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Accelerationism is a range of Ideology that call for the intensification of processes such as capitalism and technological change in order to create radical social transformations. Accelerationism was preceded by ideas from philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. (2025). 9783030426811, Springer International Publishing. ISBN 9783030426811 Inspired by these ideas, some University of Warwick faculty and students formed a philosophy collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), led by Nick Land. Land and the CCRU drew further upon ideas in posthumanism and 1990s cyber-culture, such as cyberpunk and jungle music, to become the driving force behind accelerationism. After the dissolution of the CCRU, the movement was termed accelerationism by Benjamin Noys in a critical work. Different interpretations emerged: whereas Land's right-wing thought promotes capitalism as the driver of modernity, deterritorialization, and a technological singularity, left-wing thinkers such as Mark Fisher, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams utilized similar ideas to promote the repurposing of capitalist technology and infrastructure to achieve socialism.
The term has also been used to refer to attempts to worsen existing conditions for a favorable outcome. Right-wing extremists such as Neo-fascism, Neo-Nazism, white nationalists and white supremacists have used the term to refer to an acceleration of racial conflict through , and terrorist attacks as a means to violently achieve a white ethnostate.
Patrick Gamez considers the French thinkers' philosophy of desire to be a rejection of orthodox Marxism and psychoanalysis, particularly in Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Particularly influential is Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desiring-production; rather than viewing human desire as a lack that is satiated by consumption, they view it as an inhuman flow of productive energy, having no proper organization or purpose. Any normativity or functionalism comes from flows of desire performing work and territorializing until new flows of desire override them in the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Vincent Le notes that Deleuze and Guattari's model is based on machines; as machines are assemblages of different parts which perform different functions, humans and social bodies are assemblages of "organs" which produce desires. They find capitalism to be the most radically deterritorializing process in history, as it is based on constant deterritorialization rather than a stable code of desire. Le uses the example of sex and food; they are no longer coded only for marriage and sustenance, but rather as commodities which produce other desires. While capitalism tends toward the body without organs, or a state without determinate functions or coded desires, it never reaches that state, as it causes reterritorialization by recoding things as commodity for sale, to be deterritorialized again. Mark Fisher describes Deleuze and Guattari's model of capitalism as defined by the tension between destroying and re-establishing boundaries, with the inclusion of new and archaic elements seen "where food banks co-exist with iPhones." Gamez describes Land's thought as influenced by the French thinkers' antihumanism, as well as their ambivalence or even celebration of capitalism's destroying of traditional hierarchies and freeing of desire.
Land cited a number of philosophers who expressed anticipatory accelerationist attitudes in his 2017 essay "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism". Firstly, Friedrich Nietzsche argued in a fragment in The Will to Power that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it." Taking inspiration from this notion for Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari speculated further on an unprecedented "revolutionary path" to perpetuate capitalism's tendencies, a passage which is cited as a central inspiration for accelerationism:
Land also cited Karl Marx, who, in his 1848 speech "On the Question of Free Trade", anticipated accelerationist principles a century before Deleuze and Guattari by describing free trade as socially destructive and fuelling class conflict, then effectively arguing for it:
Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian note "Fragment on Machines" from Grundrisse as Marx's "most openly accelerationist writing". (2014). 9780957529557, Urbanomic. ISBN 9780957529557 Noys states of Marx's influence, "it favors the Marx who celebrates the powers of capitalism, most evident in The Communist Manifesto (cowritten with Engels), over the Marx who also stresses the difficulty of transcending and escaping capital, the Marx of Das Kapital", also characterizing the accelerationist view of Marx as filtered through Nietzsche.
Fisher notes the same excerpt from Anti-Oedipus as Land, along with a section from Libidinal Economy which he describes as "the one passage from the text that is remembered, if only in notoriety", as "immediately giving the flavour of the accelerationist gambit":
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams additionally credit Vladimir Lenin with recognizing capitalist progress as important in the subsequent functioning of socialism:
Accelerationism was also influenced by science fiction (particularly cyberpunk) and electronic dance music (particularly Jungle music), with Fisher and Mackay noting The Terminator, Predator, and Blade Runner as particular sci-fi works. Mackay and Avanessian also note the Sprawl trilogy, with Iain Hamilton Grant stating " Neuromancer got into the philosophy department, and it went viral. You'd find worn-out paperbacks all over the common room." Fisher states of Land's "theory-fictions" from the 1990s, "They weren't distanced readings of French Theory so much as remixes which put Deleuze and Guattari on the same plane as films such as Apocalypse Now and fictions such as William Gibson's Neuromancer." Mackay also notes Russian cosmism and Erewhon as influences, while Noys notes Donna Haraway's work on .
Ray Brassier's "Prometheanism and its Critics", compiled in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, addresses Jean-Pierre Dupuy's Heideggerean critique of human enhancement and transhumanism. Critiquing the man-made vs. natural distinction as arbitrary and theological, Brassier expresses openness to the possibility of re-engineering human nature and the world through rationalism instead of accepting them as they are, stating "Prometheanism is simply the claim that there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and our world." Srnicek and Williams used the term in stating "we declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital". Negarestani and Wolfendale use the concept of inhuman rationalism (or rationalist inhumanism), advocating reason to radically transform humans into something else.
Prometheanism and left-accelerationism are connected to the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars rejects the myth of the given, or the concept that sense perceptions can provide reliable knowledge of the world or that a reliable connection between the mind and the world can be established without requiring other concepts. This establishes a distinction between the manifest image of knowledge through common sense and experience versus the scientific image of knowledge through empirical hard science. Fluss and Frim use the example of emotions and deliberative choice (the manifest image) versus neurobiology's study of brain states and firing neurons (the scientific image). Prometheanism tends towards a rejection or deletion of the manifest image. For Fluss and Frim, left-accelerationists assert that there is no permanent, intelligible world that can be known. Rather, the world beyond human senses is "irremediably alien", but humans pretend it is not "in order to maintain our parochial prejudices in everyday life". Thus, left-accelerationists adopt an ideology of technoscience and a rejection of subordinating technology and science to human concerns. This is exemplified with Brassier sarcastically demanding that a Heideggerian “explain precisely how, for example, quantum mechanics is a function of our ability to wield hammers.”
The mechanism of hyperstition is understood as a form of feedback loop. According to Ljubisha Petrushevski, Land considers capitalism to be hyperstitional in that it reproduces itself via fictional images in media which become actualized. This phenomenon is viewed as a series of forces invading from the future, using capital to retroactively bring about their own existence and push humanity towards a singularity. Noys notes The Terminator and its use of time travel paradoxes as being influential to the concept. Land states "Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely". Fluss and Frim state that the left-wing perspective rejects pre-emptive knowledge of what a humane or advanced civilization may look like, instead viewing future progress as wholly open and a matter of free choice. Progress is then viewed as hyperstitional in that it consists of fictions which aim to become true. They also note its influence on Negarestani's thought, in which inhumanism is seen as arriving from the future in order to abolish its initial condition of humanism.
Vincent Le considers Land's philosophy to oppose anthropocentrism, citing his early critique of transcendental idealism and capitalism in "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest". According to Le, Land opposes philosophies which deny a reality beyond humans' conceptual experience, instead viewing death as a way to grasp the Real by surpassing human limitations. This would remain as Land's views on capitalism changed after reading Deleuze and Guattari and studying cybernetics, with Le stating "Although the mature Land abandons his left-wing critique of capitalism, he will never shake his contempt for anthropocentrism, and his remedy that philosophers can only access the true at the edge of our humanity." Land utilizes Deleuze and Guattari's conception of capitalism as a deterritorializing process while disposing of their view that it also causes compensatory reterritorialization. Taking from their antihumanism, his work would critically refer to human politics as "Monopod" or the "Human Security System". Lacking any anthropic principles which Deleuze and Guattari partly maintain, Land pursues absolute deterritorialization, viewing capitalism as the Real consisting of accelerating deterritorialization, with the mechanism of accelerating technological progress; he states "reality is immanent to the machinic unconscious." Gamez notes that Land also views capitalism as a form of artificial intelligence, with Friedrich Hayek's view of markets as "mechanisms for conveying information" being a precursor. Le states "since Land sees humanity's annihilation as a solution to accessing the real rather than as a problem as it is for Deleuze and Guattari, he affirms that we should actively strive to become bodies without organs, not even if it kills us, but precisely because it kills us."
Denis Chistyakov notes "Meltdown", a CCRU work and one of the writings compiled in Fanged Noumena, as vividly expressing accelerationism. Here, Land envisioned a "technocapital singularity" in China, resulting in revolutions in artificial intelligence, human enhancement, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. This upends the previous status quo, and the former First World struggle to maintain control and stop the singularity, verging on collapse. He described new anti-authoritarian movements performing a bottom-up takeover of institutions through means like biological warfare enhanced with DNA computing. He claimed that capitalism's tendency towards optimization of itself and technology, in service of consumerism, will lead to the enhancement and eventually replacement of humanity with technology, asserting that "nothing human makes it out of the near-future." Eventually, the self-development of technology will culminate in the "melting of Earth into a seething K-pulp (which unlike Gray goo synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates)." He also criticized traditional philosophy as tending towards despotism, instead praising Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis as "already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972."Nick Land9780955308789, Urbanomic/Sequence Press. ISBN 9780955308789 Le states that Land embraces human extinction in the singularity, as the resulting hyperintelligent AI will come to fully comprehend and embody the Real of the body without organs, free of human distortions of reality. Gamez considers Land to have an "obsession" with artificial intelligence and intelligence in general; as human intelligence can only be enhanced so far, hyperintelligence and the freeing of desire must be realized with human extinction. He notes Land's Lovecraft reference of "think face tentacles" as highlighting Land's interest in transformation to the point of becoming inhuman and "unintelligible."
Land has continually praised China's economic policy as being accelerationist, moving to Shanghai and working as a journalist writing material that has been characterized as pro-government propaganda. He has also spoken highly of Deng Xiaoping and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, calling Lee an "autocratic enabler of freedom." Hui stated "Land's celebration of Asian cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore is simply a detached observation of these places that projects onto them a common will to sacrifice politics for productivity." Land's interest in China for technological progress, stemming from his CCRU days, has been considered an early form of sinofuturism.
Noys is a staunch critic of Land, initially calling Land's position "Deleuzian Thatcherism". He accuses it of offering false solutions to technological and economic problems, considering those solutions "always promised and always just out of reach." He also criticized Land's interest in submitting to capitalism's destructiveness, stating "Capitalism, for the accelerationist, bears down on us as accelerative liquid monstrosity, capable of absorbing us and, for Land, we must welcome this." Slavoj Žižek considers Land to be "far too optimistic", critiquing his view as Determinism in considering the singularity to be the pre-ordained goal of history. Contrasting it with Freud death drive and its lack of a final conclusion, he argues that accelerationism considers just one conclusion of the world's tendencies and fails to find other "coordinates" of the world order.
Noys characterizes Fisher's position as "cultural accelerationism", connecting it with his work on hauntology and noting his essay "Terminator vs Avatar" as an example. Here, Fisher claimed that while Marxists criticized Libidinal Economy for asserting that workers enjoyed the upending of primitive social orders, nobody truly wants to return to those. Therefore, rather than reverting to pre-capitalism, society must move through and beyond capitalism. Fisher praised Land's attacks on the academic left, describing the academic left as "careerist sandbaggers" and "a ruthless protection of petit bourgeois interests dressed up as politics." He also critiqued Land's interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari, stating that while superior in many ways, "his deviation from their understanding of capitalism is fatal" in assuming no reterritorialization, resulting in not foreseeing that capitalism provides "a simulation of innovation and newness that cloaks inertia and stasis." Citing Fredric Jameson's interpretation of The Communist Manifesto as "seeing capitalism as the most productive moment of history and the most destructive at the same time", he argued for accelerationism (in terms of the 1970's French thinkers) as an anti-capitalist strategy, criticizing the left's moral critique of capitalism and their "tendencies towards Canut revolts" as only helping the narrative that capitalism is the only viable system. In another article on accelerationism, Fisher stated "the revolutionary path is the one that allies with deterritorialising forces of modernisation against the reactionary energies of reterritorialisation."
Srnicek befriended Fisher, sharing similar views, and the 2008 financial crisis, along with dissatisfaction with the left's "ineffectual" response of the Occupy movement, led to Srnicek co-writing "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" with Williams in 2013.9780957529557, Urbanomic. ISBN 9780957529557 They posited that capitalism was the most advanced economic system of its time, but has since stagnated and is now constraining technology, with neoliberalism only worsening its crises. At the same time, they considered the modern left to be "unable to devise a new political ideological vision" as they are too focused on localism and direct action and cannot adapt to make meaningful change. They advocated using existing capitalist infrastructure as "a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism", taking advantage of capitalist technological and scientific advances to experiment with things like economic modeling in the style of Project Cybersyn. They also advocated for "collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality" and attaining resources and funding for political infrastructure, contrasting standard leftist political action which they deem ineffective. Moving past the constraints of capitalism would result in a resumption of technological progress, not only creating a more rational society but also "recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms." They expanded further in , which, while dropping the term "accelerationism", pushed for automation, reduction and distribution of working hours, universal basic income, and diminishment of work ethic. (2025). 9781784780968, Verso Books. ISBN 9781784780968
Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism has also been noted as left-accelerationist, with Noys characterizing it as taking up the "call for utopian proposals" in Srnicek and Williams' Manifesto. Michael E. Gardiner notes Fully Automated Luxury Communism, , and The People's Republic of Walmart as united in the left-accelerationist belief in detaching cybernetics from capitalism and using it towards liberatory goals. Steven Shaviro compared left accelerationism to Jameson's argument that Walmart's use of technology for product distribution may be used for communism. Shaviro also argues that left-accelerationism must be an aesthetic program before a political one, as failing to explore the possibilities of technology via fiction could result in the exacerbation of existing capitalist relations rather than Srnicek and Williams' desired repurposing of technology for socialist ends. Fisher characterized the "folk politics" that Srinicek and Williams criticized as neo-anarchist and lacking previous left-wing ambition. Tiziana Terranova's "Red Stack Attack!", compiled in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, references left-accelerationism in analyzing Benjamin H. Bratton's model of the stack, proposing the "Red Stack" as "a new nomos for the post-capitalist common." Land rebuked its ideas in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, stating "the notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism is a deep theoretical error." Alex Williams referred to Brassier and Negarestani as "the twin thinkers of epistemic accelerationism" in seeking to maximize rational capacity and enable the possibilities of reason. Sam Sellar and David R. Cole characterize their work, along with Wolfendale's, as seeking the acceleration of Rationalism modernity and technological development, distinct from capitalism. In particular, Brassier's Prometheanism accelerates normative rationalism as the basis for human transformation. They note Mackay and Avanessian's explanation of Negarestani:
Acceleration takes place when and in so far as the human repeatedly affirms its commitment to being impersonally piloted, not by capital, but by a rational program which demands that it cede control to collective revision, and which draws it towards an inhuman future that will prove to have 'always' been the meaning of the human.Fluss and Frim characterize Brassier works such as Nihil Unbound and Liquidate Man Once and for All; as well as Negarestani's The Labour of the Inhuman, Cyclonopedia, and Intelligence and Spirit; as providing a philosophical basis for left-accelerationism. Capitalism is viewed as promising progress while in fact exerting control and only providing inconsequential progress in the form of commodities to purchase. This requires biopower and a conservative view of the human, with inhumanism being viewed as a revolutionary force which promotes the constant upgrading and redefining of humanity. However, Fluss and Frim criticize this for discarding individual human welfare in favor of a larger system of constant technological revision, mirroring Land and making room for human subjugation rather than revolution; they state "It requires no special prescience to see that the 'liquidation of the human' is a prelude to the 'liquidation of human beings.'" Noys posits a tension between left-accelerationism's liberatory tones and the reactionary and Elitism tones of its influences such as Nietzsche, stating "the risk of a technocratic elitism becomes evident, as well as the risk we will lose the agency we have gained by aiming to join with the chaotic flux of material and technological forces."
In The Question Concerning Technology in China, Yuk Hui critiqued accelerationism, particularly Ray Brassier's "Prometheanism and its Critics", stating "if such a response to technology and capitalism is applied globally, ... it risks perpetuating a more subtle form of colonialism." He argues that accelerationism's Prometheanism tries to promote Prometheus as a universal technological figure despite other cultures having different myths and relations to technology. Further critiquing Westernization, globalization, and the loss of non-Western technological thought, he has also referred to Deng Xiaoping as "the world's greatest accelerationist" due to his economic reforms, considering them an acceleration of the modernization process which started in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and intensified with the Cultural Revolution.
Aria Dean articulated a position of "Blacceleration" as a "necessary alternative to right and left accelerationism". Synthesizing racial capitalism with accelerationism, she argued that accelerationism is intrinsically tied to the Black people experience through capitalism's relationship to slavery, particularly the treatment of slaves as both inhuman capital and human, which is not accounted for in other accelerationist analyses of capitalism. This challenges the accelerationist distinction made between human and capital, in turn challenging their rejection of humanism in favor of an inhuman subject since black people have historically been treated as such a subject; she states "to speak of transversing or travestying humanism in favor of inhuman capital without recognizing the way in which the black is nothing other than the historical inevitability of this transgression—and has been for some time—circularly reinforces the White people humanism these thinkers seeks to disavow." Fluss and Frim state that it emphasizes "the historical exclusion of black people from white humanist discourses, and the historical process whereby capitalism has engendered the 'black nonsubject.'"
Several commentators have also used the label accelerationist to describe a controversial political strategy articulated by Slavoj Žižek. An often-cited example of this is Žižek's assertion in a November 2016 interview with Channel 4 News that, were he an American citizen, he would vote for U.S. president Donald Trump, despite his dislike of Trump, as the candidate more likely to disrupt the political status quo in that country. Richard Coyne characterized his strategy as seeking to "shock the country and revive the left."
Chinese dissidents have referred to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as "Accelerator-in-Chief" (referencing state media calling Deng Xiaoping "Architect-in-Chief of Reform and Opening"), believing that Xi's authoritarianism is hastening the demise of the Chinese Communist Party and that, because it is beyond saving, they should allow it to destroy itself in order to create a better future.
Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the perpetrator of the 15 March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that killed 51 people and injured 49 others, strongly encouraged right-wing accelerationism in a section of his manifesto titled Destabilization and Accelerationism: Tactics. Tarrant's manifesto influenced John Timothy Earnest, the perpetrator of both the 24 March 2019 Escondido mosque fire at Dar-ul-Arqam Mosque in Escondido, California, and the 27 April 2019 Poway synagogue shooting which resulted in one dead and three injured. Patrick Crusius, the perpetrator of the 3 August 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting that killed 23 people and injured 23 others was influenced by Tarrant as well. Tarrant and Earnest, in turn, influenced Juraj Krajčík, the perpetrator of the 2022 Bratislava shooting that left dead two patrons of a gay bar.
Vox pointed to Land's shift towards neoreactionarism, along with the neoreactionary movement crossing paths with the alt-right as another fringe right wing internet movement, as the likely connection point between far-right racial accelerationism and the term for Land's otherwise unrelated technocapitalist ideas. They cited a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center investigation which found users on the neo-Nazi blog The Right Stuff who cited neoreactionarism as an influence. Land himself became interested in the Atomwaffen-affiliated theistic Satanist organization Order of Nine Angles (ONA) which adheres to the ideology of Neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing the ONA's works as "highly-recommended" in a blog post. Since the 2010s, the political ideology and religious worldview of the Order of Nine Angles, supposedly founded by the British neo-Nazi leader David Myatt in 1974, have increasingly influenced militant neo-fascist and neo-Nazi Insurgency groups associated with right-wing extremist and white supremacist international networks, most notably the Iron March forum.
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