A brief introduction to accelerationism

During one of my lectures on science fiction and futurology, I was asked for my opinion on Accelerationism. I confessed that I wasn't very familiar with the concept and that, for some reason, it struck me as somewhat "conspiratorial." However, given my lack of knowledge, I decided to do my homework and provide an overview of this concept, which has been gaining relevance in the fields of research and technological development.

A good starting point is the article Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in, published on The Guardian's website. Written by Andy Beckett, the text traces the term's origin to the science fiction novel Lord of Light, published in 1967 by American writer Roger Zelazny. Amidst the hippie fervor and the influence of Hindu mythology and cosmic references, Zelazny introduced future scenarios and political stances in his fiction that invited reflection. In the story, we are introduced to a group of revolutionaries who wanted to take society to "a new level" by transforming people's attitudes toward technology—a group Zelazny called Accelerationists.

Although his work was forgotten over time, the notion that science fiction had a major impact on technological innovation became increasingly established over the following decades, for example, through the testimonies and visions of the future presented by great names like Arthur C. Clarke and J.G. Ballard, who said in 1971 that "what the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will be doing tomorrow."

As Beckett points out in his piece for The Guardian, over the last fifty years, and especially in recent years, we have begun to witness increasingly rapid changes in the world. This includes work patterns, political cycles, everyday technologies, communication habits and devices, the redesign of cities, and the acquisition and disposal of possessions—all of which, as Beckett argues, have been accelerated.

At the same time, during this same fifty-year period, accelerationism as a philosophical current also grew, largely unnoticed by the media and academia. To this end, the notions from Zelazny's fiction were refined and transformed from a speculative group into a real movement with a new perspective on the contemporary world and its potential. In this sense, what real-world accelerationists argue is that "technology, especially computational technology, and capitalism, particularly in its most aggressive and global variety, must be massively accelerated and intensified—either because it is the best way to advance humanity or because there is no other alternative."

According to Beckett, accelerationists are in favor of automation and the blending of humans and machines, the real and the virtual (or digital). To this end, they also frequently advocate for the deregulation of business and government involvement in the economy. "They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political disruption has value in itself," the journalist writes.

"Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism, and all other ideologies designed to moderate or reverse the already immensely disruptive and seemingly desperate pace of change in the modern world. 'Accelerationism is a political heresy,' write Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian in the introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, a sometimes baffling, sometimes exasperating book published in 2014 that remains the only reliable guide to the movement."

Like other heresies, Beckett continues, accelerationism also has different generations of adherents: ideas are passed between people, some being refined while others are renounced. In some cases, the author notes, those involved use their own specialized communication and gather around dominant figures, which leads to the creation of factions and different movements that spread across countries like the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, Italy, and France. Its members have published books, essays, journals, manifestos, and blogs, and have sparked discussions on social media—all in a way that, in Beckett's judgment, makes it difficult to tell if it is a plot from a dystopian novel or a dialogue about politics, culture, and economic theory.

Accelerationists have also been part of university faculties and are organizers of sporadic events where they share their ideas with the public and, with these people, learn how to improve their methods. Some of these meetings are recorded on YouTube, described by Beckett as "grainy footage of intense young people talking mesmerically about the future, often to the sound of electronic music and abstract visual activations in the background, frequently to bewildered audiences in dimly lit classrooms."

For a long time, however, we could perhaps count only a few dozen active accelerationists around the world. This classification only became more popular after 2010, when the term that emerged in Zelazny's fiction was addressed by Benjamin Noys, one of the movement's main critics.

Throughout that decade, however, accelerationists have focused especially on issues of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, such as "the rise of China and artificial intelligence, what it means to be human in an age of invasive and addictive electronic devices, the seemingly uncontrollable flow of global markets, the power of capitalism as a network of desires, the growing erasure of the boundaries between the imaginary and the factual, the reconfiguration of our minds and bodies by increasingly fast-paced music and films, and the complicity, repulsion, and excitement that so many of us feel about the speed of modern life."

For British accelerationist Steve Goodman, we all already live in "an operating system programmed by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism, and emerging artificial intelligence." Goodman, in fact, as Beckett notes, brought many of his ideas to the dance music scene by creating the famous record label Hyperdub. "Whether you like it or not, we are all accelerationists today," reflects Steven Shaviro, a critic of accelerationism and author of the book No Speed Limit, published in 2015, which deals with the movement.

However, as Beckett reminds us, the celebration of technology and the speed of development can have its risks, as happened with the Italian Futurists who, in the last century, while enchanted by the machines of the industrial age, also ended up becoming involved with fascism. Even though the works created by the movement are still appreciated today, the movement never really recovered a good reputation.

Something similar also happened with British philosopher Nick Land, who taught at Warwick University in the 90s and suddenly left academia. Since then, he has been active on the internet, though not always using his own name. His focus has been on themes such as the supposed obsolescence of Western democracy, the idea of "human diversity," and "capitalist selection of humanity"—a pseudoscientific idea popular among far-right sympathizers that different races also "naturally" have different values in the modern world. On the other hand, Land also advocates for the supposedly inevitable "disintegration of the human species" as artificial intelligence develops.

As a consequence, many accelerationists have distanced themselves from Land, as is the case with Iain Hamilton Grant, who was one of his students at Warwick and is now a professor of philosophy at the University of the West of England. "I try not to read the things he writes. People [in the accelerationist movement] are embarrassed. They think he sounds like a murderer. Anyone who is an accelerationist, who reflects on this, thinks: 'How far is too far?' But then even asking that question is an opposition to accelerationism," argues Grant, and as Beckett adds, accelerationism, after all, is not about limits.

Even as a critic of accelerationism, Benjamin Noys acknowledges that it is a seductive movement, and in an impatient moment like the present, “accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is moving fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a wall and slows down (as it did during the 2008 financial crisis), they say it needs a new boost.”

In the case of Donald Trump’s election and his ultra-capitalist, anti-establishment conduct, some believe this to be the first mainstream manifestation of accelerationist politics. More recently, Noys has noted that these accelerationist ideas have resonated in different spheres, from technology-positive circles to other elite libertarian and far-right niches in the United States. In alt-right blogs, Nick Land’s name has become a reference point. According to Beckett, “commentators have noted, with excitement, the connections between some [accelerationist] ideas and the thinking of both Silicon Valley billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel and Trump’s iconoclastic strategist, Steve Bannon.”

“‘In Silicon Valley,’ says Fred Turner, a prominent historian of the American digital industries, ‘accelerationism is part of a much larger movement that is saying we no longer need [conventional] politics, that we can get rid of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ if we can just use technology correctly. Accelerationism also connects to the way electronic devices are marketed—the promise that, finally, they will help us leave the material world, all the messiness of physicality, behind.’”

For Turner, what is interesting about accelerationism is much older than it is modern: “They are speaking a millenarian language,” promising that a vague, universal change is within our grasp. Noys warns that accelerationists are trying to “reclaim the future.”

Curiously, Andy Beckett proposes in his article that Marx himself was the first of the accelerationists. For the author, the Communist Manifesto published by the German philosopher in 1848 demonstrated both shock and fear of capitalism, with its “constant revolutionizing of production” and “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Marx, therefore, saw this growing intensity of capitalism as an essential prelude to the moment when the common citizen would be “finally compelled to face… the real conditions of his life” and, thus, initiate a revolution.

However, in a less orthodox way, what can be salvaged as some of the first signs of accelerationism is found in 1960s France. As Beckett explains, “shaken by the failure of the left-wing revolt in 1968, and seemingly faced with a post-war economic boom in the West, some French Marxists decided that a new response to capitalism was necessary.”

“In 1972, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a tireless, explosive, and highly seductive book, which suggested that instead of simply opposing capitalism, the left should accept its ability to both liberate and oppress people, and then seek to strengthen those anarchic tendencies ‘to go even further… in the movement of the market… to ‘accelerate the process.’”

Two years later, another disillusioned French Marxist, Jean-François Lyotard, continued the argument even more provocatively. His 1974 book, Libidinal Economy, declared that even the oppressive aspects of capitalism were “appreciated” by those who have their lives reordered and accelerated by the system. Furthermore, there is no other alternative: “The system of capital is, when all is said and done, natural.”

Both the book by Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard’s book were considered controversial in France when they were released. Later, in 1980, the duo released A Thousand Plateaus as a warning that the excess of capitalist acceleration could “suck society into ‘black holes’ of fascism and nihilism.” At the same time, however, in the United Kingdom, Anti-Oedipus and Libidinal Economy were viewed differently. After contemporary French philosophy had been ignored by the British for so long, these works were translated into English in 1983 and 1993, leading local thinkers to see a revelation in the writings of the French philosophers. This was also the case for Iain Hamilton Grant, who encountered Libidinal Economy in the 90s during his master’s degree. “I couldn’t believe it! A book written by a Marxist saying that ‘there is no way out of this,’ meaning capitalism, and that we are all just little pieces of engineered desire arranged in this great system—it was the first, as far as I knew.”

It was at Warwick in the 90s that Nick Land taught theatrical and “strange” classes, according to Beckett: “he would stand on chairs and talk, or sit on desks, rocking back and forth. He also peppered his pronouncements with dark humor. He would tell the audience, ‘I work in the field of Collapse of Civilizational Studies.’ A quarter of a century later, some former Warwick philosophy students still speak of him with admiration. Robin Mackay says, ‘I think he was one of the most important philosophers of the last 50 years.’”

Despite this, as previously mentioned, Land’s thinking took a turn in the 90s, when he stopped writing texts oriented toward 18th and 19th-century philosophers like Nietzsche to follow the new wave of accelerationism consolidated by the new radicals arriving at the Warwick philosophy department in the mid-90s. One of them was Sadie Plant, a former cultural studies lecturer at the University of Birmingham who focused on researching modern pop culture. Another was Mark Fisher, a former student of Plant’s, and both became Land’s partners that same decade.

“Like Land, Plant and Fisher also read the French accelerationists and became increasingly hostile toward those who felt most represented by the traditional left and liberal ideas in British humanities departments, as well as around the world. Unlike Land, Plant and Fisher were technophiles: she had one of the first Apple computers, he was an early adopter of the mobile phone. ‘Computers… follow accelerating and exponential paths, proliferating, miniaturizing, connecting to each other,’ wrote Plant in Zeros and Ones, a caffeinated 1997 book about the development of computing. Plant and Fisher were also committed fans of the growing and bustling 90s dance music scene and action films, which they saw as forms of popular art that embodied the possibilities of the new digital age.”

At the same time, the 90s were marked by the arrival of the internet to the consumer and the idea that capitalism had triumphed over communism with the end of the Cold War. The perception that the future was technological, shaped by computers and globalization, spread through British and American academia, as well as the political sphere, and the Warwick accelerationists, therefore, became the vanguard of this new mindset.

However, in the United States, accelerationism gained a style characterized by glossy magazines like Wired, which promoted the “Californian ideology”: “the optimistic argument that human potential could be fully unleashed with digital technology.” In the UK, this optimism influenced a new wave of workers, and at Warwick, on the other hand, the prophecies became darker. According to Plant, one of the reasons was “precisely to repress this lively 90s utopia, much of which seemed quite conservative.” Such a view, defended by Plant, explains Beckett, came from the desire cultivated by old-fashioned men to find salvation through gadgets. “We want a more open, messy, and complicated world, not a shiny new order.”

Such British pessimism had to do with the national context itself during the 90s, in which technology and capitalism were seen as intense forces trying to consume an already decrepit body. To analyze this moment, however, Plant, Fisher, Land, and nearly 30 others at Warwick founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, one of the main references of British intellectualism in recent history.

“The CCRU existed as a fully functional entity for less than five years. For a time, it was based in a single office in the narrow corridors of the Warwick philosophy department, of which it was an unofficial part. Later, the unit’s administrators rented a room in the center, near Leamington Spa and above a Body Shop store.”

For decades, tantalizing references to the CCRU have been made on politics and culture websites, music and art publications, and other more intellectual parts of the press. “There are groups of students in their 20s who are reviving our practices,” says Robin Mackay. Since 2007, he has led a respected philosophy publisher, Urbanomic, with limited editions of old CCRU publications and new collections of prominent CCRU writings among its products.

The CCRU was aware of its image from the beginning. The name was deliberately crafted with a military or robotic aspect, especially as its members began to write and refer to themselves as a collective, without using a definite article, as ‘Ccru.’ In 1999, its history was summarized by sympathetic music journalist Simon Reynolds in his trademark concise and disembodied style: ‘Ccru… emerges in October 1995, when it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and the University of Warwick as a temporary habitat… Ccru feeds on postgraduate students + damaged academics (Nick Land) + independent researchers…”

Among the readings cultivated by the group was William Gibson’s book Neuromancer (1984). According to Grant, the iconic cyberpunk novel went viral among CCRU members, which says a lot about how science fiction has always been intertwined with the narrative of accelerationism. Consequently, in 1996, the CCRU also began working with “cinema, complexity, currencies, dance music, electronic money, cryptography, feminism, fiction, images, inorganic life, jungle, markets, matrices, microbiotics, multimedia, networks, numbers, perception, texts, exchange, video, virtuality, war,” all subjects that, according to Beckett, are popular and even a fixation of contemporary politics. “We felt we were the only people on the planet talking about this kind of thing seriously,” Grant said two decades ago. In Beckett’s words, the CCRU was a kind of flexible, intellectual metal alloy, much like the multiform android from Terminator 2 (1991), which, incidentally, became a beloved reference among the group’s members.

“The main result of the CCRU’s frantic and promiscuous research was a conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms, sometimes speculative to the point of being fictional. A typical 1996 text, Swarmachines, included a section on jungle, then the most intense strain of electronic music: ‘Jungle functions as a particle accelerator, seismic sound frequencies creating a cellular noise that immerses the body… it rewinds and reloads conventional time at the speed of silicon blips… It is not just music. Jungle is an abstract diagram of the inhuman planetary future.’”

Due to the unorthodox work of the academics associated with the CCRU, the impression they left on outsiders was that it was something chaotic and nonsensical. Their existence within the philosophy department made for a deeply divided situation, as many professors detested Nick Land, and consequently, students also learned to dislike one of the CCRU's leaders. With Land's departure from the University of Warwick, several other CCRU members abandoned the group and their meeting room above the Body Shop. According to Beckett, it was from that point on that they moved away from accelerationism and into a “vortex of more antiquated esoteric ideas, drawn from occultism, numerology, the abyssal American horror novels of writer H.P. Lovecraft, and the life of the English mystic Aleister Crowley, who was born in Leamington in a cavernous terraced house to which several CCRU members moved.”

“‘The CCRU became almost a cult, almost a religion,’ says Mackay. ‘I left them before it became pure madness.’ Two of the group's key texts were always Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness and its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now, which collected followers and opponents around the world and from conventional sanity that seemed lethally glamorous. Upstairs, Land and his students drew occult diagrams on the walls. Grant describes how a ‘punitive regime’ of heavy reflection and drinking led several members to suffer mental and physical breakdowns. Land himself, having later described it as ‘perhaps a year of fanatical abuse’ of the ‘sacred substance amphetamine’ and ‘prolonged artificial insomnia… devoted to the futile practices of ‘writing,’’ suffered a collapse in the early 2000s and disappeared from public view.”

According to Beckett, Land left the UK to live in Taiwan and later in Shanghai, where he lives to this day. Taking advantage of his new home and experience, Land also published an article in the English-language newspaper Shanghai Star, in which he defined the modern fusion of Marxism and capitalism in China as “the greatest political mechanism for social and economic development the world has ever known.” Back in his Warwick days, Land also treated what he called neo-China as an ideal of what this accelerationist society would be: “fixed by the future and changing rapidly.” Given how the Chinese government currently functions, however, Land’s appreciation suggests that his previous sympathy for a libertarian agenda has ceased to exist.

On the other hand, former CCRU members like Suzanne Livingston pursued less controversial careers, earning a doctorate in robotics and artificial intelligence and going on to collaborate with corporations such as Sony and Ericsson. Steve Goodman created his electronic music label Hyperdub in 2004 and began releasing dubstep records that sometimes demonstrate an accelerationist root. “It’s like an onion. Our audience is invited to peel back as many layers as they like—some will make your eyes water, so we don’t force the issue.”

Still at the center of British accelerationism, however, Robin Mackay continues to publish texts through Urbanomic and remains in contact with his former CCRU colleagues. At 43, he lives in a town in the English countryside and continues to defend Land. “Accelerationism is a machine for opposing pessimism. By considering unprecedented possibilities, you can feel less depressed by the present,” he reveals to Beckett, also commenting on having gone through periods of depression alongside his friend, Mark Fisher, who took his own life in January of this year.

“At the end of his life, Fisher was increasingly concerned by the idea that the UK was not taking a great step forward, but was static. Amidst all the frenzy of modern life, sometimes even the most developed countries still live the opposite of accelerated times: the same parties seem to be perpetually in power; the same sluggish capitalism, still struggling for a peak a decade after the financial crisis; the same longings for the good old days, expressed by elderly Brexit supporters and nostalgic leftists.”

Even the thinking of arch-accelerationist Nick Land, now 55, seems to be slowing down. Since 2013, he has become a guru for the American far-right neoreactionary movement, or NRx as they often call themselves. Neoreactionaries believe in replacing modern nation-states, democracies, and government bureaucracies with authoritarian city-states, which sound in neoreactionary blogs like idealized medieval kingdoms similar to modern enclaves like Singapore.

In 2013, Beckett notes, Land published an essay on the movement, giving it the theatrical name “The Dark Enlightenment,” which became widely known as one of the founding documents of neoreactionary groups. Land argues that occurrences like the election of Trump and Brexit are developments that accelerationists should support since they would bring an end to the status quo. However, not everyone buys this argument from Land, as is the case with accelerationist Ray Brassier: “Nick Land has gone from arguing about how ‘politics is dead,’ 20 years ago, to these antiquated and traditionally reactionary things.”

All of this, to Beckett, does not seem so new. He recalls, for example, that in 1970 the American writer Alvin Toffler, known as an exponent of futurology (which Beckett calls “a more fun intellectual cousin of accelerationism”), published the book Future Shock, in which he dealt with the possibilities and threats of new technologies. “Toffler predicted the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, cryogenics, cloning, and robots working behind airport check-in counters. ‘The pace of change is accelerating,’ concludes a documentary version of the book, with a slightly theatrical narration by Orson Welles. ‘We are living through one of the great revolutions in history—the birth of a new civilization,’” writes Beckett.

Curiously, it was in 1973 that the oil crisis occurred and global capitalism did not accelerate again for nearly ten years. Faced with this realization, Beckett quips that we are still waiting for this “new civilization” promised by Toffler. Regardless, his book sold millions of copies, perhaps an achievement that some accelerationist will also reach one day.

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