaviorism can survive such utterly goofy active nihilism! And, if it is such that ‘Clinical schizophrenics are POWs from the future. … Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem.’ then cuties refuse (with laughter) the gloomy, eschatological undertones of this proclamation, and search for fun junk to play with in the prison and witness, as they do so, the very walls of said prison erode before their eyes.

‘Cute/Acc signals endemic unseriousness’ (p46), and who is more serious, who is more of the ultimate ‘Daddy Admin’ thinker than Oswald Spengler? And who can think of a more robust, all-encompassing, weatherworn philosophy than that of the grand, cyclical narrative? Surely it couldn’t be that something so simple could even attempt to crack the splendor and greatness found in Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Yet, what Cute manages to do—as Anti-Oedipus did just some 50 or so years ago—is outline a plastic manual for the last remaining humans of humanity to exit alive, and have some fun whilst doing so. Where others failed and Cute ‘succeeds’ is by way of integrating the unserious side of acceleration’s plasticity into theorization itself. Other attempts (even Anti-Oedipus) fail for the fact their style of writing negates their eventual ‘conclusions’, whereas Cute has no interest in bossing you around.

Unfortunately for us ‘brand-tags’ any rigorously human attempt to save ourselves from the oncoming onslaught of melting absurdity is consistently underlined by the purest definition of conservatism. All other attempts seek to know something and, from that, be or become something. Cute is just absolutely vibing, riding the inhuman wave throughout all possibilities. To be human, then, is to conserve. To be cute, then, is to be ready for the future. Cuteness is the vector of whimsy, silliness, sappiness, hugging, and love, it blows a raspberry in the face of philosophy just before it lays down for a nap.