Accelerationism
This page covers the political concept of accelerationism. For a page on accelerationism from a philosophical perspective, see the
Philosophyball Page
"Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory."
Accelerationism is a range of ideas in revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left and right-wing ideology—that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and
right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.
History
Origins
The Origins of accelerationism can be traced as far back as Karl Marx, with his notion that the self-intensifying processes of capitalism will eventually lead to it's own demise through revolution, but the real philosophical roots come in the early 1970s with the French Marxists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who wrote in their 1972 book 'Anti-Oedipus' that rather than oppose capitalism, leftists should instead acknowledge it's ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen those liberating tendencies, or in other words, to "accelerate the process". In 1974 the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard extended on this, saying that even the oppressive aspects of capitalism were "enjoyed" by those whose lives the system reordered and accelerated.
Nick Land and the CCRU
Nick Land was an English philosophy professor at the University of Warwick in the early 1990s who became known for his highly animated but often confused lecturing style. He was influenced by the writings of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard and felt that the optimism of the post-cold war 90s was naive and needed to be undermined. His writings during this period would later become the core of accelerationist ideology.
In October 1995, several of his students, and several faculty members who agreed with him including the cyber-femenist Sadie Plant founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit or CCRU to further develop accelerationist thought (although nobody called it that at the time). The CCRU was obsessed with life under late capitalism and about the pace of technological progress.
The CCRU was described as an incredibly fast-paced and intense environment. They operated out of a small, cramped office that was messy and filled with drugs. Members would be made to think constantly and would give each other impromptu seminars on whatever connections they happened to make. Rather than follow any academic standards, the group gained knowledge through collectively sharing their thoughts. They also held annual conferences called "Virtual Futures" to promote their ideas and gain new recruits. These conferences were attended by people from all parts of academia, but they were just as abstract and confusing as their ideas themselves were. One conference for example featured Nick Land lying on his back and croaking into a microphone like a frog.
Collapse of the CCRU and decline of the movement
The articles the CCRU churned out were typically very confusing and had only the thinnest grounding in actual research. They wrote about topics that wouldn't become mainstream until decades later, such as the impact of the internet and artificial intelligence on society, but the poor quality of their work and their utter disregard for academic norms and practices made them hated by the University of Warwrick's philosophy department.
Sadie Plant left the group in October 1997, leaving Land in charge. She claimed that while she still agreed with the ideas, she found the group suffocating and had to get out. A year later the CCRU split from the University of Warwick entirely and Lands remaining followers relocated to Leamington. Once there, the CCRU shifted to a focus on the esotericism and the occult and rapidly descended into madness. The group become quasi-religious and cult-like. The intensity of thought required by it's members became even more intense. This pressure to be constantly thinking all the time (as well as heavy amphetamine use) eventually sent several of the groups members into severe mental breakdowns, including Land. By the early 2000s, Land had dissappeared from public life and the CCRU effectively ceased to exist. All of Accelerationisms academics dispersed to do other things and the ideas faded into obscurity for the next decade.
Resurgence in the 2010s
The term "Accelerationism" was first used to describe the movement in 2010 by the critical theorist Benjamin Noys. He took the term from the science fiction book "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny, where it is used to describe a group of aliens who dedicate theselves to technological progress. Noys was deeply critical of Accelerationism, but nonetheless it's name stuck.
In the early 2010s, Accelerationism began to gain traction again, but in doing so it split into two varients: left accelerationism, which mostly spread among academic circles, and right accelerationism, which mostly spread via the internet.
History of Left Accelerationism
Before it's collapse, one of the CCRU's members was a man named Mark Fisher. Today he is most well known for writing the book "Capitalist Realism". In 2003 Fisher started a magazine called K-Punk which published articles which drew heavy inspiration from the works of the CCRU's aggressively pro-capitalist rhetoric. However, over time the magazine drifted away from accelerationism and towards are more left-wing point of view. He felt that capitalism, with it's slow and monotonous corporate structures and endless production of the same products, had become a disappointment to accelerationists, while at the same time, he criticised mainstream leftists for not properly utilising the possibilities that modern technology offered. One of K-Punk's readers, a man named Nick Srnicek, strongly agreed with Fisher's analysis and the two eventually became friends.
After the 2008 Financial Crisis and the failure of the 2011 Occupy movement, Srnicek felt that leftism was in need of a new kind of radical politics. So he and British political theorist Alex Williams teamed up to write "#Accelerate: A Manifesto for the Accelerationist Movement" in 2013. It defined a version of accelerationism which was anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal, but which also rejected traditional left wing methods of direct action and democracy-as-process. This became known as Left Accelerationism. They would later expand their ideas into a book called "Reinventing the Future" in 2015, which saw a much more positive reception despite (or perhaps because) it never uses the word 'accelerationism'. Left accelerationism remains widely rejected by most leftists today.
In 2014, inspired by this new strand of accelerationism, Armen Avanessian and former CCRU member Robin Mackay published the book "#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader" which remains to this day the most comprehensive guide to the left accelerationist movement.
History of Right Accelerationism
After Nick Land's breakdown and the collapse of the CCRU, Land moved to Taiwan and then a few years later to Shanghai, where he became a journalist for an english-language shanghai based newspaper. His articles were mostly a confusing mix of pro-government propoganda and CCRU-style gibberish. While in Shanghai, he became convinced that China was already living in an accelerationist society and became enamoured with what he saw as the techno-authoritarianism of leaders like China's Deng Xiaoping and Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew.
Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s he became a fairly prolific writer on the internet, not always under his own name, and his writings began to take on an increasingly right-wing character. He began writing about ideas of 'human biodiversity' and 'capitalist human sorting' and became a proponent of the idea that there are natural differences between races. This rightward shift caused most accelerationists to distance themselves from Land.
He eventually came into contact with Curtis Yarvin and together the two synthesised the ideology known as Neo-Reactionarism (NRx), also known as the Dark Enlightenment, named after Land's 2013 essay on the ideology. The Dark Enlightenment can effectively be seen as version of Accelerationism modified to account for what Land sees as the problem of leftist progressivism, which he believes is slowing down the acceleration process, and also to accomodate his new right-wing beliefs.
Influence on Neo-nazism
NRx/The Dark Enlightenment came into existance on the internet in the early 2010s, at around the same time and place as the alt-right. Both being far-right ideologies, the two naturally came into contact with each other and a lot of ideological mixing happened between the two. This led to Accelerationism spreading all throughout far-right and neo-nazi circles, assisted by the nature of the internet. Several neo-nazi militia groups embraced accelerationist politics as a justification for violence After the 2017 Charlottesville rally led to the collapse of the Alt-right, many of it's now dissaffected members found the radical and violent methods of accelerationist neo-nazism to be a more attractive prospect than the comparatively cautious mass politics of the alt-right.
Accelerationism had an effect on the rise in white supremecist killings and terrorist attacks in the late 2010s, as it's belief in creating social chaos by any means helped to inspire many 'lone wolf' attackers. The largest of these was the 2019 Christchurch massacre, of which the shooter's manifesto cites accelerationism as one of his motivations. This caused accelerationism to spread among far-right circles even more to the point of becoming a mainstream belief in the far right.
Beliefs
Landian Accelerationism
Landian Accelerationism believes that the development of technoculture and the victory of capitalism after the cold war are inherently intertwined and can never be separated. it believes society is perpetually headed towards crisis at an accelerating rate, in such a way they we always recognise too late and do not have the ability fix. "Events increasingly just happen, They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent.". Technological advancement in capitalism is not just changing society, it is changing our very selves. It believes that eventually things will progress to a point where the individual will dissolve compared to the importance of the techno-capitalist system. Contrastingly, while it acknowledges that capitalism has enabled great innovation, it also believes that capitalism holds back innovation just as much as it enables it, that capitalism has never been fully unleashed, but has always been held back by politics. From this, Land concludes that rather than attempting to resist capitalist processes, these processes should instead be unleashed completely and fed back into themselves. to quote the man himself "The process is not to be critiqued, the process Is the critique, feeding back into itself as it escalated. The only way forward is through”.
Left Accelerationism
Similar to Landian Accelerationism, left accelerationism also believes that the world is descending into a period of ever accelerating catastrophes and cataclysms, which current politics is unable to adequately solve. It cites the response to the 2008 financial crisis and climate change as examples of this. It believes that Neoliberalism has, since its emergence in 1979, completely taken over politics to such a degree that even leftism has been absorbed by it. Even the crisis of 2008 did not destroy it, but only reformed it. They believe that modern leftists have it all wrong with their focus on localism, direct action, and what it calls "endless horizontalism", which it believes achieves nothing meaningful other than making leftists feel good about themselves. Instead it calls for leftists to identify the processes and mechanisms inherent to capitalism that contribute to its decline, and to accelerate those processes to accelerate the collapse. It also believes that before a post-capitalist society can be implemented, robust forms of class power must be recreated, the media should be reformed into the hands of the people, and an intellectual infrastructure must be created to develop the ideas and methods for building a post capitalist society rather than relying on the future post-revolutionary world to do it for them.
Right Accelerationism.
See also: Neo-Reactionarism
Right accelerationists believe that western governments are inherently corrupt and liberal democracy is a failure. They believe it cannot be reformed and so must destroyed to pave the way for a better future. Depending on the sub-variant, this could either be the dark enlightenment desire for an ultra-capitalist corporate monarchy, or the neo-nazi desire for a white enthnostate. They believe the best way to achieve the destruction of western governments is through the creation of maximum of social chaos. It does not matter what one does or how they do it, so long as it further destabilises western government. This can and does include murder and terrorism. While they reject electoral politics, they also believe that if you do vote, you should vote for the most extreme candidate you can find, left or right, since that deepens political polarisation and social division.
Personality and Behaviour
Accelerationism talks incomprehensible words, because is influenced by postmodern, post structuralist philosophy and Lovecraft.
How to Draw
- Draw a ball.
- Fill it in with either black or a very dark gray.
- Draw three right-pointing arrows, the leftmost arrow green (#0ED145), the center arrow yellow (#FFF200) and the third arrow red (#EC1C24).
- Add the eyes and you're done!
Color Name | HEX | RGB | |
---|---|---|---|
Black | #000000 | rgb(0, 0, 0) | |
Green | #0ED145 | rgb(14, 209, 69) | |
Yellow | #FFF200 | rgb(255, 242, 0) | |
Red | #EC1C24 | rgb(236, 28, 36) |
Relationships
Friends
Landian Accelerationism - GOTTAGOFAST!
UnconditionalAccelerationism - Mychildforthemodernday,disillusionedbycapitalismandsocialism.
Reactionaryism - Let'spullthingsback,byFORCE!
Revolutionary Progressivism - Let'suseforcetopushthingsforward!
Anarchism - Ihelpherachievehergoals.
Futurism - FellowloverofNYOOM.
Kakistocracy - UnknowinglyhelpsmeachieveMYgoals.
Anti-Realism - Theultimateendgoal.(Sorry,
Anti-Centrism)
Posadism - Mydear,dearson.
Acid Communism - MysonwhohasstayedtheclosesttomyoriginsinMarx'swritings.
Climate Skepticism - Let'sspreadchaos,death,anddestructiontoacceleratethecollapseofthestatusquooftheentireworldtogether.NYOOM!
Bio-Posadism - Let'sbringnewdiseasesandpandemicstoacceleratethecollapseofSOCIETY.NYOOM!
Frenemies
ZeroAccelerationism - Pleaseson.Accelerate.Please.
Cybercommunism - My
rightsidehatesyouwhilemy
leftsidelovesyou.
Enemies
Conservatism - BOOORING,ISLEEP!
RadicalCentrism - Slowpoke.
Anti-Radicalism - Notfunatall.
Neoliberalism - NotNYOOMatall.Rather,ascreechinghalt.
PoliceStatism - I'LLKEEPSPEEDINGUNTILI'LLDIE,LIKEITORNOT!
Progressivism &
Reformism - Whyyoucallyourselvesprogresswheyouarereallyslowingmedown!
Further Information
Literature
- A Quick-And-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism by
Nick Land
- Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 by
Nick Land
- Meltdown by
Nick Land
- #Accelerate: Manifesto for an accelerationist politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek
Wikipedia
Videos
Online Communities
Gallery
Portraits
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Credit: TheLegend2t
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Credit:
User:Muddy Mudkipz