Penned during the dot-com boom/bust as a series of short stories before being published in 2005 as a complete novel, Charles Stross’s Accelerando animates the experience of technological evolution outpacing human comprehension across the (then) near and (still) far future. In particular, it plotted out — pre-generative-AI and pre-Bitcoin — the convergence of AI and finance and what human existence might be like in its aftermath.
On Monday, we watched a US presidential inauguration in which an aggregation of the world’s most powerful tech titans were situated center stage. This made sense given that it was to a great degree tech, and the new ways that tech-enabled media shape our actions, our impulses, our identity-formation and collective associations, that won Trump the election. The next day, Trump announced the country’s private sector had pledged a $500 billion investment in new AI infrastructure.
Accelerando has been an important reference for New Models since its inception. But with the coalescence of crypto and AI (a development now cosigned by the executive branch of the US government), references to Stross’s work have proliferated. With this ep, we give you an NM Reads featuring excerpts from Accelerando (Ace, Orbit, 2005, CC) read and produced by Lil Internet.
For more: Charles Stross’s blog, antipope.org
