UCLA

For this special issue of b2o, we explore Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In these projects and artifacts we find highly politicized deployments of Silicon Valley-style scitech, masked as concerned with escape from planet Earth while necessarily downplaying and denying their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged, obfuscated philosophical origins in accelerationism and technological nihilism, these endeavors and their proponents in government and tech sectors represent the ultimate expression of reality TV’s much-discussed “preppers,” ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else. In a final turn, this paper contrasts such endeavors with Trump-era protectionist values (e.g., increased military spending; the detention of migrant children; entrenched, ongoing structural racism; antagonism of longtime allies) seemingly in stark opposition to these manifest desires to leave, rather than defend, the nation. Yet, when read through the lens of accelerationism, such antagonism can be more accurately identified as directly aligned with the hastening of global confrontation, chaos and the deliverance of the chosen few to a fetishized future of their making.