Nothing to see here? Health Goth and the eclipse of hypercamouflage

Displacing the dialectical negativity of traditional or ‘kitsch’ Marxism, accelerationism names a contemporary heresy. The affirmative orientation of the movement seeks instead to strategically harness the capitalist mode of production, and the historical material conditions it has sired, to intensify, destabilize and ultimately exhaust the present neo-liberal deadlock. With its anti-nostalgic, putatively ‘transhuman’ embrace of technical sportswear, biotechnologies and digitally rendered environments, the recent ‘Health Goth’ phenomenon, which first emerged as an aesthetic and social trend centred around an Internet community in 2013, therefore, at first blush, appears quintessentially accelerationist. In the interview-essay that follows, however, we pose a series of questions to Chris Cantino, one of Health Goth’s chief instigators, in a bid to open up further, speculative appropriations of a movement that itself stems from practices of détournement. Whilst acknowledging that the movement may indeed be characterized in accelerationist terms, a characterization that would moreover resonate with Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of the ‘Tipping Point’ as social epidemic, particularly insofar as it is one so overtly enabled and stimulated by the spectacular affect of sportswear fashion, we propose that it nevertheless exceeds this first order of reception, chiefly by eclipsing the accelerationist concept of hypercamouflage.