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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerationism | 3/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T14:56:05.593251+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Cybernetic Culture Research Unit === The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a philosophy collective at the University of Warwick which included Land, Mackay, Fisher and Grant, further developed accelerationism in the 1990s. Fisher described the CCRU's accelerationism as "a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a 'technihilo' celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, partly inspired by the pro-markets, anti-capitalism line developed by Manuel DeLanda out of Braudel, and from the section of Anti-Oedipus that talks about marketization as the 'revolutionary path'." The group stood in stark opposition to the University of Warwick and traditional left-wing academia, with Mackay stating "I don't think Land has ever pretended to be left-wing! He's a serious philosopher and an intelligent thinker, but one who has always loved to bait the left by presenting the 'worst' possible scenario with great delight...!" As Land became a stronger influence on the group and left the University of Warwick, they would shift to more unorthodox and occult ideas. Land suffered a breakdown from his amphetamine abuse and disappeared in the early 2000s, with the CCRU vanishing along with him.
=== Popularization === Accelerationism emerged again in the 2010s, with Mackay crediting the publishing of Fanged Noumena, a 2011 anthology of Land's work, with an emergence of new accelerationist thinking. In 2014, Mackay and Avanessian published the anthology #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, which The Guardian referred to as "the only proper guide to the movement in existence." They also described Fanged Noumena as "contain[ing] some of accelerationism's most darkly fascinating passages." In 2015, Urbanomic and Time Spiral Press published Writings 1997-2003 as a complete collection of known texts published under the CCRU name, besides those that have been irrecoverably lost or attributed to a specific member. However, some works under the CCRU name are not included, such as those in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. In November 2025, Noys called the movement a "corpse" which had disappeared or been eclipsed by more urgent debates, but found it still relevant in contemporary debates on large language models and artificial intelligence, as well as in the corporate world with effective accelerationism.
== Concepts == Accelerationism consists of various and often contradictory ideas, with Noys stating "part of the difficulty of understanding accelerationism is grasping these shifting meanings and the stakes of particular interventions". Avanessian stated "any accelerationist thought is based on the assessment that contradictions (of capitalism) must be countered by their own aggravation", while Mackay considered a Marxist "acceleration of contradictions" to be a misconception and stated that no accelerationist authors have advocated such a thing. Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim note that accelerationists make extensive use of neologisms, either original or borrowed from continental philosophy. Such terminology can obscure their core arguments, exacerbated by the fact that it can be highly inconsistent between thinkers.
=== Posthumanism === Accelerationism adheres to posthumanism and antihumanism, with left-accelerationists such as Peter Wolfendale and Reza Negarestani using the term "inhumanism". Noys characterizes accelerationism as taking from posthumanism in continental philosophy, such as Nietzsche's Übermensch, as well as in a technological sense. Fluss and Frim characterize accelerationism as adhering to nominalism in disputing stable essences of nature and humanity, as well as voluntarism in that the will is radically free to act without natural or mental limitations.