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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
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| Accelerationism | 1/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T14:56:05.593251+00:00 | kb-cron |
Accelerationism is a range of ideologies that call for the use of capitalism and associated processes to create radical social transformations. Broadly, accelerationism engages with antihumanism, as well as posthumanism, and seeks to accelerate desired tendencies within capitalism at the expense of negative ones, though variants differ greatly on which tendencies and if this will lead beyond capitalism or further into it. Accelerationism originated from ideas from philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who speculated in the 1970s that emancipatory forces within capitalism, particularly deterritorialization, could be radicalized against it and its oppressive aspects. Inspired by these ideas, some University of Warwick faculty and students formed a philosophy collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the 1990s, led by Nick Land. Land and the CCRU drew upon contemporary media and culture such as cyberpunk and jungle music to further develop these ideas in a right-wing, pro-capitalist manner. They theorized a self-revolutionizing capitalism that would culminate in a technological singularity, resulting in artificial intelligence surpassing and eliminating humanity, though they drifted from these ideas and dissolved by the 2000s. In the 2010s, the movement was termed accelerationism by Benjamin Noys in a critical work, followed by a renewed interest in its ideas. Thinkers such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams advocated a left-wing accelerationism based on embracing capitalist technology and infrastructure to move past a stagnant capitalism, exploring themes such as automation of work. This was associated with Prometheanism, which engaged with ideas such as rationalism, posthumanism, and a rejection of limits on change. Land, having moved to China, also engaged with the Dark Enlightenment movement as part of his right-wing accelerationism, rejecting egalitarianism and democracy in favor of CEO-run states to promote the singularity. Effective accelerationism arose with influence from effective altruism to promote technological progress and artificial general intelligence to solve human problems, and ascend the Kardashev scale. Various other meanings for the term also emerged, such as to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it, as well as by far-right extremists promoting racial violence and the collapse of society in order to establish a white ethnostate (militant accelerationism).
== Background == The history of accelerationism has been divided into three waves. First, there were the late 1960s and early 1970s French post-Marxists such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, whose thought arose in the wake of May 68. According to David R. Cole, texts produced during this period had little effect "other than as perhaps scattered art practices", with the result being that "capitalism has emerged as triumphant in the past 50 years, and the idealism of the student 1968 revolution in Paris has subsequently faded." The second wave arose in the 1990s with the work of Nick Land and the CCRU, with the third being the Promethean left-accelerationism of the 2010s.
=== Influences and precursors === The term accelerationism was previously used in Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light. It was later popularized by professor and author Benjamin Noys in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative to describe the trajectory of certain post-structuralists who embraced unorthodox Marxist and counter-Marxist overviews of capitalist growth, such as Deleuze and Guattari in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Lyotard in his 1974 book Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard in his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death. Noys later stated "at this point, what we can call accelerationism is dedicated to trying to ride these forces of capitalist production and direct them to destabilize capitalism itself." Patrick Gamez considers the French thinkers' philosophy of desire to be a rejection of orthodox Marxism and psychoanalysis, particularly in Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Particularly influential is Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desiring-production; rather than viewing human desire as a lack that is satiated by consumption, they view it as an inhuman flow of productive energy, having no proper organization or purpose. Any normativity or functionalism comes from flows of desire performing work and territorializing until new flows of desire override them in the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Vincent Le notes that Deleuze and Guattari's model is based on machines; as machines are assemblages of different parts which perform different functions, humans and social bodies are assemblages of "organs" which produce desires. They find capitalism to be the most radically deterritorializing process in history, as it is based on constant deterritorialization rather than a stable code of desire. Le uses the example of sex and food; they are no longer coded only for marriage and sustenance, but rather as commodities which produce other desires. While capitalism tends toward the body without organs, or a state without determinate functions or coded desires, it never reaches that state, as it causes reterritorialization by recoding things as commodity for sale, to be deterritorialized again. Mark Fisher describes Deleuze and Guattari's model of capitalism as defined by the tension between destroying and re-establishing boundaries, with the inclusion of new and archaic elements seen "where food banks co-exist with iPhones." Gamez describes Land's thought as influenced by the French thinkers' antihumanism, as well as their ambivalence or even celebration of capitalism's destroying of traditional hierarchies and freeing of desire. Land cited a number of philosophers who expressed anticipatory accelerationist attitudes in his 2017 essay "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism". Firstly, Friedrich Nietzsche argued in a fragment in The Will to Power that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it." Taking inspiration from this notion for Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari speculated further on an unprecedented "revolutionary path" to perpetuate capitalism's tendencies, a passage which is cited as a central inspiration for accelerationism: