Accelerationism
The Core Argument
Accelerationism should not be confused with theories of acceleration. That modernity accelerates from technological, economic, and social stances is a diagnosis, an idea elaborated systematically by sociologists such as Hartmut Rosa. These theories generally feed calls for deceleration or degrowth. Accelerationism is different and names the position for which the process should be neither slowed nor resisted but intensified. The term itself was coined as a critique: Benjamin Noys forged it in 2010 (borrowing it from Roger Zelazny’s science-fiction novel Lord of Light) to name a temptation he denounced.
If accelerationism has a source code, it was written in the 1990s by the British philosopher Nick Land. Land’s only conventional book, The Thirst for Annihilation (1992), read Georges Bataille as the thinker of expenditure and the dissolution of the subject, announcing the anti-humanism of everything that followed. At the University of Warwick, around the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) co-founded with Sadie Plant, Land then developed an annihilationist philosophy. Reading Deleuze and Guattari through Bataille and cybernetics, he described capitalism as a runaway process of deterritorialization dissolving every tradition, institution, and identity in its path, up to and including the human: “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.”
This vision is inseparable from its literary form. Land writes so-called “hyperstitions,” designating fictions that make themselves real. Land’s hyperstitions positively present themselves as viruses accelerating the dissolution of the human order. The most famous of these theory-fictions, “Meltdown” (1994), compresses the whole program: a technocapital singularity captures the Earth, institutions collapse, and, in its most quoted sentence, “nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” Land’s writing was never simply critical; its vocation is prophetic: a way of making science fiction come true.
Even before Land’s later trajectory, accelerationism carried a constitutive political ambivalence. Land forged his position within a revolutionary-left tradition, faithful to Deleuze and Guattari’s project of unsettling the social, political, and sexual order; what set him apart was his refusal of anticapitalism, grounded in the conviction that capitalism cannot be transcended. Asking whether we want capitalism is, for him, unsustainably naive; dreaming of a postcapitalist world means nothing but stopping the march of time. To him, there is no distinction between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification: capitalism’s destruction is itself capitalism.
This fatalism prepared his drift rightward. Exiled in Shanghai in the 2000s, Land came to praise Chinese capitalism and the Asian megacity as the true accelerators against a West stuck with “demosclerosis”: democracy as a decelerator whose redistributive parasitism (protected by the moral interdicts of egalitarianism of what Curtis Yarvin calls the “Cathedral”) blocks the creative destruction acceleration requires. Such is the argument of “The Dark Enlightenment” (2012), and the meaning of Land’s rallying to neoreaction. This rally is presented as strictly instrumental: “Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire,” a strategic vehicle for re-accelerating capitalism in the West, opening onto a posthuman future.
This ambivalence can be seen in the opposite readings of Land. The Landian label was first reclaimed on the left: in the 2013 “#Accelerate” manifesto, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek argued for a left-wing accelerationism (l/acc) against “folk politics.” This program echoed in the xenofeminism of Laboria Cuboniks (“if nature is unjust, change nature!”). At the opposite pole, one of the most recent avatars, “effective accelerationism” (e/acc), launched in 2022 by Guillaume Verdon (“Beff Jezos”) and consecrated by Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023) converts these positions into an entrepreneurial vulgate for Silicon Valley. Critics insist that the constellation rests on an illusion: for Noys, accelerationism mistakes capitalism’s dynamism for a road out of it; for Christophe Bouton, its canonical genealogy rests on a handful of misread passages, and it functions less as a philosophy than as a marketing ideology in the service of the tech industry.
Philosophical Roots
Accelerationists of all stripes claim a specific Marx: not the romantic critic of industrialism, but the thinker who saw in capitalism the most revolutionary force in history. Specifically, they quote the “Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse, where the development of machinery and of the “general intellect” undermines the very foundation of value based on labor time, capitalism thus producing from within itself the conditions of its own overcoming. To a lesser degree, as Christophe Bouton notes, accelerationism can be traced to Nietzsche as a paradoxical ancestor. The reference is a posthumous fragment of 1887 in which Nietzsche, contemplating the “levelling” of European man, envisages pushing the process to its term, since only its completion could give rise to a new sovereign type.
A major philosophical root is Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972). Analyzing capitalism as a machine that “decodes” and “deterritorializes” every fixed social relation while constantly reinstalling new archaisms to contain the flows it unleashes, they entertained the hypothesis that the genuinely revolutionary path was to go further in the process. However, Deleuze and Guattari never stop insisting that capitalism reterritorializes as much as it deterritorializes. It is precisely this caution that Land’s reading strips away, absolutizing deterritorialization into a cosmic destiny.
There is a last intellectual connection that should be noted: the theories of technological singularity. The hypothesis, popularized by Ray Kurzweil, who expects an artificial general intelligence to trigger it around 2045, holds that exponential technical progress must reach a point of qualitative rupture. The singularity is what gives accelerationism its eschatology: it converts the experience of speed into a prophecy of rupture and lends the imaginary its quasi-religious charge. It is also what distinguishes accelerationism from any ordinary apology of progress: what is promised is not improvement but metamorphosis: the end of the human sequence.
To Know More
Andreessen, Marc. “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen Horowitz. October 16, 2023.
Avanessian, Armen, and Robin Mackay (eds.). #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic (2014).
Bouton, Christophe. L'accélération de l'histoire. Des Lumières à l'Anthropocène, Seuil (2022).
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Classics (2009).
Gardiner, Michael E. “Critique of Accelerationism.” Theory, Culture & Society, 34/1 (2017): 29-52.
Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Urbanomic (2011). See the editors’ introduction by Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay.
Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Routledge (1992).
Miranda, Arnaud. Les Lumières sombres. Comprendre la pensée néoréactionnaire. Gallimard (2026).
Noys, Benjamin. Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Zero Books (2014).
Noys, Benjamin. The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Edinburgh University Press (2010).
Roose, Kevin. “This A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go.” New York Times. Dec. 10, 2023.
Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press (2013).
Shaviro, Steven. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism. University of Minnesota Press (2015).
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso (2015).
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”, in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside (2013).
Sutter (de), Laurent (ed.). Accélération! Presses Universitaires de France (2016).
Turner, Fred. “On Accelerationism”. Public Books, September 1 2016.
