What Is #AltWoke?
#AltWoke is: The Catalytic Left. Post-Landian Left-Accelerationism. Team Reza Negarestani. ‘The Dark Insurrection.’ Direct action hacktivism. Free market socialism. Apocalyptic communism. Intersectional xenofeminism. Environmentally conscientious nihilism. Libidinal Marxism. Platform stacktivism. IoT urban policy. High post-post-structuralism. The Corporate Undercommons. Gratuitous neologism and nomenclature trolling. Lifestyle branding as political ideology & vice versa.
AltWoke™: Left Hand Praxis
Lawful Neutral
Infrastructure building
Stacktivism
Political reformatting
Rationalism
Urbanism
Globalism
#AltWoke: Right Hand Praxis
Chaotic Good
Disruptive compliance
Troll farm astroturfing
Hacktivism
Nonlinear cyberwarfare
Post irony
Memes as agitprop internetism
Ten Commandments of #AltWoke
- If you’re still ‘Woke,’ you’re actually asleep.
- Post-shame is the child of post-facts. Be immune to criticism.
- Build the Cathedral 2.0
- Read Baudrillard while scrolling Kim K’s feed. Repeat until you understand.
- If you think intersectionality is a numbers game, then you’re doing identity politics wrong.
- #BlackPopMatters
- Be the amoral Leftists the Right thinks you are.
- Let a thousand detournements bloom, make them viral, infect the Swamp.
- Xenophilia. Love the alien, difference, and experimentation.
- Be vague. Frustrate the critics, entice the curious.
#AltWoke Suggested Readings
The Self Awakened – Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Windfall – McKenzie Funk
Love & Rockets– The Hernandez Brothers
How Will Capitalism End? – Wolfgang Streeck
The Dictator’s Handbook – Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
‘Lure of the Void, Part 1’ – Nick Land
The Zero Marginal Cost Society – Jeremy Rifkin
Uncorporate Identity – Metahaven
‘Ego Tripping’ – Nikki Giovanni
More Brilliant Than the Sun – Kodwo Eshun
The Birth of Biopolitics – Michel Foucault
Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Colonising the Clouds
The Entrepeneurial State – Mariana Mazzucato
Federalist Paper 10 – James Madison
Capitalist Realism – Mark Fisher
Program Earth – Jennifer Gabrys
Global Warming Gridlock – David G. Victor
‘Global Capitalism in Danger’ – Li Minqi
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
S, M, L, XL – Rem Koolhaas
The Stack – Benjamin Bratton
Ante-Anti-Blackness – Jared Sexton
Roads to Power – Jo Guldi
Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity – Thomas Metzinger
‘Labor of Inhuman’ – Reza Negarestani
Ontology of Finance – Suhail Malik
To Live and Think Like Pigs – Gilles Chatelet
Platform Capitalism – Nick Srnicek
Program Earth – Jennifer Gabrys
Black Skin, White Masks – Frantz Fanon
Global Warming Gridlock – David G. Victor
Prison Notebooks – Antonio Gramsci
The Hacker Manifesto – McKenzie Wark
A Thousand Plateaus – Deleuze-Guattari
This is Not a Program – Tiqqun
Empire – Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
Rebel Cities – David Harvey
The Autopoetic Turn – Sylvia Wynter
The Blank Swan: The End of Probability – Elie Ayache
The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society – Elena Esposito
Synthetic Philosophy of Mathematics– Fernando Zalamea
Andrew Nosnitsky’s review of De La Soul’s ‘Buhloone Mindstate’
Distrust That Particular Flavor – William Gibson
Theory of International Politics – Kenneth Waltz
The Religion of the Future – Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Chinese Cyber Nationalism – Xu Wu
‘Abducting the Outside’ – Reza Negarestani
Finite Media – Sean Cubitt
Cognitive Architecture – Ann Sussman & Justin B. Hollander
Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
The Perfect Crime – Jean Baudrillard
Seeing Like a State – James C. Scott
Capital – Thomas Picketty
Socially Useful Production – Adrian Smith
Refugee Phrasebook
An Engine, Not a Camera- Donald Mckenzie
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity – Ulrich Beck
Notes on The Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord
The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
Future Active – Graham Meikle
Tropic of Chaos – Christian Parenti
A Brief History of Neoliberalism – David Harvey
The Left Alternative – Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Nihil Unbound – Ray Brassier
Scenes of Subjection – Saidiya Hartman
Dark Deleuze – Andrew Culp
A Realist Theory of Science – Roy Bhaskar
Capital as Power – Jonathan Nitzan & Shimshon Bichler
Neurophilosophy at Work – Paul Churchland
Libidinal Economy – Jean Francois Lyotard
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society – Norbert Wiener
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines – Manuel DeLanda
Expatation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form – Stephen Jay Gould & Elizabeth S. Vrba
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand – Samuel Delany
The Undercommons – Fred Moten & Stefano Harney
Poethics of the Open Boat – Rizvana Bradley
What Are #AltWoke’s Tactics?
All we will say is that it’s a four part practice: Theoretical Practices (writing, teaching, conferences, blogs), Street-Level Practices (protests, riots, strikes in real space), Social Media Practices (#AltWoke), and Electoral Practices (participating in all elections and encouraging others to do so with a clear cut idea of how short-term decisions may affect long-term objectives).
Why Is #AltWoke Necessary?
ANON was shaken out of its slumber on November 9th. Climate change, global inequality, police militarization, Brexit, the rise of online fact-resistant and anti-intellectual populism, the expanding deep state, Wall Street’s convergence with Silicon Valley, the global health crisis, and the demagoguery of the Trump administration are all symptomatic of and catalysts for Right Accelerationism.
We agree with Nick Land’s diagnosis of late capitalism. It is an entropic AI, a systemic feedback loop wholly incompatible with the welfare of human beings.
Our ‘amorality’ isn’t a bankruptcy of ethics so much as an emotional discipline in response to global existential threats. A learned stoicism and pragmatism is crucial to #AltWoke. We acknowledge the reality of planetary scale ecological and sociopolitical catastrophe. We accept this reality as well, insofar that it’s a causal plausibility given the geopolitical circumstances. If we do nothing, Apocalypse will be the next epoch after the Anthropocene.
The nihilism exhibited by Nick Land and his NRx acolytes looks anemic from where we’re standing. NRx/Right Accelerationism is nihilism for cowards. Passively observing the phenomenon of capitalism’s gross consumption of the Earth’s resources, watching the development of technology that exacerbates this phenomenon, and synthesising this with a eugenic, Eurocentric fundamentalism shouldn’t even count as an ideology.
NRx/Right Accel is cosplay: a revenge fantasy that masquerades as a wet dream. The real deterritorializing ‘Gnon’ is drug trafficking, the Zetas, the Shower Posse, the death toll in Chicago, the Baltimore riots, the IRA, suicide bombers. It’s the HSBC allegedly laundering dirty money, it’s Pirus, and GD’s. Credit card scammers in Flatbush are as blockchain savvy as any Silicon Valley NRxer with an Ethereum startup. Marginalized underclasses understand capitalism’s dark potentials like the drug trade etc, and know how to do Right Accelerationism more brutally than NRx
These people aren’t abstract crime stats; they’re our relatives, neighbors, and coworkers. Their nihilism is neither a revenge nor a power fantasy, it’s a consequential reality that they accept — a visceral fight for survival. Their nihilism is more real and muscular than the smug passivity of Nick Land’s cucks and their frog hyperstitions.
Right Accelerationism is the suicidal epitome of white privilege. And white privilege is nothing more than a specious obliviousness. European explorers colonizing and exploiting indigenous lands for their resources kickstarted the Great Acceleration Forward. Colonization begat the global market, the creation of liberal economics, and Enlightenment values which created disruptive technologies alongside capitalism’s growth. These created the Other (xeno) and changed global demography in such a way that PoC, queer, and non-males dominate the cultural sphere. Modernism was little more than European artists coopting non-white aesthetics (Ezra Pound, Picasso, Matisse), anticipating globalism as an emancipatory lifestyle, and experimenting with nontraditional lifestyles. At the risk of sounding deterministic, we are where we’re supposed to be mathematically.
‘Deviance’ is only abhorrent if you lend any credence to traditional hierarchies. Being a cuck is only a smear word if you believe the idea of masculinity is a) real and b) something to aspire to in the first place. Saying these roles are constructs is not to devalue the role of constructs in general. Instead, when you recognize that these notions are fluid and transient, you can move more freely within the world.
Adhering to Hyper-Left-Accelerationism is an act of rebellion in this dichotomous, cyber-facilitated, political landscape. It forces you to challenge notions that lead you to ascribe value judgments without much thought. To call Nick Land an evil person and to say that we are evil by proxy is easy, but to explain why he made the political shift from Left to Right, and how his texts have influenced both respective spheres is a question that requires more thought. This is a school of thought that offers clear cut goals: fully automated eternal communism, and a world where you have the right to be lazy.
#AltWoke challenges adherents of Left Accelerationism to materialize their theory. Is this just another intellectually trendy circle-jerk for graphic designers in Helsinki, academic careerists, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and Verso book deals? Does this ideology have any aspiration to scale? Can we finally start putting this into practice? We promise you can theorize and build infrastructure at the same time.
Although #AltWoke is a vertical political school of thought, it doesn’t disregard protests or horizontal action. However, we are opposed to kitsch recklessness. Effective protests come from frustrated entities with specific goals in mind, which is why Occupy fizzled out, despite its global audience. The Civil Right’s Movement was strategic and had specific goals in mind. Standing Rock is another example. Yes, riots are protests as well and can also be effective insofar the anger of the oppressed, expressed as violence against private property, highlights a failure or injustice on the state’s end. As an example, the violence in Ferguson led to the development of the Black Lives Matter movement, and this movement examined a specific problem.
We are not opposed to identity politics, per se. We’re opposed to identity politics in its current form. We think a better answer to the current mode of virtue signaling would be to add terms to the modern lexicon that explain intersectionality and, specifically, terms that talk about internalized racism, patriarchy, etc. It’s important to discuss identity in a way that is deserving of the complexity the issue presents. Take lived experience and match it up against statistics, don’t present it as an absolute fact that everyone should automatically agree with.
Many of these terms already exist and deal with identity in a systematic way, as opposed to pointing to lived experience as if it’s an infinite truth. If you think notions like Othering by way of Fanon or cultural hegemony by way of Gramsci are too academic, then make these terms part of the general lexicon until they no longer seem obscure. Teaching Gen Z to understand hegemony and media should be the next big emancipatory project.
We’re a technologically based society and #AltWoke believes that our political decisions should be framed around this premise. Having access to endless streams of information will cause profound changes, culturally, sociologically, psychologically and perhaps even neurologically. Thus, you should think more critically about the way you engage with technology. This can only happen by educating yourself outside of our writing and manifesto.
The Left thinks we’re the Alt-Right while the Alt-Right thinks we’re AntiFa. In an age where nuance is meaningless, this proves to us that we’re doing something useful.
#AltWoke Glossary
Anihilorgasmia – AltWoke critique of nihilism as insufficient or incomplete. Nihilism is sex without the orgasm.
Hyper-Left-Accelerationism – The idea that technosocial processes within capitalism can be hastened, expanded, or repurposed even more than was originally thought by first generation Left Accelerationists. Accelerationism is a neutral ideology/phenomenon with Left and Right political deviations. Left adherents believe that technology can be pushed to emancipatory ends in order to transition into a post-capitalist world. Right adherents wish to intensify the conditions of capitalism indefinitely to possibly bring about the singularity. Hyper-Left-Accelerationism is the application of the Right Accelerationist methods to the objectives of Left Accelerationism. (See Biotech Doomsday Communism)
The Basilisk – “Autonomous capitalistic algorithmic virus and its human co-conspirators.” Malignant far right cohesion permeating online as a chimeral metapolitical, hyperstitional hivemind/AI. To think about it, denounce, or repress it normalizes and emboldens it as a memetic virus. Its purpose is to become a hypostition before AI speciation. Examples: Pepe/Kek, /pol, r/theDonald, Gamergate, #FrogTwitter.
Biotech Doomsday Communism – A catalytic Hyper-Left-Accelerationist political program that incorporates Reza Negerastani’s thesis of “inhumanism”; reterritorializing capitalism’s global catastrophes through planetary computation and integrated networks.
#BlackPopMatters – The aesthetic dominance of the Other. ‘Black’ being a shorthand for Otherness. This Other blends pop and the avant garde into new artistic forms. “Pop always retroactively rescues unpop from the prison of its admirers” and makes it available to all.
The Black Stack – The Technosphere. The Stack to Come. The acceleration of acceleration in all of its natural, infrastructural, socio-political and technological spheres. See The Stack.
Cam’roning – The act of Orientalism vis a vis treating the aesthetics, culture, and vernacular of the Other as a postmodern joke. Or using said aesthetics as raw material commodity totems. Examples: Dat Boi the meme, anime Nazis on 4Chan using black slang, white supremacists using anime aesthetics at all, most critical analysis of hip hop, Dana Schutz.
Catastrophe Ethics – The ethics of a common social good in the face of existential threats. There are no conservatives in the foxhole. Examples: vaccination, The New Deal, Geneva Convention.
Caucasity – The unbearable whiteness of Western chauvinism.
The Cathedral 2.0 – The infrastructure of the Left.
Closet Cuck – Men who repress their inner cuckold under a hyper-masculine facade.
Cuck – 1. (Noun) A complacent shill. Also an actual literal cuckold (not that there’s anything wrong with that). 2. (Verb) To indoctrinate, equivalent of being ‘redpilled.’
Class Consciousness – Here, interpreted as a state of awareness that can be achieved by pulling the wool off of the eyes of the working class. It means that one doesn’t see rich people and their desires, dreams, and values when one looks in the mirror.
Deep Freedom – A life of creativity, risk, experiment, and personal connection.
Eideology – The study of hypostitions (mass-politics mythology). Eideology is semiotic meme science and the instrumentalization of post-facts (hyperstition) to combat post-facts. If memes can be understood and manipulated, then they are scientific. If memes are ‘magic’, then they are grounded in a universal bedrock (hypostition). It is the difference between the Marxist understanding of history and society – the potential for classless utopia – and the clerical insistence on the immutable ways of tradition and order. Portmanteau of “eidetic” and “ideology.” (See hypostition, meme science)
FALC – Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Left Accelerationism with better PR.
False Necessity – The idea that society must be structured in any specific way, usually by utilizing some narrative or idea about a fundamental human ‘nature.’
Freeze Peach – ‘Free speech,’ dog whistle politics.
Fugitive Culture – The far right’s attempt to reclaim counterculture aesthetics, fashion, and art. “Conservatism is the NEW punk rock.” Examples: Richard Spencer, Streetwear Hoteps, Vice Magazine under Gavin McInnes, Dylan Roof, Sam Hyde, culture jamming via memes, Donald Trump’s vulgarity, Azealia Banks, LD50 Gallery. (See Radical Normativity)
Fully Automated Eternal Communism – What comes after Biotech Doomsday Communism. Tiziana Terranova calls this “The Red Stack.” Ingenuity’s final triumph over entropic nature; more promethean than utopian. Gnon is dead.
Gen Y2k – Millennials and every subsequent generation after. The post-internet generation. The Deleuzian generation.
Great Acceleration Forward – A catalytic event for the accelerationist phenomenon, or something that accelerates the process further. Examples: The Enlightenment, Colonialism, Irish Potato Famine, The Industrial Revolution, The Great Recession.
The Great Recession – The neoliberal economic decline observed in world markets during the late 2000s and early 2010s. This event, alongside the development of social media catalyzed the radicalization of politics.
Hypercamouflage – Concealing one’s identity to advantageously blur the line between enemy and ally. Not only looking like a friend to the enemy but also like an enemy to a friend
Hypostition – Crystallized fictions operating below the framework of society as sediments setting up the narrative for hegemony and newer hyperstitions. Both the opposite and end result of Hyperstition; an inversion of “all that is solid melts into air.” All that is air fossilizes.
Infornography – Portmanteau of “information” and “pornography.” An addiction to or an obsession with sharing, acquiring, manipulating and digitizing information. (See Venereal Semiocapitalism)
Kanyeing – An act of political/cultural self-sabotage from an ethnic or sexual minority due to mental break down from repeated exposure to Western hegemony.
Meme – Ideas, hyperstitions, or ideologies distilled, repackaged, and ready for viral distribution.
Meme Science – the rejection of superstitious meme magic. Instead, this methodology lets semiotics and experiential fieldwork (internet lurking) guide the creation of subversive images and media, and the deconstruction of Alt-Right memes.
Metapolitics – Talking about politics in of itself, and the relationship between the individual and the power structures that govern it.
‘No Gnon, no alphas’ – #AltWoke slogan denoting antipathy toward essentialism, naturalist fallacies, and fundamentalism. Culture, science, and society are humankind’s weapons against unjust nature.
Nomenclature trolling – Academic bait via gratuitous neologisms. This entire glossary, or #AltWoke.
Pleb – Old guard. Mainstream Republicans are pleb right; Woke is the pleb left.
Pornosexual – The sexuality of Gen Y2k: a pansexual queerness augmented by hyperreal pornography. Normalized “deviance.” Examples: The rise of camming and sex work among millennials, transgenderism among millennials, porn performers appropriating the aesthetics of Tumblr/Instagram selfie culture, millennial openness to kink, the fashion industry appropriating BDSM aesthetics.
Post-Facts – When specific talking points are repeated, regardless of their relation to the truth. Appeals strongly to emotion or narrative in lieu of facts.
Post-Shame – Variant of post-fact, a deflection of criticism. Think Kellyanne Conway or Milo Yiannopoulos.
Radical Normativity – Conservatism maintaining the status quo by radically transforming Conservatism via a reactionary vanguard. Examples: Barry Goldwater, Tea Party Movement, Alt-Right, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon.
The Stack – The integration of nature, infrastructure, social systems, and cloud-based computation into a single system. Also a new type of corporation that uses tight-lock integration of hardware, software and wetware (biological /cyborg entities) in order to form a branded ecosystem.
Stacktivism – A term that attempts to give form to a critical conversation and line of enquiry around infrastructure and the relationship we have to it.
Supremacismo Meltdown – The supremacy of the half-blood and synthesis of Kodwo Eshun and Nick Land. The cultural and demographic singularity of the diasporic Other catalyzed by European colonization. Cultural cross mixing among the Other creates an alien plateau or permanent culture of avant garde experimentation.
Technobiogenesis – The speciation of technology via artificial intelligence. This began the moment humans created language.
Thanophilia – The Right’s apparent desire to race to the bottom. Examples: Yukio Mishima, Oswald Spengler, anti-vaxx movement, climate denial.
Transcendental Embryonic Prometheanism – Neo-Rational view of an anti-essentialist, malleable universe that is neither fatalist nor hierarchical, but in a perpetual state of becoming. Like wet cement.
‘ve vaz vikangz’ – a phrase used to dismiss far right historical misrepresentation, Western exceptionalism, and manifest destiny.
Venereal Semiocapitalism – The combined commodification and virtualization of communication into an overproduction of memes which creates a landscape of continuous excitement across the internet. (See Virtual Realism)
Virtual Realism – The material/substantive world (irl) augmented by an information economy of hyperreal spectacle (url). The Myspace Era begat the post-truth 2010s.
Wojak – #AltWoke’s mascot. Wojak is to #AltWoke as Pepe is to Alt-Right. (Note: #AltWoke has been known to deploy Pepe nonetheless.)
Xeno – the diasporic, Other – the first subjects of modernity, as both Kodwo Eshun and Toni Morrison posit; alien plateaus.
Xenogenesis – A foreign origin. The transient space where the Other thrives.
Zaddy – Paternalistic hero worship some figures have for each other on the right, and the type of fandom that followers (see Cuck) have for their leaders. e.g. Jim Goad is Zaddy to Gavin McInnes. Mencius Moldbug is Zaddy to Peter Thiel. Nick Land is Zaddy to closeted neoreactionary fanboys.
#Alt-Woke Companion & #AltWoke Manifesto are the work of ANON. We are a collective of “Other.” Some of us are sex workers, some immigrants, many of us queer. There are even a few privileged white cucks amongst us. Nevertheless, ANON is largely the work and brainchild of People of Color (PoC). Our social disciplines are as varied as our identities, from journalists to dominatrixes. ANON are the intellectual cousins of #BlackLivesMatter divorced from liberalism. All inquires should be directed to: xenochan@protonmail.com