Accelerationism: A Retrospective History

Remarks for the Korean translation of #ACCELERATE

Robin Mackay and Amy Ireland

0. Introduction

The book #accelerate was published in English almost 10 years ago.

It’s a pleasure to see it translated, and we are fascinated to see what kind of impact it has in Korea, and how an East Asian accelerationism might differ from a Western one, given that the West, having hosted the explosion of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, has for some time been slowing down and falling behind.

Why did we originally want to publish #accelerate and bring the concept of accelerationism to the foreground? The idea was not to introduce people to some kind of unified position or ‘movement’. In fact, such a thing didn’t exist at the time. The point was to present a constellation of different positions which, in their interactions and tensions, outline a set of problems and trajectories of exploration that we think are crucial for understanding the contemporary world.

The texts in this book ask a series of questions that are still relevant today, about our relationship to the rapid processes of technological and social change underway across the globe, about whether politics still has a role to play, about intelligence, technology, and human agency. And above all, about the future.

The way in which the book came about was quite unusual. What we did by collecting these texts was to piece together a history for the concept of accelerationism. You could say that we ‘discovered’ this history, scanning through the twentieth century all the way back to Marx and Samuel Butler. Or, you could say that we ‘invented’ this history, as a speculative exercise. What if accelerationism really was ‘a thing’?

Since the book was published, the concept of accelerationism has, surprisingly, become quite mainstream, entering into art, culture, and politics, and as such it has been subject to many interpretations. =Some of these interpretations have been very fruitful, some less so. Some we would class as misunderstandings, and these misunderstandings are very persistent.

Very few people today would openly class themselves as ‘accelerationist’, and it’s interesting to reflect that it is still seen, in some sense, as a ‘dangerous’ idea.

In the end, I don’t think anyone can claim ownership over the idea of accelerationism, or dictate what is or is not accelerationism. The word has its own destiny now. All that we can do is tell you about our involvement in its history, and our own conclusions as to the most coherent way to think about accelerationism.

1. ‘Accelerationism’ is an insult

If we can essentially blame ‘accelerationism’ on one person, then it would be the left-wing academic Benjamin Noys, who first used the term in his 2010 book ‘The Persistence of the Negative’. Noys identified accelerationism as a trend in post-marxist, poststructuralist philosophy.

The key text here is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s books on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where they ask whether emancipation calls for the destruction of capitalism, or whether instead we should ‘accelerate the process’. For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism consists of a paradoxical tendency: on one hand, it schizophrenically decodes and deterritorialises human society, while on the other hand it paranoiacally recodes and reterritorialises it.

The basic idea of ‘accelerationism’ here, then, is that capitalism houses a set of liberatory tendencies which can be accelerated to the point where they transform the social fabric, what it means to be human, etc.

2. Accelerationism was never called ‘Accelerationism’

Noys quite rightly connected this to a small group of British thinkers in the 1990s who picked up this line of thought and developed it, foremost among them Nick Land and Sadie Plant.

Although the word ‘accelerationism’ was actually never used in this context, it is this group that has become the most identified with the term.

Their position was that conceptions of the human and human politics (what Nick Land calls the ‘Human Security System’) are exclusively repressive. They are a ‘drag’ on the process of the self-development of intelligence, and on the planetary mutation that is capitalism—both of which in fact are the same thing, because Capital is Artificial Intelligence.

As Deleuze and Guattari said, capitalism tends to dissolve hereditary social forms and restrictions. It is not a social system but the negative of all social systems. It can therefore operate as an engine of exploration into the unknown, it harbours the possibility of escaping from the repressive inheritance of the human.

At the core of Land’s thought—inherited from Bataille—there is indeed a reckless, even romanticist, desire for abolition, a desire to explore the outside of the ‘prison of human being’ at all costs.

According to Land, to be ‘on the side of intelligence’ is to totally abandon all caution with respect to the disintegrative processes of capital and whatever reprocessing of the human and of the planet they might involve.

Meanwhile, Sadie Plant—influenced by postructuralist feminism—saw in these mechanisms of disintegration and dissolution an emerging alliance between women and machines, both of which had constituted the repressed outside of the patriarchal-humanist economy of the subject.

It was also a question of style: In the 90s the small group that would later become the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, developed a style of writing that tried to collapse theory into the aesthetics of cyberpunk fiction and electronic music—in particular the late stages of rave, darkside, and jungle. They tried to bring writing together with those abstract, synthetic, futuristic sonic spaces, and the science fiction narratives that were intertwined with them: those tracks commonly sampled from SF films.

Writing, it seemed, needed to be a part of that cultural complex which was at the same time the site for new conceptualisations of human and inhuman futures. So the idea of acceleration was now formulated in a kind of accelerated, libidinal writing that didn’t just describe, but produced the feeling of acceleration.

Accelerationism, here, becomes a call to participate as fully as possible in the processes that are taking apart the human. A kind of participation in the future before it arrives, and in order to accelerate its arrival.

Noys’s fierce criticism of all this is that it was, ultimately, nothing but an aesthetic that served to promote the neoliberal politics of the time—Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. Therefore it is a kind of abdication of thought, and particularly of marxist thought. For Noys, it’s merely a confused championing of capitalism, which in its science-fictional aestheticisation, mistakes the oppression of capital for a kind of liberation.

3. ‘#Accelerate’ is a joke

One of the interesting things about the emergence of accelerationism has been a revival of interest in this work of the CCRU and Nick Land. But in fact, I think it worked the other way around: Urbanomic published Fanged Noumena, a collection of Nick’s writings, in 2011, and having those texts available undoubtedly had an effect on the emergence of ‘accelerationism’ as a positive term, in defiance of Noys’s attack on it. The arrival of Fanged Noumena turned the works of Nick Land from a derogatory footnote about a brief episode in philosophy, into a cultural force in the present, and Noys’s mention of accelerationism took on an importance that it otherwise wouldn’t have had.

In the wake of this untimely return of Land’s work, one of the earliest people to use the term and positively advocate for it was Mark Fisher, an ex-member of CCRU, in the text ‘Terminator vs Avatar: Notes on Acceleration’ (included in #accelerate).

Between 2011 and 2014, a small group of us on Twitter took up the term ‘accelerationism’, and would spot items in the news or cultural products that seemed ‘accelerationist’, and post them with the hashtag ‘#accelerate’. This meme began to spread in the online environment.

As jokes often do, it developed into something more: a number of philosophers and political thinkers started to develop different lines of thought on accelerationism, and the #accelerate hashtag began to take on real consistency.

The real turning point was when Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published the ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ in 2013, which kickstarted the idea of “Left accelerationism”. This manifesto was a kind of beacon at a time when leftwing politics was doing a lot of soul-searching, and became surprisingly popular and broadly read.

The manifesto argued that, where revolutionary politics had once been passionate about the emancipatory possibilities of technology, the transformation of the human, and the unleashing of productive forces, in the contemporary moment it seemed to have abandoned that kind of thinking to the neoliberal right.

What the manifesto calls for is essentially a reclamation of the ambition and vision that progressive politics once had. It seeks to combat the Left’s preoccupation with what Srnicek and Williams call “folk politics.” In a world that is irreversibly abstract and global, left politics cannot simply consist in pleas to return to the local, to the organic, to the human. Rather than advocating degrowth, progressive left politics must take an affirmative stance towards the reformatting of human society by technology, and the constant process of change and complexification that has taken over the planet. The slogan of a politics that seeks equity and progressive thinking should not be ‘slow down’ but ‘speed up’.

An accelerationist politics, according to the Manifesto, would need to build alliances across different practices – design, computation, logistics, information processing, etc., as well as political theory and political debate. Beyond the hopeful horizontalism of movements like Occupy in the US, it would need to be serious about complex organisational strategies and access to power. And it would need to operate by means other than the traditional democratic party system.

So there is an attempt here—which may seem rather paradoxical—to meld accelerationism with a more traditional set of concerns about social and political justice. On one hand it consists in a realism: the historical product of capitalism must be positively factored into any possible liberatory politics. You can’t pursue a localist agenda against globalisation, you can’t just organise happenings where you gesture symbolically towards ‘other possible worlds’ without engaging in the concrete questions about the construction of new platforms for trading, communication, etc., and the legacy of the existing ones. That sort of activisim is just a feelgood politics that has no actual impact. There is a kind of realism here about left politics facing up to the aspects of capitalist development that are effectively irreversible and indeed have been beneficial.

But Left accelerationism refuses a reckless abandonment to the deterritorialising and decoding—or reformatting—aspects of capitalism. There is an idea that we can strategically redeploy and reuse the technological advances of capitalism against capitalism. In this way left accelerationism combats the hopelessness that is sometimes characteristic of left-wing critique: the idea that all of human life is absorbed by capitalism and there’s no way out except by looking backwards, or dreaming of a miraculous transformation that would enable us to start over.

In this way, then, drawing on the legacy of accelerationism provided a way to rethink and reconfigure a leftwing political stance.

The extremely difficult task of Left Accelerationism, however, is to prove that there can be some motor for acceleration other than consumer capitalism. What would that be? Isn’t any instrumentalising of accelerationism just a compromise with the ‘human security system’? The question is whether left-accelerationism ultimately looks like another species of leftist wishful thinking.

4. Accelerationism has no History…yet

With the return of interest in the CCRU and Nick Land and Sadie Plant’s work, and with the emergence of Left Accelerationism and the success of the manifesto when it was published online, it began to seem a good idea to publish something.

Although we hesitated for a long time, wondering whether it was redundant to publish a paper book, since the discourse on accelerationism had so far been entirely online.

When we decided to compile this book in 2013, we decided it had to be more than just a compilation of contemporary texts. We wanted to see whether we could piece together, more coherently, a history for accelerationism.

Beyond Benjamin Noys’s brief mention, this history didn’t really exist…or it hadn’t up until this point.

However, as the ‘#accelerate’ trend had emerged as a constellation of positions coming from various quarters (theoretical and political philosophy, art and design) it had often referred back to diverse previous moments: not just the thinkers referred to by Noys—Nick Land, Sadie Plant, CCRU, Deleuze and Guattari—but Marx, Veblen, Firestone, Russian Cosmism, etc.

The first aim of the book, then, is to sketch out this genealogy, to take note of all the different nuances and disagreements possible within a broadly accelerationist position, and above all to see how, at each stage, new accelerationisms tend to adopt some features of their forerunners and reject others.

The second aim is to ask what accelerationism could mean now, whether it is or could be a coherent theoretical and political position.

6. Accelerationism is Scandalous

The publication of #accelerate helped to promote the idea of accelerationism, and it became a topic of debate.

There ensued an increasing polarisation of accelerationism into what were seen as Left and Right political strands. In some ways this was a productive period, in which the basic tenets of accelerationism were debated.

Left Accelerationist concepts such as ‘fully automated luxury communism’ became current memes, and accelerationist ideas—if not the word itself—seemed to be entering the thinking of left wing political parties.

But by 2015, when Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published their book Inventing the Future, which in essence continued the left accelerationist project, they did not use the word ‘accelerationism’ at all.

Media use of the term had taken another turn. Picking up on a common misunderstanding, think-pieces and media reports online started to talk about accelerationism, spreading the idea that it consisted in the doctrine that ‘capitalism can only be defeated by exacerbating its worst tendencies until the system breaks down’, or simply, that ‘in order to make things better, they must first be made worse’.

This idea then seemed to flourish in the febrile climate of the culture wars until eventually we were seeing mass media headlines and think tank reports on ‘militant accelerationist subcultures online’, and ‘the dangerous new ideology of accelerationism’ conflating the ‘accelerationism’ coined by Noys with an unrelated use of the term to refer to a terrorist tactic in a series of neo Nazi pamphlets mostly penned in the 1980s by a man named James Mason.

This conflation of an experimental philosophy joyfully engaged in dismantling the repressive strictures of the human subject, or a doctrine of large-scale leftistist techno-leftist political transformation, with the idea that ‘public acts of violence should be used to “accelerate” the collapse of decadent liberal social forms with the goal of inciting race war’ was made possible by the existing misconception that ‘accelerating the process’ meant ‘making things worse to make them better’ and the fact that Nick Land had recently publicly allied himself, through Neoreaction, with elements of the Alt-Right.

Having turned the concept of accelerationism from an insult to a hashtag and then to a field of thinking and study, having built a history for it, there was struggle ahead here for anyone who wanted to maintain the word accelerationism and the concepts that had been gathered around it. Should we fight for it? Should we continue to advocate for its complexity and its potential for thinking? Or did it have to be abandoned?

7. No one Knows what Accelerationism Is

This indicates quite well that there is no consensus on what accelerationism is. And that’s still the case today.

There are however a number of common misunderstandings, some of which we made an effort to dispel and which already dealt with in the introduction to the book, along with others that continue to be perpetuated online, and lead to both superficial dismissals and celebrations of accelerationism.

It’s not about accelerating contradictions.

It’s not about ‘making things worse to make things better’.

It’s not about ‘The Singularity’.

It’s not about speed (grasped independently of intensity).

8. We are all Accelerationists

Meanwhile, the world continues to accelerate. Mark Fisher had remarked, very early on, that in fact we are all accelerationists in terms of our actual actions. We might complain about the velocity of contemporary life, but very few of us are really engaged in creating some kind of decelerated alternative. There are calls to return to a simpler way of being, but in fact, humanity at large has clearly opted to plunge further into a web of technical mediation that disrupts our relation to ourselves and our sense of what is human, rendering us economically, politically, personally, and even emotionally and sexually reliant upon machinic networks. We don’t even any longer fully understand how these machines work, never mind control them, and their ultimate consequences run beyond even the most extreme SF.

Remember that, when #accelerate was published, there was no ChatGPT, no CRISPR, etc….—it has to be said that 90s ‘accelerationism’, with its occultism, addiction, its electronic viral plague, now looks quite prescient…

Accelerationism, from this point of view, is simply the honest way to understand our current condition and to reflect upon our actual participation in the future.

9. Accelerationism is, and is not, a Paradox (Time and Intelligence)

There is something apparently paradoxical about the very idea of accelerationism being an ‘ism’: as if it is something you could decide to do…

For the ‘classic’ accelerationism of the CCRU and Nick Land, it was about participating in the future. But if these inhuman processes are inexorably taking place and we, as mere humans, have no choice in the matter, what does it mean to ‘accelerate the process’?

There is a kind of temporal paradox here… A kind of ‘time-loop’ in which we can access pieces of the future (‘the future is unevenly distributed’) and put them to work on ourselves now—so that the future brings itself about by infecting the present.

The crucial thing here is to understand the political role played by fictions and what CCRU called ‘hyperstitions’.

This is why science fiction has always been important in accelerationism. In Land and CCRU in particular, it was the Terminator series, in which an agent from the future returns to the present in order to program themselves into the future…

And at this point, it’s revealed that at its deepest, perhaps Accelerationism, ultimately, is neither a politics nor an aesthetics but a philosophy of time, agency, and fate.

And then the question of intelligence: if we want to be ‘on the side of intelligence’. If what we want to do is to tap into future intelligence, bringing it to bear on the present by opening up epistemic, technological, and social paths to change… where does intelligence reside? And do we need to take into consideration that intelligence is not necessarily ‘our’ friend?

Does intelligence reside in the blind cyperpositive feedback loops of capital, which only seeks to intensify, and has no regard for the human (Land)? Or can intelligence come forth through a collective practice of rationality (Negarestani, Left Acc)? Is the future a constantly churning abyss of possibility that we can voluntarily participate in by throwing off dogmatic constraints on our thinking, but can never bring under control for the purposes of a political programme (U/Acc)?

This is accelerationism, the philosophical question of futurity, intelligence and politics.

10. Accelerationism in the Plural

It should already be clear that accelerationism is not a unified position, any more today than it was 10 years ago. As I emphasise in my preface to the Korean edition, the most interesting thing since the publication of the book has been the emergence of many new accelerationisms.

This proliferation of these plural accelerationisms is an expression of the collective thinking of the terminally online, and perhaps it’s also an antidote to passive doomscrolling. What has been shown in the years since the crisis over the popular meaning of the term, is that accelerationism continues to produce its own discursive history completely independently of any theoretical or academic intervention or concern. It seems that you can generate as many accelerationisms as you want. Just identify features of the present that seem to indicate unprecedented futures; give in to the vibe; accelerate the process.

We could mention: Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto, n1x’s ‘Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper‘ (g/acc), Aria Dean’s ‘Notes on Blacceleration­ism’ (bl/acc), Vincent Garton and Edmund Berger’s discussions on ‘uncondi­tional accelerationism’ (u/acc), recent efforts to conceive of an ‘effective accelerationism’ (e/acc), and even a ‘cute accelerationism’ (cute/acc) which take kawaii and aegyo as markers of the future mutation of the human. All of these form a mutating field of thought and cultural production in which the question of accelerationism enables us to audition alternative versions of the future, and continues to provoke excitement, dread, enthusiasm, and apprehension.

This proliferation points to the fundamentally libidinal character of accelerationism, something that can be lost when accelerationism is discussed as if it’s a critical theory. Each accelerationism opens up an entry point for participation in the future. And each of these entry points is an index of a sensibility or a perversion of desire, a particular stance about what is most intensely futural, which is then accelerated to its ultimate conclusions.

Accelerationism champions such obsessive libidinal intensification at the expense of any given image of the human or of nature, and is therefore always going to be in excess of any reasoned and reasonable management of human affairs.

Left Accelerationism tried to turn it into a deliberative, responsible, and constructive politics. But today even its advocates have given up the word ‘accelerationism’, and have instead turned to party politics and reform.

In contrast, what we see today is the spontaneous emergence of online microcultures which are not theorising but simply doing accelerationism.

And it is worth remarking that this often happens in communities who have been in one way or another written out of the narrative of ‘being human’, and who decide to accept and accelerate this.