Accelerationist Compass
.png) | |
| The sixteen posthuman futures, plotted on axes of hyperhuman/unhuman and deceleration/acceleration | |
| Year | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Medium | Digital image |
The Accelerationist Compass, also known as Pick a Future, is a four-quadrant grid of sixteen ironic posthuman future scenarios produced within the Miya and KALI/ACC milieu. Laid out in the format of a political compass, it plots each scenario against a vertical axis running from hyperhuman to unhuman and a horizontal axis running from deceleration to acceleration, pairing every title with an illustrative image.[1]
Origin
The grid closes Charlotte Fang's essay KALI/ACC Basilisk: A Survival Horror Eschatology, published on Mirror on March 30, 2023. Its final section, "Posthuman Alternatives", reframes the singularity not as a sudden apocalypse but as "an exponential acceleration of technocapitalism towards ends increasingly unconcerned with and unknowable to us," in which what is extinguished is not humanity itself but "man's centrality in the narrative arc of the universe."[1]
Having set out a choice between "apocalyptic survival" and "ascendant extinction," the essay offers the grid as the menu of remaining options:[1]
The only thing I can promise is you are an NPC in someone else's game—but go ahead, step right up and pick a future:
Structure
The grid is a four-by-four arrangement of sixteen cells, divided by crosshairs into four quadrants. The vertical axis runs from hyperhuman at the top to unhuman at the bottom, measuring how far a given future preserves or discards recognizably human form and experience. The horizontal axis runs from deceleration on the left to acceleration on the right, measuring whether the future arrives by arresting technocapitalist development or by driving it forward.[1]
Each cell carries a compressed scenario title over an image drawn from science fiction, anime, digital art and photography. The titles range across transhumanist, primitivist, communist, fascist and occult registers, and are written in the deliberately provocative idiom of the imageboard cultures the KALI/ACC milieu emerged from.
The sixteen futures
| Quadrant | Scenarios |
|---|---|
| Hyperhuman / deceleration | Total Nihilistic Un-Singularity; Hyper-Commodified Cocaine Capitalism; Post-Collapse Subtellurian (Re)colonization; Archeofuturist Miyazaki Patchwork |
| Hyperhuman / acceleration | Cybernetic Sex Slime Transcendence; Recursive Matrioshka Brain Universe Reduplication Exit; Interplanetary Technofascist Manifest Galaxy; Universal MMO Consciousness Upload |
| Unhuman / deceleration | Eternal Y2K Cultural Time-Trap Forever; Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism; Eco-Fascist Global Genocide Anti-Singularity; Globohomo Vampire-Elite Enslavement |
| Unhuman / acceleration | Autonomous Pajeet Technocracy; 100% Urbanization Simcity AI-tocracy; Post-Scarcity Post-Female Mass Technoreclusion; Ex-Human Pangalactic Strip Mining Singularity |
In the Exegesis
The grid is reproduced in The Exegesis of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby as Fig. 13, captioned "Accelerationist compass," where it appears in the Basilisk Coda at the end of the "Posthuman Alternatives" section, in the same position it occupies in the original essay.[2]
Interpretation
The grid's irony lies in the invitation itself. Presented as a choice, it offers no option in which humanity survives in its present form: every quadrant resolves into either the transcendence or the dissolution of the human, and the reader invited to "pick" has already been told they are "an NPC in someone else's game."[1] The compass format, associated with online political self-classification, is turned on a set of outcomes that no one selects.
The grid's fatalism is the position that Radical Love Through the End Times was introduced to answer. Published a day after the essay, that concept proposes sincerity and love as a stance within accelerationist conditions rather than a further future to be chosen from the board.