omniharmonicImaginal House Deep Tech Talk (re/acc)
Collapse, Technocapitalist Authoritarianism, and Accelerating Regeneration
I was recently invited by Patricia Parkinson to give a talk at Imaginal House on the themes I’ve been exploring in my recent writing: the runaway feedback loops of late-stage capitalism, the rise of techno-authoritarianism, and what it might mean to build genuinely regenerative alternatives.
The talk covers similar territory to my recent essays on regenerative accelerationism and the transhumanist lineage behind Silicon Valley’s political vision, but in a more conversational register. I opened with a song I wrote in San Francisco, staring up at the Salesforce Tower’s LED screen playing looping videos of happy families and nature at the heart of the machine consuming the world.
What I tried to do in the room was make sense of the forces accelerating around us: AI, political chaos, the hollowing out of the middle class, the quiet merger of surveillance infrastructure with state power, not to leave people feeling disempowered, but the opposite. Understanding these dynamics as system properties rather than conspiracies or accidents opens up agency. It lets us see where the leverage points actually are.
A few threads from the evening: why I think the people in elite positions of power understand that capitalism is not sustainable, and why techno-authoritarianism is their response. The strange philosophical lineage connecting Nick Land to Peter Thiel to J.D. Vance to policies being implemented right now. And why regenerative accelerationism means building parallel systems: local currencies, cooperative supply chains, place-based resilience, rather than trying to reform a system whose logic requires it to keep extracting.
The talk ends where the essays end: with the Indigenous diagnosis of wetiko, the cannibal spirit, and the suggestion that our response to these runaway processes means re-embedding ourselves in relationships with place in ways that become incomprehensible to a machine that can only see through the lens of commodity.
Deep gratitude to Patricia for the invitation and to everyone at Imaginal House for such a generative evening.
P.S. If you’re still here, you might enjoy reading the lyrics of the song I sang at the beginning of the talk. I’ve also included a poem I wrote that I ended up reading during the dialogue that followed.
The Fiery Tongue of Babylon
The fiery tongue of Babylon licked me like an atom bomb I screamed momma what’s gone wrong but no one could hear my call at all
The fiery tongue of Babylon spits the riddles keep you circling the drain stand in iPhone lines drenched by acid rain if you ask the same question you get the same refrain
It was always going to fall Even if you don’t tear down the walls
It was a mystery to me how it stayed around with people taking drugs just to stick around even if the markets are all already drowned we’re still keeping the lights on
There are certain things you’re not allowed to say some sacred cows to whom you always must pray and if you ever tried to find your own way they’ll try to burn you right down to the ground
It was always going to fall Even if you don’t tear down those walls
Now it crashes on my mother and my brother and my father So I shout fuck it, we’re not drowning in these tainted holy waters if you want it you can get it, start a riot, write a pamphlet we’ve tried so many times before thought we as humans we could end this holy war they built a prison it just didn’t have a door
This is such a beautiful planet it’d be such a shame if we waste it
An Ode To Landless People
They burned the boats. We cannot return. There is no land that would have us back. And who could blame her?
Now, set against the wind and the winter that is always coming, we furtively dream fever dreams of a sense of home, of belonging, played out on silver screens in our sitcoms and our pornography.
Hollow laugh tracks and fake orgasms replace a place that knows our names, that knew our flesh and longed for us before we had yet to set foot there.
Who longs for us now? The machine. The machine we constructed of fallen angels and market forces that became our new Gods, reifying our ceaseless hunger in cold steel and glass.
It longs for the blood of our children that we pay in our taxes and our debts, pooling our will into the forced displacement of others.
As we have cursed ourselves, so shall we restlessly curse our relatives.
Because we cannot rest, not any longer. We can only gnaw and seek like the zombies we created in movies, more autobiographical than we can let on that we know.
There is no return. We burned the boats. Then we burned the corn fields of the ones who welcomed us here with open arms. We broke their hearts and spirits with unimaginable cruelty. We called their land wild and their wisdom savagery.
And yet, they still offer us medicine with the hope that if we stop hurting ourselves for long enough we might stop hurting them.
I do not know where to go now that the bosom of the Great Mother has been forsaken. Some wish to depart for the stars, a final cosmic suicide to see ourselves out after all that we’ve wrought.
If they do arrive on Mars, they’ll burn the boats. We cannot return. There is no planet that would have us back. And who could blame her?