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POLITICS
Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring
white supremacist killers around the world
How a techno-capitalist philosophy morphed into a justification for murder.
by Zack Beauchamp
Illustrations by Chris Malbon
Updated Nov 18, 2019, 6:15 AM PST
Chris Malbon for Vox
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both
at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can
purchase it here.
Blaze Bernstein, age 19 at the time of his murder, loved to cook.
Before he traveled back to his home in California for the 2017-’18 winter break, the
University of Pennsylvania sophomore had been elected managing editor of a campus
cooking publication called Penn Appétit. It’s a position he ended up never filling.
On the morning of January 2, his parents noticed that he’d left their house in the
Orange County community of Foothill Ranch and tried to contact him. When he didn’t
respond, they checked his Snapchat account and found messages between their son
and Sam Woodward, a former high school classmate. The two had planned to hang out
at a local park.
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Bernstein, who was gay and Jewish, texted friends that he and Woodward were meeting
for a sexual encounter. Less than a week later, investigators discovered Bernstein’s
body in the park, hidden by a tree branch and a mound of dirt. He had been stabbed 19
times in the neck.
Authorities quickly identified Woodward as a suspect and found Bernstein’s blood in
his car and on a knife in his possession. They learned that Woodward was a member of
Atomwaffen Division — one of the most extreme neo-Nazi groups in the country. He
was arrested; he pleaded not guilty and is still awaiting trial.
The local Jewish community center celebrated Bernstein’s memory by naming its
cooking school in his honor. Atomwaffen celebrated Woodward by making T-shirts
emblazoned with his mugshot.
Chris Malbon for Vox
Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white
supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued
through this year.
The October 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the deadliest act
of anti-Semitic violence in American history. The March 2019 Islamophobic attack on
mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was the deadliest mass shooting in the
country’s history. It was followed in April by another attack on an American synagogue
(this time in Poway, California), and an August 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart
that was one of the most brutal attacks targeting Hispanics in US history.
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In late July, FBI Director Christopher Wray reported that the FBI had made as many
domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 as it did in all of 2018 — and further, that “a
majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some
version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”
These killings were often linked to the alt-right, described as an outgrowth of the
movement’s rise in the Trump era. But many of these suspected killers, from
Atomwaffen thugs to the New Zealand mosque shooter to the Poway synagogue
attacker, are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist
ideology, one that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into
their own hands.
It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are
irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate
their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have
been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand
killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat
rooms.
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.
Accelerationism has bizarre roots in academia. But as strange as the racist movement’s
intellectual history may be, experts believe it has played a significant and underappreciated role in the current wave of extremist violence.
“It’s not an ideology that exists in a theoretical sense,” says Joanna Mendelson, a senior
investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s an ideology that has
actually manifested in real-world violence.”
Chris Malbon for Vox
Bizarre origins
The earliest version of “accelerationism” was, ironically enough, in some ways a
celebration of the status quo.
The mainstream ethos of the 1990s was thoroughly capitalist, the collapse of the Soviet
Union creating a sense that the spread of the American economic and political model
was inevitable and irresistible. This coincided with a technological revolution — the
rise of widespread internet access and the birth of mass internet culture, a sense of a
world defined by and connected through technology in previously incomprehensible
ways.
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At the University of Warwick, a relatively new but well-regarded English university, a
young philosophy professor named Nick Land argued that the triumph of capitalism
and the rise of technoculture were inextricably intertwined. Drawing on the work of
famously dense continental theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and JeanFrancois Lyotard, Land argued that capitalist technological advancement was
transforming not just our societies, but our very selves. The self, he believed, 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.
“Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its
motor,” Land wrote in an email to Vox, in characteristically cryptic style. “Our question
was what ‘the process’ wants (i.e. spontaneously promotes) and what resistances it
provokes.”
The “we” he’s referring to is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a group of
Warwick faculty members and graduate students who worked with Land to examine
the questions that would come to define this early accelerationism. The writing that
came out of CCRU’s work has a hallucinatory, ethereal quality that makes it hard to
figure out exactly what they’re trying to say (Land’s marquee book is titled Fanged
Noumena). It also feels very of its time; CCRU members obsessed over electronica and
used the word “cyber” a lot, all conveying a sense of a society rapidly accelerating
toward an exciting future.
The CCRU was a fount of mad energy, obsessed with the pace of life under late
capitalism; its members had utter disregard for traditional academic norms about
scholarship and behavior. This could not last long. The CCRU split from Warwick in
1998, long after the university’s philosophy department had grown tired of its antics.
According to Andy Beckett, a journalist who chronicled the CCRU’s rise and fall in the
Guardian, Land and his remaining followers moved into a home in Leamington
formerly owned by prominent British satanist Aleister Crowley, part of an obsession
with the occult that had flourished in the accelerationist ranks. Beckett describes a
psychologically tortured group that would scribble strange diagrams on the walls of
Crowley’s former home. In Fanged Noumena, Land describes his “tool of choice”
during his darkest period as “the sacred substance amphetamine ... after perhaps a
year of fanatical abuse [I] was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.”
After the CCRU’s collapse, its members spread across British academia as well as fields
ranging from journalism to music production. Its ideas rose to prominence again in
the early 2010s, taking two separate, and opposed political turns.
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One was left-wing and academic, a school of Marxist thought focusing on how
technology can be conscripted toward building a post-capitalist future. The other was
right-wing, and in major part a product of Land’s mind.
After his breakdown, Land moved to China and became enamored with its technoauthoritarian political system. He worked as a journalist, reporting uncritically and
favorably on the Chinese regime’s accomplishments. When I asked him which
politicians he admired, he said he’s “not huge on political figures” on the scene today.
However, he added, “[Singaporean technocratic authoritarian] Lee Kuan Yew and
[former Chinese leader] Deng Xiaoping were greats.”
Land turned this admiration for technocratic strongmen into an entire political
ideology. Linking up online with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin — who
writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug — he helped construct the doctrine of
“neoreaction,” or NRx, essentially an argument that democracy had outlived its
usefulness. In his 2013 series of essays on the topic, titled The Dark Enlightenment,
Land argues that the ideal state is a capitalist monarchy described as “gov-corp,” the
state-controlled by an authoritarian CEO organizing policy according to the dictates of
“rational corporate governance.”
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature. Christina
Animashaun/Vox; Mark Wilson/Getty Images
It was essentially a hard-right spin on accelerationism. Neoreactionaries argue that
egalitarian and democratic policies described as “progressive” by left-liberals are, in
fact, a way of slowing down the only progress worth having — acceleration toward
techno-capitalist singularity. Neoreaction is a version of accelerationism adapted to
address this problem.
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“Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire,” Land wrote in a 2013 blog post.
“Beside the speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly
weighted decelerator ... comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is
proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the Left.”
Though NRx has no mainstream proponents, it does have connections to prominent
figures. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read
neoreactionary literature, and Trump-backing venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s fund
supported Moldbug’s tech startup Urbit. In emails to right-wing provocateur Milo
Yiannopoulos obtained by Buzzfeed, Moldbug claimed to be “coaching Thiel,” telling
Yiannopoulos that he “watched the [2016] election at [Thiel’s] house ... He’s fully
enlightened.”
Neo-Nazi accelerationism and the alt-right
The extreme right-wing internet is a small place. The rise of neoreaction inevitably led
it to cross paths with another online fringe movement of the mid-2010s: the alt-right.
Members of the two movements didn’t agree on everything: While Land and Moldbug
valorize capitalism and see democracy as the major barrier to a better future, alt-right
ideologues like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor valorize whiteness and see Jews and
non-whites as the problem. Nonetheless, the two shared core ideas, like an emphasis
on the role of genetics in creating human hierarchies, that make them comfortable
coexisting in the same online spaces. “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not
exactly allergic to the stuff,” as Moldbug once put it. (Land is somewhat more critical,
writing in The Dark Enlightenment that “the opportunity for viable ethno-supremacist
politics disappears into a logical abyss.”)
The result is considerable cross-pollination between neoreactionaries and the altright. Ideas and terminology crossed the different group lines; some fringe
influencers, such as the YouTuber Colin “Millennial Woes” Robertson, have described
themselves as being both neoreactionaries and members of the alt-right. A 2018
Southern Poverty Law Center investigation found that several posters on The Right
Stuff , an alt-right website, were heavily influenced by neoreaction.
“Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with
Dark Enlightenment,” one of the posters quoted in the study wrote.
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This is the most likely means through which the racist movement became introduced
to the term “accelerationism.” There’s no meaningful use of the term or attention paid
to Land among American racists prior to the alt-right’s encounter with The Dark
Enlightenment — and why would there have been? An abstruse techno-capitalist
philosophy seems to have little in common with the herrenvolk hatred of the KKK. It
wasn’t until the rise of neoreaction and the alt-right — two very online movements that
shared members in common — that the encounter would have happened.
It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “accelerationism” has displaced the alt-right in the
eyes of many internet racists.
White nationalist and alt-right ideologue Richard Spencer (third from right) takes part in an anti-immigration march
near the White House in December 2017. Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
In popular usage, the “alt-right” is generally taken to refer to racists on the internet.
That’s actually a bit imprecise: The alt-right is a specific subset of online racists, one
that believes white nationalism can triumph by trolling journalists and staging reallife demonstrations like Charlottesville. The basic model is Hitler and the Nazi party:
Win power through democratic elections, then enact your goals.
This has long been a controversial strategy in the neo-Nazi community. It had been
tried before in the 1950s and 1960s by the American Nazi Party, whose charismatic
leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, attempted to turn it into a legitimate force. Rockwell
staged a rally on the National Mall, demonstrated against civil rights, and planned
marches through Jewish neighborhoods on Jewish holidays. This amounted to very
little politically and, in 1967, Rockwell was assassinated by a former member of his own
party.
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The alt-right’s leaders believed the time was right for another try, in large part thanks
to Donald Trump and the internet.
Trump is seen by the alt-right not as a crypto-Nazi, but as an outsider sympathetic to
white nationalist goals. He served as a figurehead, a rallying point that could help them
convert larger numbers of Americans to their cause. The internet allowed them to try
out their message with a mass audience: memes and trolling and message boards
allowed them to bypass media gatekeepers and reach Trump fans who might be
receptive to white nationalist ideas directly. Indeed, the combination of Trump’s rise
and alt-right online activity did swell the movement’s ranks considerably.
The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was supposed to be proof of
concept, a demonstration that the pro-Trump shitposters could be turned into a realworld political movement. What actually happened was a wave of national revulsion
and backlash, particularly after the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer by a
white nationalist. The alt-right lost access to social media platforms, was hounded out
of public demonstrations by Antifa, and unequivocally denounced by virtually
everyone in American politics (except Trump). The second Unite the Right rally, held
in DC in 2018, was a pathetically low-turnout affair.
Neo-Nazis, alt-right, and white supremacists take part in the night before the Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017. Christina Animashaun/Vox; Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The silver lining for the alt-right — the president’s “very fine people” comment —
wasn’t enough to salvage things. Trump, despite all his vicious rhetoric and antiimmigrant policies, had failed to stop what white supremacists see as the existential
threat to America: the country’s long-term movement toward becoming a majorityminority country. The alt-right’s theory of change through elections lost favor with
others on the white supremacist fringe.
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“From 2015, when Trump announced and attacked Mexicans that first day, through
around Charlottesville, these people really thought they were going to be victorious in
the electoral [process] and be able to take a peaceful route back to power,” says Heidi
Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “That
has been completely given up on.”
This was the moment that neo-Nazi accelerationism really began its rise to
prominence — and promote its new and more violent theory of change to supplant the
ideas of the “alt-cucks,” as accelerationists derisively termed their white nationalist
opponents.
Like neoreaction, neo-Nazi accelerationism holds that the liberal-democratic order is a
failure — that we should move beyond it toward a better future, and that the task of
political action should be to accelerate the speed of that transformation. Only in their
view, that “better future” is not capitalist authoritarianism, but the total collapse of a
degenerate and corrupt Western society — and the rebirth, out of its ashes, of a new
political order more hospitable to white domination.
Their main inspiration on how exactly to “accelerate” this process came from James
Mason, a previously unheralded neo-Nazi writer who produced a newsletter called
Siege in the 1980s. In Siege, Mason uses the collapse of George Lincoln Rockwell’s
political strategy to claim that any attempt to work inside the parameters of normal
politics was doomed to failure. A better approach, he argued, was pioneered by serial
killer Charles Manson — a correspondent of Mason’s who deeply influenced the
theories developed in Siege.
The murders committed by Manson and his disciples served, in his mind, as a model of
decentralized violent action that would be hard for authorities to stop. If neo-Nazis
emulated Manson on an individual level, killed and tortured select targets, eventually
they could help spur a white uprising against the system — accelerate the pace of a
societal collapse already made inevitable by Jewish and non-white corruption, and set
the stage for its replacement by a Fourth Reich.
“If I were asked by anyone of my opinion on what to look for (or hope for) next I would
tell them a wave of killings, or ‘assassinations’ of System bureaucrats by roving gun
men who have their strategy well mapped-out in advance and well-nigh impossible to
stop,” Mason writes in Siege. “His greatest concern must be to pick his target well so
that his act may speak so clearly for itself that no member of White America can
mistake its message.”
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Mason is still alive today. He lives in Denver and looks like an unremarkable bearded
white man — that is, when he isn’t wearing his vintage Nazi uniform and a swastika
arm band. He languished in obscurity until 2017, when members of the militant neoNazi group Atomwaffen tracked him down. The group was founded in 2015 and had
long admired him; many of its members were on Iron March, a neo-Nazi web forum
that was an early promoter of violent accelerationism.
After linking up with Mason in real life, they received his blessing to continue
aggressively promoting his ideas, to promote websites with names like Siege Culture
aimed at updating Mason’s framework for modern times. The accelerationism they
preached centered on heightening the contradictions, using violence both to target
their enemies and force a harsh response from the political system — eventually, they
hoped, demolishing the state apparatus that stands between us and a white-dominated
future.
Alt-right supporters walk toward a rally in Portland, Oregon, in August 2019. Christina Animashaun/Vox; Stephanie
Keith/Getty Images
2017 was a good time for such a doctrine to begin spreading: The alt-right was buckling
under post-Charlottesville strains, drawing adherents from those extremists
disenchanted with the alt-right’s comparatively cautious approach. They adopted the
alt-right’s tactic of trolling and shitposting to popularize their more violent ideas; the
phrase “Read Siege” became a meme they pushed on social media.
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Atomwaffen organized itself into cells: Adherents would meet up at physical “hate
camps,” practice with rifles, and plan their next move. Accelerationist ideas flourished
separately on social media platforms and extremist web forums like 8chan and Fascist
Forge, reaching neo-Nazi groups around the globe.
The dedication to violence in accelerationist spaces is scary. They openly fantasize
about the need to kill Jews and non-whites and even celebrate ideologically opposed
acts of violence — like Islamist terror attacks — as a blow against the system.
Though violence is celebrated as the preeminent tactic, they’re willing to endorse nonviolent means as well. Accelerationists have proposed distributing flyers for racist
rallies alongside ones for a counter-rally, to stoke social division and create conflict.
They suggest you should always vote for the most radical candidate in any election,
regardless of their position on the political spectrum, to undermine the system’s
coherence. One poster I saw even heralded the rise of Bernie Sanders, a Jewish
socialist, on the grounds that his proposed expansions of the welfare state would
bankrupt the US government and thus undermine its grip on power.
In their view, any sort of increase in social tension is good as long as it accelerates us
toward system collapse — and individuals have an obligation to do what they can to
hasten us along this path. Even, or more precisely, especially committing murder.
“I would be willing,” as one Fascist Forge contributor put it, “to use all resources
possible for accelerationism.”
Chris Malbon for Vox
How accelerationism spread terror
Starting in 2017, Atomwaffen members began practicing what they preached. From
that year on, the group has been publicly linked to at least five killings, including Blaze
Bernstein’s. In October 2019, police in Washington arrested Kaleb Cole, believed to be
the leader of the state’s Atomwaffen division, and seized eight guns from his residence.
They believed he was about to commit a mass shooting.
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But the thing about accelerationism today is that it does not require any organized plot
or group to lead to mass murder. Accelerationist justifications for violence have
suffused online white nationalist spaces to the point where anyone can encounter it
and draw their own murderous conclusions.
“There is an entire subculture of individuals who are promoting this concept, who
advocate for sabotage and destruction against the system,” Mendelson, the AntiDefamation League researcher, says. “It only takes that one individual who’s inspired
by the rhetoric on that message board to act.”
The internet has allowed James Mason’s original vision, “lone wolf” violence, to
become a reality, not just in the United States but globally: Accelerationism seems to
have played a role in the March 2019 Christchurch shooter’s decision to gun down
Muslims while they prayed.
A gathering to remember victims of the New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque attack, which left 51 people dead. The
shooter explicitly touted accelerationist ideas. Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images
Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s motivation was a mix of hate and fear: Like all
contemporary white supremacists, he believed non-white population growth was an
existential threat to his race. His manifesto is titled “The Great Replacement,” a term
coined by a French writer but in context refers to the theory of “white genocide” by
demography that goes back decades in the white supremacist movement. Tarrant’s
plan for stopping white genocide drew liberally from accelerationist ideas; he literally
titled a section of the manifesto “Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics for
victory.”
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“Why did you carry out the attack? ... To add momentum to the pendulum swings of
history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society in order to eventually
destroy the current nihilistic, hedonistic, individualistic insanity that has taken
control of Western thought,” he writes. “The change we need to enact only arises in the
great crucible of crisis.”
It’s difficult to overstate the influence of Tarrant’s attack and manifesto on the
internet’s racist right. The Christchurch shooting claimed 51 lives, one of the deadliest
white supremacist terror attacks in modern history. The sheer violence of the assault
on New Zealand’s small Muslim community turned his manifesto into a must-read on
the racist right — and made accelerationism into one of the dominant ideas on the
fringe right today.
People view flowers and tributes to remember victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks, on March 23, 2019.
Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images
“Atomwaffen was a relatively insular universe. When the Christchurch shooter starts
describing this, it makes a big jump to the wider consciousness of the white
supremacist movement,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Beirich says. “That clear
statement of accelerationism in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto took this to
another level. Now, pretty much everybody on the radical right has read this stuff,
imbibed this stuff — and he put it into the public domain for white supremacists.”
In April, about a month after Christchurch, a man named John Earnest entered a
synagogue in Poway, California, and began firing on worshippers. Earnest’s manifesto
is a mix of old-school Christian anti-Semitism and internet-era hatred; the manifesto
cites both Tarrant and 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers as
inspiration, but seems particularly inspired by Tarrant’s writing (“Tarrant was a
catalyst for me personally,” he writes).
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At one point, Earnest explicitly borrows a clearly accelerationist idea from Tarrant’s
manifesto: the idea that using a gun in an attack could hasten the state’s collapse by
stoking conflict over gun control.
“I used a gun for the same reason that Brenton Tarrant used a gun,” he writes. “The goal
is for the US government to start confiscating guns. People will defend their right to
own a firearm — civil war has just started.”
Several months after Christchurch and Poway, a third white nationalist named Patrick
Crusius shot up a Walmart in El Paso, specifically targeting Hispanic patrons. Like
Tarrant, Crusius was obsessed with the idea of a demographic threat from non-white
immigrants. He pledged his allegiance to the New Zealand killer’s way of thinking.
“I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” he wrote in a pre-attack
screed. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great
Replacement.”
People gather at a makeshift memorial outside the Walmart where 22 people were killed in El Paso, Texas, on August
3, 2019. Christina Animashaun/Vox: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
It’s tricky to say definitively that accelerationism “caused” Blaze Bernstein’s murder,
other acts of Atomwaffen violence, or the three white supremacist mass shootings of
2019. There is almost always a complex web of personal reasons for why an individual
chooses to kill; It’s possible they would have turned violent regardless of what ideas
they were exposed to. The influence of accelerationism is clearer in some of the killers’
writings than in others (Crusius’s manifesto, in particular, doesn’t seem too indebted
to the theory).
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Accelerationism is a diffuse idea, and it’s best to think of its influence as such. NeoNazis didn’t need accelerationism to be violent, but rather the doctrine’s omnipresence
in online far-right spaces makes it more likely that both groups and individuals are
inspired to embrace terrorism as a tactic. The frequent expressions of support for
violence increase the baseline risk that someone turns to it.
“As late as Dylann Roof [the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter], the
reaction of white supremacists was kind of ambivalent,” says Mark Pitcavage, a senior
research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League. “Now ... they want more people like
that to emerge.”
It’s hard to even say how many spaces there are encouraging that process. Atomwaffen
is not the only organized group promoting accelerationism; other groups whose ideas
fit the doctrine are the Bowl Gang, a small group of online propagandists who lionize
Roof; and The Base, a trans-Atlantic neo-Nazi umbrella group that explicitly aims to
turn online chatter into real-world violence.
These groups have also largely moved beyond open web forums like Iron March, Fascist
Forge, and the now-shuttered 8chan. You can find their content on major social media
platforms like YouTube and Twitter, but most of it has to be masked or heavily censored
in order to avoid bans. (One accelerationist video I watched on YouTube bleeped out the
word “Nazi” in the narration in an effort to dodge the censors.)
The real hubs of accelerationist activity are secure messaging platforms like Telegram,
apps that are harder for law enforcement to surveil and easier to keep free of outside
influence. Journalists and professional hate-watchers have gotten access to their
channels, but it’s impossible to know exactly how many are operating outside of
anyone’s view. Barring federal regulations weakening the encryption protections for
these platforms — a proposal that raises serious privacy and data security concerns —
it may not be possible to effectively keep tabs on what accelerationists are saying to
each other and what they’re planning.
White supremacist violence tends to come in waves, with high-profile killings typically
inspiring copycats until the movement is exhausted. In that sense, the current wave of
accelerationist-influenced violence is hardly unprecedented.
But this is the first such wave in the era of internet ubiquity and is largely made up of
young, digital-native men. Accelerationists instinctively understand that their
statements and actions can rapidly reach a planetary audience. They are exploiting the
speed of life under late capitalism to spread hate to the masses, a dark parody of the
techno-capitalist singularity posited by CCRU theorists in the early 1990s.
In our correspondence, Nick Land told me that “the assumption” behind
accelerationism was that “the general direction of [techno-capitalist] self-escalating
change was toward decentralization.” It seems that this was partly correct — but in a
far more horrifying way than anyone at the time could have anticipated.
A confederate flag is burned by demonstrators protesting the Unite the Right 2 rally near the White House in August
2018. Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers political ideology and
global politics. He also hosts Worldly, Vox’s podcast on foreign policy and international
relations.
Chris Malbon is an illustrator and designer based in Bristol, UK.
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The new US-Ukraine deal, briefly explained
MAR 11
When it’s okay to wait to pay off debt
MAR 11
The arrest of a pro-Palestinian immigrant should worry every American