What happened? In May 2017, accelerationism properly entered the popular imagination. The term had originally emerged from the feverish posting of an online blogosphere ten years earlier, an archipelago of blogs on which a disparate gathering of cultural critics, academics, philosophers and anonymous interlocutors all debated the cultural, political and intellectual events of the day. Having soon transitioned from this online underground to become a topic of interest for academic conferences and publishing houses, it was no less of a surprise when accelerationism eventually found its way into one of the most famous newspapers in the world. In the long-read article for The Guardian, author and journalist Andy Beckett declares that this strange concept,
rooted in the dialectical materialism of Marxism and some of the more obscure science fiction novels of the late 20th century, would soon define the way we live in and think about the past, present and future. That is, if it hadn't already. He argues that before the world even knows what has hit it, such is the nature of the beast, this new way of thinking about capitalism will be on the lips of every worker and every government. Accelerationism is here to stay. The general premise of this fringe philosophy, as Beckett explains it, is that the capitalist world has been accelerating at an alarming rate. This is blatantly apparent. Look at any graph of our technological progress since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and you will see an incline that shows no signs of slacking.
And yet nothing can keep accelerating forever, can it? And what will be in store for us when the curve flattens? Alternatively, what happens when the incline of that graph reaches its peak? Will technological progress and its primary driver, capitalism, simply stop? Will we have any need for capitalism any longer? Will capitalism have any need for us? Perhaps this peak will offer us many new opportunities regarding how we live our lives. Beckett framed the accelerationist position as follows. Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified, either because this is the best way forward for humanity
or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business and drastically scaled back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves, that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself. The accelerationist gambit, then, seems to be one of cyberpunk impatience. The faster we get to breaking point, the better. But lurking underneath the confidence of Beckett's attributions, there is also the diffuse sense that capitalism, knowing that its time is almost up, has stalled itself, choosing to languish in a frenetic stasis. The questions that these points of favour are supposedly meant to answer are
have the futures we were once promised plateaued onto an endless expanse of sameness? If so, then how might we give capitalism a little push? We should do what we can to accelerate the carousel of capitalist life until it speeds up more than the system itself can handle, breaking apart and finally allowing space for change. Beckett explores these arguments through a range of interviews with many of the blogosphere's initial participants, sketching a potted history that takes in SF writers like Roger Zelazny and J.G. Ballard, artists and musicians like Jake and Dinos Chapman and Code 9, philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Gattery and Jean-Francois Leotard, and of course contemporary right-wing boogeymen like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel. At the heart of it all
is Nick Land, a renegade academic based at the University of Warwick in the 1990s who synthesised all of the above and then some, predicting much of what we now know as our dystopian present from an eccentric and amphetamine-warped perspective in the recent past. As such, Land is a figure who seems strangely out of place and out of time, and his writings are often heralded as critical ur-texts that inspired many of those that would go on to shape the movement. However, given the often vague and still hotly contested particulars of accelerationism, many argued that Beckett's definition was woefully inaccurate. After all, aren't all of these positions, supposedly favoured by accelerationists, just the tendencies that neoliberal capitalism has spent the last four or five decades selecting for? And if we must stop deluding ourselves that
economic and technological progress are within our control, what's the point of favouring certain tendencies anyway? Does this not simply reduce the accelerationists to an online gathering of apolitical, socio-economic glory supporters, cheerleading the market's abstract choices as and when it makes them? That doesn't sound like a position to warrant serious investigation by philosophers, artists and politicians. Because of this, many believed Beckett's summary was confused. Despite having all the right jigsaw pieces and having spoken to all of the right people, the picture of accelerationism that he presents is clearly missing something. As a result, some saw Beckett's article as going for the gotta-go-fast model of accelerationism, an openly ridiculed but nonetheless popular variant that demonstrates all the nuance of a
Sonic the Hedgehog meme. For others, who had been persistently trying to shrug off this mischaracterisation for almost a decade, the response was quite desperation. It seemed that there was no getting through to the few journalists who seemed curious about their ideas, so that they might represent this strange philosophy with fewer provocations to rile up their readers, and more nuanced considerations of what this philosophy might have to offer all of us in the 21st century. Credit where due. A year earlier, the political and cultural magazine The New Statesman published a much shorter but also more accurate article that was successfully distinguished between the increasingly popular got-to-go-fast reading of accelerationism and the philosophical readings' original observations. The article makes the point that only some people understand accelerationism
as being the process by which capitalism is pushed to its worst excesses as soon as possible in order to provoke anti-capitalist response. Whilst this basic model seems largely innocuous, the kind of Hollywood truism declaring that exposing the true evils of late capitalism will leave inevitably to revolt, the unnamed author of the New Statesman article takes care to emphasise the fact that few philosophers preach anything so simple or so passive. They continue. Some philosophers, for instance, focus on repurposing the tools of capitalism, outlining a model for political change opposed to the work of those Marxists who seek to entirely reject the suspect tools of, to give one example, knowledge of late capitalist economics. In this version of accelerationism, the aspects of capitalism which may instigate its own downfall
are seized and refashioned to speed up the process of its undoing. It was this model of accelerationism that many of the philosophy's key contributors had been emphasising for some time, albeit under a growing shadow of apparent futility. Mark Fisher, for instance, the blogger and writer who was arguably the first person to self-identify as an accelerationist, had repeatedly put forth a view of accelerationism that was less entangled in its own contradictions. Four years before the publication of Beckett's article, for instance, in a 2013 essay for the online journal EFLUX, Fisher had expressed his frustration in this regard as follows A certain, perhaps now dominant, take on accelerationism has it that the position amounts to a cheerleading for the intensification of any capitalist process whatsoever, particularly the worst, in the hope that this will bring the system to a point of terminal crisis
This formulation, however, is question-begging, in that it assumes what accelerationism rejects, the idea that everything produced under capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain, and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits. In light of this more nuanced articulation, which nonetheless warrants some unpacking of its own, accelerationists do not simply favour post-human automation and critically for the sake of change, as Beckett suggests. They instead favour the potentials that these innovations uncover, which capitalism produces for itself but then must repress later on. This is to say that, for all of its injustice, subjugation and oppression,
capitalism has nonetheless encouraged the development of cultural artefacts that depict worlds radically different to our own. It has similarly encouraged the development of emancipatory technologies that might produce the worlds that we have been promised by poets for generations. In its attempts to streamline and cheapen the production of commodities through automation, for instance, capitalism has revealed a glimmer of a world without work. However, this glimmer has then been necessarily obscured and obfuscated by the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production. so as not to encourage the emergence of this other world any further. It was Fisher's position then, shared by many accelerationists, that what must be accelerated are the tendencies within capitalism that the system itself produces, for which it must always obstruct within itself for the sake of its own survival.
It's a political and philosophical position that does not simply cheerlead speed, but also remains vigilant to those opportune moments when capitalism tamps its own brakes. The rallying cry for the accelerationist then is that we must stop capitalism from purposefully stunting its own growth. Two years later, none of this would matter. On the 15th of March 2019, a 28-year-old heavily armed Australian man, Brenton Tarrant, travelled to two separate mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, opening fire on those both inside and out, killing 51 worshippers and passers-by and injuring 40 more. Prior to the attack, which was also live-streamed on Facebook, Tarrant uploaded a manifesto online. Nestled in amongst a plethora of white supremacist conspiracy theories that called for an armed resistance that would fight to stop the seemingly inevitable end of the white race,
Tarrant advocated for tactics of destabilisation and accelerationism. Stability and comfort are the enemies of revolutionary change, he writes. Therefore we must destabilise and discomfort society wherever possible. Eight months later, journalist Zach Bouchamp wrote an article for the website Vox that contrasted Becket's original article in the starkest terms. Whereas the subtitle of Becket's piece promises to explain how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in, Bouchamp instead derides accelerationism as the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world. His summary of accelerationism, read side by side with Beckett's and Fisher's, only intensifies the extent to which this fringe philosophy has fallen from grace.
Bouchamp declares, Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right's attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence. Attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself. They hope for a white-dominated future after that. It would seem at a glance that this is simply a case of etymological misfortune,
two disparate movements sharing a name. and yet these two accelerationisms supposedly shared roots. A familiar name appears in both Beauchamp's and Beckett's articles, Nick Land. Having interviewed Land for his article, Beauchamp summarises his position with a surprising accuracy. Land argued that capitalist technological advancement was transforming not just our societies but our very selves, he explains. For Land, the self was being dissolved by the increasing speed and pace of modern life. The individual was becoming less important than the techno-capitalist system it found itself in. And yet the implications of this position are quickly glossed over, as Land's contemporary political associations take the fore, paying no mind to the ways that his accelerationist position is precisely the opposite of Brent and Terrence.
Land has grown increasingly infamous over the last decade or so, largely due to a contentious Twitter presence that is at best politically incorrect and contrarian, at worst a hive of dog-whistle racism and neoconservative politics. He's also the author of a range of pro-capitalist and anti-Marxist writings. Taking all of these facts together, he is the reigning persona non grata on the academic left. However, the way in which she describes the dissolution of the individual self to Beauchamp nonetheless encapsulates the crux of not only an explicitly philosophical accelerationism, but also the way in which it fundamentally undermines its own far-right bastard offspring. Indeed, whilst Land may hold left-wing anti-capitalism in open contempt, this is because he supports this process of subjective fragmentation and dissolution
that globalised capitalism encourages. Brenton Tarrant and those like him, quite explicitly, do not. If the acutely Islamophobic nature of Tarrant's crimes were not enough, we might turn to the title of his manifesto, The Great Replacement. It's a title shared with a 2011 book by the far-right French author, Renaud Camus. Having apparently witnessed a period of rapid demographic change in the populations of rural France in the 1990s, Camus speculated that there was a conspiracy amongst elites to replace white Europeans with specifically the Muslim populations of other countries. He declares that this subtle and insidious process amounts to nothing less than the great replacement of white people by other ethnic minorities, a so-called genocide by substitution.
Whilst Camus' theory is the hysterical by-product of a deep Islamophobia, it is clear that this fear, shared by Tarrant, of any change to a phantasmatic and reified pure white French subject could not be any more anti-accelerationist. This is even true by the measure of the reductive, gotta-go-fast meme accelerationism. When Camus, much to everyone's surprise, ran for the French presidency in 2016, he announced that one of his flagship policies would be to stop the production of cars that go faster than the speed limit. As such, following the Christchurch shootings, many online argued that this white supremacist subject was precisely the subject that accelerationism first set out to critique. Indeed, this was the reason why accelerationism was first affirmed by so many on the left.
It encouraged the dissolution of what Mark Fisher, notably a former student of Lanz, had once called capitalism's mandatory individualism. as readers noticed the inconsistencies within these readings of accelerationism declaring that the original accelerationists of the 2000s affirmed the very processes that the likes of tarrant were violently rejecting many went on to chastise bouchon for his poorly researched and reductive article in fact many lay the blame for the establishment of this far-right version of accelerationism firmly with the press themselves who had routinely spread this misunderstanding of the philosophy's premises for over a decade in fact there was a case to be made that the press were primarily to blame for establishing this understanding of accelerationism they were now assigning to its original theorists. And the accelerationist blogosphere was certainly
not going to let a bunch of ill-informed journalists erase 10 years' worth of work, a decade's worth of books, debates and conferences. However, in hindsight, this desperate search for someone else to blame was grossly tone-deaf and ill-advised. Regrettably, for all the blogosphere's cause for nuance, there was little reckoning with the fact that this fringe within a fringe had come close to erasing over 100 lives. Lives that were far more important than the validity of a few books and blog posts. It soon became clear that the supposedly original accelerationism, simply washing its hands of its violent offspring, was not enough. No nuanced position was worth a damn if it did not account for the very real violence that had been produced alongside its theoretical disavowals. As a result, a new and uncomfortable question emerged that few seemed
ready to approach and deal with. What good is this kind of semantic opposition when faced with the abject reality of the Christchurch massacre? In the months that followed, a less defensive understanding of accelerationism's trajectory began to develop. Many began to accept that no matter its origin, this far-right offshoot was as accelerationist as the various other offshoots that had emerged throughout the blogosphere over the 10 years since the term first came into wider use. In the early 2010s, for instance, the accelerationist blogosphere had decisively split, with various writers settling into competing political factions, pledging allegiance either to a left accelerationism or a right accelerationism. Towards the end of the decade, a number of other variants emerged, such as gender accelerationism, black accelerationism, zero accelerationism,
and unconditional accelerationism. Many interlocutors had broken off to explore wholly separate projects, some of which predated accelerationism altogether, but which were nonetheless adjacent to its initial emergence. Projects such as speculative realism, neo-reaction, xenofeminism and neo-rationalism. Many of these projects overlapped due to the fact that they shared a founding gesture, the pursuit of a new politics or philosophy that was capable of intervening in our present moment of late capitalist stasis but they differed wildly in terms of their primary focus and thoughts on political practice. Despite these differences it was the opinion of many para-academic thinkers that any new philosophy nothing less than a new way of thinking about the world needed to be
midwifed alongside the non-philosophical developments of the day. This is to say that it was not enough to simply whine about capitalism's embargo upon the culturally and or politically new. Philosophy, for want of a better phrase, has to put its money where its mouth is. It has to produce new thought of its own in response to all that is going on outside of its ivory tower. As Karl Marx once famously argued, philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. For the accelerationists, this was most true in the orbit of the 2007-2008 financial crash. It was clear that there was no discourse, popular or otherwise, that was capable of productively responding to that event, and so they set about trying to build one. In light of this drive towards the new, competing theories were inevitable, and to be
welcomed. After all, any new thought must necessarily be born from dissensus. As Robin Mackay argued in an interview with CCCB Lab, conducted in conjunction with the publication of Accelerate, the Accelerationist Reader, in 2014. It's important to realise that there are many accelerationisms. This indeed was the primary reason for publishing Accelerate. When accelerationism began to emerge as a constellation of positions coming from various quarters, both theoretical and political philosophy, art and design, it referred back to diverse previous moments such as Marx's writings on machines, Russian cosmism, the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard in the 1970s, and Nick Land, Sadie Plant and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit's more recent work in the 1990s. The first aim of the book is to trace 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. It was this otherwise healthy process of diversification, undoubtedly if inadvertently, horrifically if ironically, that led to its present far-right affiliation. It's an example of a process of philosophical speciation, giving birth to a movement that violently opposes the socio-cultural version of that very same process. In this sense, this quotation from Mackay illuminates both the mechanism that allowed this far-right variant to emerge,
but also what this variant lacks, an insistence on the production of the new. Equipped with an awareness of this irony, surely we are capable of acknowledging the horror of the Christchurch massacre and the ways in which far-right accelerationism proceeds contrary to accelerationism's original motor. To split hairs and argue about the fidelity of the far-right's interpretations of certain controversial pro-capitalist philosophers all too readily detracts from the fact that this inexplicable butterfly effect has nonetheless led to people dying in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable. But this does not mean that we must defer to empty thoughts and prayers, nor should we attempt to reify an original accelerationism. Many still take issue with this suggestion, but to argue that we must not philosophize about events such as the Christchurch massacre echoes cries from the right that we must not politicize school shootings.
In fact, this is precisely what we must do. These events are crises of politics and crises of philosophy. We may even say that such events represent the crisis of disarticulation between the two. Following a period of reflection, it is now clear that there remains much work to be done if we are to counter this variant and insist upon the post-capitalist futures that accelerationism first sought to welcome with open arms. As Benjamin Noyes, the academic and writer who first coined the term accelerationism, argued in a Facebook post shortly after the shootings, while trivial in the face of the horror of that act which is so despicable not allowing this chaos to spread into all our signifiers is something indeed to counter a tendency that reduces these competing positions down to a singular version and therefore leave it riven with contradictions
is to infect accelerationism with the very process it sought to critique a process whereby philosophy too must account for the trajectories of thought it cannot help but produce at least under capitalism but which it must also always obstruct. The irony here, I hope, is clear. This attempt by a group of critics and philosophers to think and then produce the new has eventually found itself trapped within the same despicable hall of mirrors they first sought a way out of. This is to say that in our acknowledgement of the Christchurch shooting and its undermining of accelerationism's primary critique, we see a horrifying demonstration of the very logics of late capitalism that accelerationism hope to combat, albeit rendered for us in miniature, in an intellectual and anti-intellectual microcosm. This is the central argument of this lecture series. Accelerationism
was, first and foremost, a critique of an impotence afflicting both philosophy and politics in the 21st century, and yet it is precisely the same impotence that subsequently undermined accelerationism itself. The closure of this circuit, however, provides us with an opportunity for reflection. It will be our aim here to trace the emergence of this strange paradox, the development of this negative rather than positive feedback loop, and consider the ways in which the most recent privileging of accelerationism's philosophical content over and above its political content only entrenches this paradox further. We will discuss this by first considering what Alain Bidoux called our crisis of negation, a crisis that has overshadowed left-wing politics most explicitly but not exclusively, since the dawn of the new millennium. It was a discussion of this crisis that first,
at least implicitly, gave form to the accelerations blogosphere. However, this form later became more blurred. Because of this, we will avoid too much discussion of the few books on accelerationism currently in print, which overlap and contradict each other in their explorations of what is still an underdeveloped term. We will instead unpack the cultural and intellectual context from which accelerationism first emerged in an online blogosphere that was most active between 2007 and 2014. This will also lead us to consider the second iteration of the accelerationist blogosphere, most active between 2016 and 2019. The period between these two iterations saw a number of accelerationist bloggers first put their thoughts into print. For example, 2014 saw the publication
of Benjamin Noyce's second book on acceleration, Malign Velocities, as well as the previously mentioned Compendium Accelerate. In 2015, Stephen Shaviro published three essays under the title No Speed Limit, and Nick Cernick and Alex Williams published their highly influential texts Inventing the Future. However, by this point, the disagreements had already begun to take their toll. This decline in clarity did not halt the development of accelerationism as a discourse, however. The second accelerationist blogosphere necessarily took the term in newer directions still, whilst also attempting to account for and clarify the disparities and contradictions left over by the previous cohort. At the time of writing, following the Christchurch massacre, the accelerationist blogosphere has waned once again. In hindsight, it is unsurprising
that this second blogosphere was unable to continue with the same fervour as it once did, following such a catastrophic event, but this has done little to diminish the relevance of accelerationism's debates and arguments regarding capitalism. In particular, the political problems that accelerationism first hoped to address have yet to go away. We remain trapped within a crisis of negation. We are still denied the emergence of the new. This is, ironically, the new normal of the 21st century, and particularly, if I might speak to my own experience, in the United Kingdom. From the Stop the War protests following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the financial crash of 2007 and 2008, the student protests of 2010 and 2011, the climate change protests of 2019, the protests against police brutality in 2011, 2014 and 2020, this century has so far been one
of great unrest but little systemic change. For many people my age, I'm reluctant to use the term millennials, our political lives have been persistently blighted. For decades, a static neoliberal politics has reigned supreme, as political parties on both the left and the right slip into a contented centrism, or further right into the cyber-gothic contradictions of neoconservatism. Think old-fashioned law and order, enforced by sci-fi sonic weaponry and post-modern propagandists. We are trapped in what Mark Fisher once called a frenzied stasis. The stagnant nature of culture and politics are both side effects of capitalism, which superficially sates our desire for the new, not with support for actually existing freedom and emancipation, but with increasingly abstract forms of consumerism and the latest home entertainment
technologies. But what use of rapidly improving technologies without rapidly improving living conditions? In our present moment, global currents of freedom do not match up. We watch as technologies improve whilst life becomes even more boringly dystopian. But technology is not in and of itself the problem. Capitalism is. It was this issue that accelerationism first sought to address. The crisis of the negative. The end of history. The faltering of the production of the new. It is my hope that this short series of lectures will provide an accessible entry point for this decade-long trajectory of thought that looks upon the world in which we live and hopes to answer the most important political question of all. What is to be done?