Yanged Noumena: Why Andrew Yang is an Accelerationist and Why It Matters

Yanged Noumena 
"if we play out the capital efficiency race, we lose - like on an epic level..."
- Andrew Yang

A c c e l e r a t i o n i s m  is a theory of time. Don't forget it. 

Time A - Entrance:
2012: Mark Fisher says "1: Everyone is an accelerationist. 2: Accelerationism has never happened. 3: Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist."
2019: Andrew Yang corresponds to all three.

Provocative, I know. But there's no longer any doubt as to whether Andrew Yang is or is not an accelerationist; its a question of whether or not he is this or that kind of accelerationist, and, considering all the riff-raff in the media about the term, let's not waste anytime - Yang is a materialist with a Marxist streak who falls somewhere between Srnicek-Williams and Nick Land.

Here's some evidence in the form of thematically arranged excerpts from Yang's recent H3H3 interview (if too much, skip to the next session where I arrive at the point):

- Technology:

• "automation trends picking up steam"

• "machine learning algorithm...can solve...incredibly complex problem beyond any human intelligence, but they're essentially complete idiots and 2 year olds at anything else [however]..these trends can sometimes explosively happen in non linear ways"

- Work and Economy (related to technology):

• "I would read various books about the future of work...like 'hey robots are coming and you should start looking into what that will mean'"

• "in an age were technology is going to end up assuming more and more work...we need to rethink...work...and...come up with better, more human ways...of valuing our...time..."

• "future trends...artificial intelligence...that's going to end up replacing...workers...the public is going to get...zero of this value...this is why you need a mechanism so we all share in that progress or things are just going to get darker and darker..."

• "our economy revolves around...capital efficiency where the market says if 'you're an accountant you're worth ...if you're a truck driver you're worth...'...tech is going to come along and do the job of the accountant and the truck driver...so...we need to...find new ways to value our own time...we have to transform what we think of as intangible value, so if you make another human being stronger and healthier, that's immensely valuable, its just right now our economic statistics don't value that appropriately"

• "why do so many Americans also not have much faith in the democratic solution [and] policies? Maybe we need to translate them into something that will actually touch people day to day - that trusts people. One danger that democrats get into is they trust institutions more than people..,more Americans would be excited about if you put your confidence in them and acted like we were all owners and shareholders in this..."

• "how do we reward and incentivize  the work we need more of for ourselves...[UBI] is not a solution, its a foundation...it gives us a chance to start measuring our economic progress in things that would matter to us, like our health and well being...whether we enjoy the work we're doing, things that might actually get us excited...the joke I make is how many people get excited about GDP when they wake up in the morning?...we need the right measurements for our society...we need to evolve...we can integrate them [other metrics noted above] into our economic measurements...if individuals, companies, or organizations put resources to work to move society in that direction they actually get rewarded economically because right now the problem is all the economic rewards cut in this [one] direction, and all the helping people rewards cut in the other direction...there are different ways to create carrots and sticks with these companies, but the trick right now is to align their well being with ours..."

• "[UBI is not going to reduce work, it's a] catalyst [for work that] supercharges the local businesses...nonprofits...volunteer organizations...so what do the jobs of the future look like? It could be that 20 years from now its very normal to work in a job that just helps make other people stronger...things that right now there is no market demand for...capital efficiency says these things are worth zero...the big change we have to make is change the measurement and say these things are actually worth a lot"

• "trickle up economy...increasing the purchasing power...creates a virtuous cycle"

- Societal and P Problems (related to work and technology): 

• "I'm running...to solve the biggest problems of our time, and I think those problems are accelerating...I didn't think I had 5 to 10 years to climb the ladder to address these problems...we don't have time for that shit [political jockeying, or going from being a CEO directly to running for president]

• "here are the real problems...the democrats response...[to trumps slogan] was 'America is Already Great.' That is not what I'm saying...we have real problems and we need to solve them as fast as possible."

• "We're in a period of vast disillusionment where if you came of age in another era they would say hey here are the things that are important and if you do this its going to work out for you...and now we just don't believe any of it...we don't believe in our institutions, we don't believe in what my future holds...we've lost confidence in our government, and we've lost confidence in our government to update its own operating system..."

• "its amazon's job to try and pay as little in taxes as possible. It's our job to make it impossible for them to pay zero taxes."

- Other Notable Excerpts (related to all of the above):

• "people call me a futurist...I call myself a presentist, just the other politicians are behind"

• "It's not socialism, its Capitalism where income doesn't start at zero" 

• "solve the problems of this time with the tools we have of this time" 

• "gotta go where the money is"

Accelerationist Bingo:

Garbage time is running out, so let's pause for a moment to check on how our players are doing.

Dark future? Check.
Accelerating? Check.
Sense of urgency? Check.
Capitalist efficiency? Check.
It's not bad, its worse? Check.
Emphasis on temporality? Check.
Humanity to be wiped out? Check.
Trends, cycles, catalysts, and nonlinear growths? Check.
And - not included in my excerpts, but present in the interview - a small circle of mega corporations with their privatized tech usurping the governments power and the effects this has on political debate which is already essentially a form of literal reality TV (reminiscent of Baudrillard). Extra check.
Now resume.

Ok. So what. Yang uses the accelerationist jargon, and probably unintentionally as most of these terms overlap with basic business and technology language (part of what Fisher might call Business Ontology) from the 90s onward (a connection made accurately by those nerds in Tiqqun in their uninspired The Cybernetic Hypotehsis, even if they draw the wrong and boring conclusion from the basic facts). It's a coincidence, right? So that's the end of it, right?

Not quite. There are no coincidences, only interlocking fictional resonances taking shape, spilling over into the subject, making themselves real, turning into beliefs, and  contaminating other hosts. Think information AIDS - and we don't get it from sharing needles, but beliefs, feelings, and ideas.

Time B - Resonances:
No more coincidences.
2000: the CCRU, speaking through the accelerationist Nick Land, writes in Split Second Timing “by the turn of the millennium 700 million years of biological evolution had been recapitulated in 70 years of technical development, leading to AI programs running…approximately ‘equavilent to the brainpower of a guppy’…technocapitalist trends involve positive nonlinearities increasing returns, or runaway trajectories…” (pg. 178).
2019: Yang says "machine learning algorithm that can solve an incredibly complex problem beyond any human intelligence, but they're essentially complete idiots and 2 year olds at anything else [however]...these trends can sometimes explosively happen in non linear ways"

The similarities are undeniable - though explainable - but there's more...

2015: Left accelerationists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, following their #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in 2013, write the book Inventing the Future Postcapitalism and a World Without Work which contains excerpts from the manifesto and has the following cover.

Machine automation? UBI? Futurism? Sound familiar?

2019: Yang says that when he started his nonprofit Venture for America in 2011 that he "would read various books about the future of work [that said] like 'hey robots are coming and you should start looking into what that will mean'"

To synthesize these 'coincidences' - 2017: Nick Land, in part discussing the above book, in the Concept of Acceleration New Center for Research and Practice Session 4 says

"The UBI argument is very close to the cynical and anti-humanist side of the argument we've come to...UBI is the expression of this extremely classic comprehension of what Capital should be...it should be a productive service in the interest of humanity...What makes it accelerationism on the left is that there's a demand for the trend of automation be continued...rather than a circuit that couples workers and capitalism together, there's an autonomous capital circuit in which robotic manufacturing substitutes for the human pole..." (Note that Nick is giving a generous reading of UBI, not necessarily arguing for UBI or a humanist Capitalism...).

Coincidence? No. Information AIDS, remember? One could very well imagine a world where Yang, a double Ivy League graduate, author, and tech savvy entrepreneur, picked up and read this Srnicek-Williams book or at least some of the related literature that may be cited in the book - and the world I imagine is one in which Yang read the CCRU and Land...

What's that you say? You now see that there is more than just a coincidence here?

Bingo.

So What Makes Yang a Real Accelerationist....(Short Accelerationist Lineage):
As seen, the Srnicek-Williams in Yang is his conceptualization of the acceleration of technology and its replacement of humans as not anti-human, but as a catalyst (accelerator) to re-emphasize the human; his appreciation for the fact that machines will free up workers' time and reduce costs thus raising profits and allowing workers to engage in care taking of their self / others, creative acts, and positive leisure time (one is reminded of the 'fully automated luxury communism' stuff too) while reaping financial kickbacks from the increased profit margins; and his proposal to use the preexisting capitalist structures (what in the CCRU is referred to as cargo culture, or using the remnants of whats there to make due) - as opposed to trying to radically change things or reinvent the wheel - as a method and case study to move towards a new politics. And, of course, again as the cover of Inventing the Future implies, Yang and Srnicek-Williams agree that universal basic income (UBI) can be paired with automation to pave the way towards a decent future. Srnicek and Williams are boring though, and I have no interest in arguing for them. Yang's saving grace is his Landian streak which is most notable in his tolerance (or absence of moralistic disdain, unlike Srnicek-Williams) for capitalism (he says universal basic income is "not socialism, but capitalism that doesn't start at zero") and his renunciation of the title of politician instead opting for a business model that understands human appetites, incentives, desire, and drives (akin to Land in the Dark Enlightenment - "Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetite..."). Tl;dr: capitalism isn't to be critiqued morally or politically, it is the method and means of critique of  itself and of morals and politics. 

However, to say that this is why Yang is an accelerationist or that this shows Yang's understanding of Capitalism and therefore his competency as a leader does not say anything of importance. Rather, what is important is that Yang understands the 5 following interconnected gears, levers, and switches of Capitalism and the plane of consistency it has deployed (what Guattari calls Integrated World Capitalism) and therefore that he also understands the humans who are attached to this machine and its parts (whose subject and subjectivity, as Guattari and Fisher point out, come to be defined of. in, and through capitalist enunciations):

1. Transitioning between one government system to another is never without its tragic backslides and severe damages to the (middle class, everyday) people, places, and institutions it is supposed to be governing and therefore the momentum or structures of the system already in place needs to be used to get to the next level, whatever that may be. 
2. Values are derived from affective experience and material, not by other values / ideas or by purse reason.
3. Values that stick with people often arise organically and intuitively when people are brought together through and with material means which act as an objective third party mediator (balanced interpersonal distance).
4. Desire
5. The death of God, i.e., the cultural milieu of nihilism, the falling out of authority, the morose malaise of political disengagement, etc., of our Western world.

These are 5 important and highly interrelated facts that underpin the accelerationist position and are elaborated by theorists imperative to the accelerationist canon such as Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard,  Moldbug, and, of course, Land who synthesizes all these thinkers.

Let's elaborate.

- 1: Gov't Transition:

Moldbug, in Chapter 1 of  his famous An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, writes

"Here…is a Times Story on the fight against malaria…: ‘Before the 1960s, colonial governments and companies fought malaria because their officials often lived in remote outposts...Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.’ Let’s focus on that last sentence. Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care. What we see here is that independence movements…led to some very concrete and very, very awful results, in addition to this curious abstraction—freedom. Clearly, whatever freedom means in this particular context, it’s such a great positive that even when you add it to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care,the result still exceeds zero...colonialism, with its intrinsic absence of freedom and its strangely effective malaria control... was in any way superior to postcolonialism, with its freedom, its malaria, its civil war, etc.”

Revolutions or independence movements, in breaking with previously established government - the purpose of government as Moldbug points out  being to simply establish order - can lead to serious disorder - the opposite function of government -  or some 'very very awful' things. This is not to say that revolutions or rebellions aren't sometimes appropriate, but rather that the left often doesn't conceptualize that if you're for revolution, you're in it for the long, nasty haul. To revolt consists in, yes, overthrowing the bad gov't, and, also yes, going through X amount of years of absolutely destabilized hell - bad nongovernment - without government or creature comforts (electricity, clean drinking water, shelter). Those who already suffer from these things (the prols) and your regular modern day 'revolutionary' alike (the petite bougie) is neither emotionally nor physically equipped for this, basic facts that play into the bigger motif through Open Letter which is that switching government is in fact like rocket science in that it needs to be done  quickly, cleanly, transparently, and all at once with the proper equipment and theoretical calculations. In accelerationist terms, one cannot turn the speeding machine on a dime or it will crash, one needs to use the speed generated by the machine and direct that vector towards something new.

- 2 and 3: Values Organically Arising in Relation to Affective Feedback to Material Conditions:

Kant, Marx and Freud have shown us the most on these matters.

For Kant, internal systems (categories, faculties, etc.) dynamically interact with one another to create a synthetic model of the outside world which is otherwise unknowable. We are not in contact with the outside directly, we are in contact with our reconstructions or synthesis of the outside, and our knowledge is limited to internal functions that uneasily map onto the outside. We know our internal models of the outside, not the outside itself. That is, for Kant's critical philosophy reason is not master in its own house. A bunch of mishmash of faculties legislating this or that take turns being master of this or that.

Freud, for the most part a secret Kantian, extends this critical approach and its emphasis on 'internal' dynamism inwards, making not only the outside unknowable, but the deep inside too (the drive, instinct, or object petit a often being likened to Kant's thing in itself). That is, for Freud's critical metapsychology, and as he says, the ego is not master in its own house. A mishmash of instincts and their vicissitudes, blah blah blah...

Deleuze and Guattari combine and extend these notions to conceptualize a universe composed of conjunctive impersonal flows and their tendencies of capture, articulation, coding, and de- and re-territorializing (or acceleration) which occur as ‘the process’ sediments into an assemblage, or organization of strata, the parts or layers of which, always amounting to more than the sum of their parts,  interact with one another inclusive-disjunctively -i.e. machinically and diagrammatically without negation - while also feedbacking into their own process of becomings. Jargon, I know. In other words, the impersonal base material flows of the noumenal outside get trapped and stratified into a thing that develops an inside, or the inner and outer unconscious (just as Freud describes, in a Kantian fashion, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle).

Nietzsche, predating Freud (who took immense inspiration from him) and engaging with while also critiquing Kant and Schopenhauer, reminds us with his own critical psychology that - to be vulgar and brief - the world is constituted of instincts transformed into human values which are then projected onto the outside as to seem more objective than they really are (see Tausk's influencing machine or Bion's strange objects for psychoanalytic hypothesis on this process) and that instincts not expressed outwardly turn inward and create personality or illness.

Marx, who, again in a critical fashion, concerns himself almost exclusively with the notion of value, runs parallel to this motley crew of thinkers and reminds us that we are unconscious of our class, i.e. our situation in a social antagonism between those who control the means of production and those who are forced to attach their bio-labor-power to and through these machines, and as a result of this unconsciousness, the values external and internal to us are skewed or distorted - perverted, as Zizek explains in his first book. As Foucault (who some argue is a Kantian, others a Marxist) puts it in the foreword to Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Oedipus - and therefore, we will say, accelerationism -  is arguably a synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx (which Land agrees with) that also toys with Freud and Kant (to the extent that D and G were polemically called 'old Kantians' after the book's release...).

What all this theory boils down to is the basic lived (and clinically verified) fact that meanings and values that form organically as life plods along, ones that occur without being consciously willed into being  - feeling laden associations to people, places, things that happen along the way or are more in accordance with instinctual activity - tend to stick in a person's experience and be used as meaningful directors much more than abstract, moral oughts that come from some authority figure without any organic situation  or personal meaning (neurotic superego injunctions inherited from mommy, daddy, state). Lived and felt experience as opposed to lofty morals are what bring people together. To apply our previous theorists, peoples' values aren't derived solely of 'pure' reason (abstract logic, 1 to 1 correspondence with the outside) and their environmental influences (vulgar humanist materialism), rather values are bound up with experience and affect, and if its one lesson that Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud emphasize its the idea that values should be one's own, attached to one's own meanings, not the ideas of others or abstract systems outside of the subject (a lesson demonstrated in the praxis of psychoanalysis where the curative factors arise through the naturally unfolding transference or emotional relationship between the patient and therapist, not necessarily through abstract cognitive or intellectual facts being taught or revealed).

- 4 and 5: Desire and Nihilism:
To be far too brief, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud's criticisms of internal, external, psychology, and social reliability or realism via the deconstruction of reason and its replacement with unconscious internal drives and their sublimation into values projected into the external realm relocates authority in the subject or body and its desire as opposed to - in this ontological order -  an omnipotent God, an outside world apodictically imposing itself on our senses ruled by this God, and a reliable internal stream of known consciousness (Descartes ego, sort of) in relation to this outside world ruled by this God. As Nietzsche foresaw, this kind of death of God and reason supplanted with a psychology of instincts or desire - a transition from outside truths to internal wants - leads to nihilism and a surplus of desire now unrestrained by slave morality.

This is where Nietzsche offers what is essentially a mythical method of remedying the nihilism he uncovered through his critical psychology, a mythical utilization of desire which Freud later turns into a therapeutic practice tied to medical science and a new theory of mind centered on the pathologies that occur when desire circuits are disturbed. Deleuze and Guattari exorcise psychoanalysis of Freud's own nihilism and the nihilistic linguistic vectors Lacan introduced via his overly structuralist approach to Freud thus freeing desire from the grips of the negative and reintroducing it as the material of one flow doubly articulated as economic and libidinal investment. Lyotard, contemporary of D and G, highly interested in psychoanalysis and Nietzsche - an interest which, as Land points out saves him from slipping into the overemphasis on language that Derrida, like Lacan, was championing at the time -  ventures through the strange land of libidinal dynamics before declaring in his book on postmodernism that in our current cultural milieu, master narratives of legitimacy and authority are dead. That is, religion, science, reason, logic and traditional moral values, deterritorialized to a pulp by capitalism, are over - cancelled. Now the only authority, legitimacy, and order - currency perhaps - is desire and how desires connect with other desires, or metanarratives.

...and Why Does It Matter (Yang vs. Sanders):
Why care about any of this?

Let's cover the first three points in one motion: gov't transition (1) and values as material and organically arising (2-3) are important to understand as Yang looks to install his very own concrete machine whose mechanisms make use of the abstract momentum of capitalism to plug-into and re-engineer (not unlike the cargo culture of CCRU) the concrete mechanisms of capitalism towards a new object. He engineers environments that will create organic relations conducive to the kind of relationships that will ignite desire; he aligns interests, connects excitements, attaches flowers of desire to one another, all through money as a third party connector.

Furthermore, Yang, in a move akin to early Marx (without the intolerance for capitalism), aims to appeal to capitalist notions of value as to help working class people reconnect their lived everyday experiences of personal value back to the value of money as opposed to the current situation of working class people struggling to live in a world where the value of money is solely connected to other values of money (CMC) and others' (big banks, state, billionaires) desire and therefore disconnected form the lived experiences of the working class people. Rather than 'Money --> work-->Money-->Other' as a circuit with personal values completely excluded, the circuit now looks like Money--> work --> life --> Self-->Other, etc. Why get rid of capitalism to let humans thrive when you could simply connect the capitalist machine to the human machine in a way that the human is registered on capitalism's terms? (Don't get too carried away answering this sentence, its rhetorical. If you disagree, you probably aren't going to change your mind are you?). Get Capital to work / fold the human into its value system, don't attempt to jam the overflowing forces of capitalism into the weak human containment system.

To get a better grasp on why this matters, lets compare Yang to Sanders' impotentized (to use a Guattarian term) politics which in discussing will  help us get to point 4 and 5, desire and nihilism.

In his Joe Rogan postcast, Bernie, utilizing almost solely negative and moralistic rhetoric in proposing a list of nice things he plans o do without providing any concrete plan, alternates between an overreliance on facts, science, cognitive reasoning, human rights, and moral fairness in the form of fuzzy, warm, but vague ‘got to,’ ‘ought to,’ and  ‘have to do this, have to do that.’ What is more, in order to convince people from all walks of life to come together around common values and ‘get on the same page,’ so to speak, Sanders argues these things aren’t actually that radical or utopian, a communication which seems to serve the function of implying that his positions are reasonable and that if one were thinking straight one would have no choice but to agree with.

Joe, possibly sensing Sanders’ lofty moralism and rhetorical defensiveness, brings up the power of anti-Sanders lobbyists and anti-climate change disinformation agents (which Sanders earlier mentions are extremely difficult to battle politically due to their entrenched positions in the corrupt system), etc., asks Sanders the following

 “these ideas sound great, but in the competitive environment of global politics how would you convince Russia or china…to do something that would put them in some sort of competitive disadvantage?”  

Sanders responds to by saying

 “well, the answer is Joe, if we do not do that, in 50 to 100 years everybody is going to be at a terrible disadvantage…you gotta make the case, these people…Putin…Xi…they’re not crazy people, and presumably they have concern about their kids and their grandchildren…this is a planet under siege, I don’t want to become a science fiction…but we gotta get together”

In perfect opposition to Yang, this not only shows Sanders’ misunderstanding of our current cultural milieu - a wasteland of postironic nihilism -  but also shows Sanders’ misunderstanding of desire and the role it plays in contemporary politics and how the two  (nihilism and desire) relate. That is, I am willing to bet that most millionaires, billionaires, CEOs, world leaders, despots, whatevers, don't give a shit about the future of the world or their familial bloodline at all. Rich and powerful people want to make as much as money as they can, conquer as much territory as possible, and consume and enjoy life frivolously as much as possible. These people want to eat and fuck the world and leave a big stinking corpse behind. They have no concern for the future generations, and no incentive to begin to develop a concern. The modern self made man is a postmodern nihilist at heart. They desire and fulfill their desire for their own self preservation, even if that self preservation destroys others and is ultimately self destructive.

Consistent with this misunderstanding of nihilism and desire, Sanders, in perfect opposition to Yang who states 'its Amazon's job to try and pay 0 taxes and its our job to try to get them to pay taxes' (two vectors of desire meeting in an event of reality) calls corporations and billionaires (Amazon and Bezos) greedy for wanting 0 taxes. He goes on “how does it happen that on issue  after issue the American people – the working class of this country – want something, nobody pays any attention to it, but billionaires want something and it gets done, and that has to do with a corrupt political system.” Ultimately, he thinks that telling a company that “their short term profits are not more important than the future of this planet" is not  " a hard sell to make” (because, as mentioned above, they’re “not crazy people”) the bottom of line of which is telling fossil fuel companies that they have to stop selling fossil fuels. A move like this will never fly as it does not take into account the desire of the corporation and how to re-engineer that desire to benefit the working class.

This critical oversight is not to be credited to Sanders being bad, stupid, immoral, etc. It's to be credited to the fact that Sanders is unconsciously a nihilist who is unconsciously operating on Capitalist terms. Consider the following: Sanders, like many politicians, tries to fix values (greed, working class not coming together) by using other values (Sanders' oughts and mandates, appeals to facts, convincing others, etc.) to change other values, a failed method which operates by the very capitalist logic protested and critiqued wherein abstractions devoid of material base are related to and effect other abstractions devoid of material base (CMC - where commodities are related to other commodities with capital, or money, as the generic exchange value deterritorializing all values and codes; making money off of moving around money; etc.). The Marx inspired left seem to miss the fact that to change values one needs to change material base that values derive from, not 'rationally' or emotionally convince people to change their values (and thus the psychoanalytic goal is to help someone have a new material-affective experience that allows them to form new values that make sense to their life and thus help others).

Another related way Yang triumphs over Sanders - one that relates back to Moldbug, revolution, and rocket science -  is that Yang knows that people don't want (desire) to take time out of their overworked days to volunteer for some heroic struggle of political valor that is likely to amount to naught. People want to be able to spend more time doing what they like with who they like, and from this the political change people want will occur as the automation feedback takes off. This is because politics don't change because of politics (just like mental health doesn't improve through a willful attempt at being mentally well, i.e. self help and motivational books, CBT, etc.), politics, an abstraction or reiffication (a commodity if you will) is an ossified version of the organic comings and goings of people (what Communism aims at returning to) and thus it is 'nonpolitics' or 'the-outside-of-politics' that is the only thing that can change politics.

But this is not the point, just one fact on the way to the point. The point is that Yang gets the power of money and sees that we have been conceptualizing money ineffectively. Money isn't an abstraction devoid of material base, it is the concrete material instantiation of internal/mental belief or affect - the flow of raw powerful desire. Money is hyperstitional. It works because we all believe in its power, and through believing in it, it becomes real and has real a/effects. It brings together heterogeneous components - subjects, objects, whatever - and provides for them a common point of reference that then sets things in motion in a way that amounts to more than the sum of its parts. It is a transcendental connector. 

To relate this to horror for a moment: if  Stephen King novels and their film adaptions - not to mention horror classics in general - have taught us anything, its that an out of the ordinary event will bring a group of heteregenous but ordinary people together, forcing them to temporarily put aside differences to occupy a foreign territory and solve a problem or address a threat. The Mist, Storm of the Century, Night of the Living Dead, etc. Capital or money (I know they don't completely equate) is the transcendental horror event that draws us together.

Summary:
In believing that agents make rational decisions, mainstream politics relies on trying to convince people to come together and bond over humanist morals in order to to artificially convince other people to believe certain things based on appeals to science, reason, logic, morals, etc. I.e., Sanders - who epitomizes the ideals of the left at this point - believes that he can appeal to the morality and reason of regular peoples and world leaders alike as to create solidarity and save the world. This kind of politics attempts to negate what already is, to disregard the current gov't structures and their vectors of influence, and move against all current entrenched power structures to install something new. 4 to 8 years to undo all of this and reinstall something new? I don't think so. Sanders is stuck in modernism and doesn't understand desire or nihilism. Yang, using the preexisting structures of Capitalism and the plane it has implanted, installs a mechanism that organically unites interests, incentivizing group activity and value co-creation.

If we are going to have a politics for the future, we need to have a nonpolitics of desire and nihilism.

Time A - Exit:
2000: the CCRU  under the direction of accelerationist Nick Land writes in Split Second Timing 
“…by the turn of the millennium 700 million years of biological evolution had been recapitulated in 70 years of technical development, leading to AI programs running…approximately ‘equavilent to the brainpower of a guppy’…technocapitalist trends involve positive nonlinearities increasing returns, or runaway trajectories…” (pg. 178).
2012: Mark Fisher, after leaving the CCRU, says "1: Everyone is an accelerationist. 2: Accelerationism has never happened. 3: Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist."
2015: Left accelerationists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, following their #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in 2013, write the book Inventing the Future Postcapitalism and a World Without Work which contain themes of automation and UBI.
2017: Nick Land in the Concept of Acceleration New Center for Research and Practice Session 4 , "The UBI argument is very close to the cynical and anti-humanist side of the argument we've come to...UBI is the expression of this extremely classic comprehension of what Capital should be...it should be a productive service in the interest of humanity...What makes it accelerationism on the left is that there's a demand for the trend of automation be continued...rather than a circuit that couples workers and capitalism together, there's an autonomous capital circuit in which robotic manufacturing substitutes for the human pole..." (*Nick is giving a generous reading of UBI, not necessarily arguing for UBI*)
2019: Andrew Yang fulfills all three of Fisher's requirements, reads books dangerously similar to Srnicek and Williams, and makes use of Landian concepts in addition to saying things like "machine learning algorithm that can solve an incredibly complex problem beyond any human intelligence, but they're essentially complete idiots and 2 year olds at anything else [however]...these trends can sometimes explosively happen in non linear ways"
2020: Andrew Yang wins the presidential election. Andrew Yang has always won the 2020 presidential election.
2049: Yang4ever, like positive feedback, once UBI catches it can't be stopped

Fictions become real. Fictions infect. Inf(i/e)ctions

Accelerationism is a theory of time. Don't forget it...