Accelerationist discourse has returned to the Internet recently, following a flurry of activity amongst the e/acc set. In response, a number of articles and video essays on “effective accelerationism” have attempted to give an account of e/acc specifically and accelerationism in general, most amusingly in Forbes.
E/acc is rubbish, of course. It is nothing more than a rebranding of neoliberalist market optimism in the age of “artificial intelligence”. The other day, Adam and Craig (from the Acid Horizon podcast) and myself decided to spend ninety minutes on this regardless, discussing Marc Andreesson’s recently published “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. You can listen to our conversation below.
A Note on Accelerationism’s Revolutionary Sentiments
I will say one thing in addition to this. Whereas Adam and Craig do not align themselves with any form of accelerationism, I personally remain an accelerationist even now, for whatever that is worth (or not worth). As someone whose thought was largely shaped by Mark Fisher, the Ccru, Hyperdub, Urbanomic, the blogosphere (2003-2019) — and yes, undoubtedly the residual influence of Nick Land’s early work — it is not something I can imagine ever renouncing entirely, even as I despair at the ways this complex body of thought has been and continues to be used and abused. But despite all of this, one obscured truth remains. For me, accelerationism is just one name for a recent flavour of revolutionary sentiment, and no matter what others come to say about it, that sentiment and the context it was shaped in is something I still hold very dear.
What is embarrassing about e/acc is that it has removed this revolutionary sentiment from its “thinking” entirely. This is clear when you look at the comments made by those who are spearheading e/acc online, particularly their disgruntled responses when they are lumped in with the vulgar accelerationisms of old. For example, I was scrolling through the replies to YouTuber Joe Scott’s recent video essay on accelerationism last night. The video does a surprisingly good job of tracing the origins of accelerationism (albeit ending with the politique du pire summary, after going in a few directions entirely new to me). But rather than incur the ire of the old acc crowd, now largely dispersed, it was CEObro Garry Tan who voiced his disagreement with the following tweet:
Your characterization [of accelerationism] is disconnected from reality. Technological optimism is at the core of e/acc.
I am a moderate Democrat and centrist and e/acc is nonpartisan. We care deeply for creating as much human abundance as possible.
This was a very entertaining tweet to read. When e/acc first started being discussed online, many of us saw it for what it was immediately: a centrist accelerationism. It was funny to see that acknowledged outright.
Of course, the likes of Tan are by no means embarrassed by this characterisation — although they should be. As Adam, Craig and I discussed, this is in large part the problem with e/acc. We “original” accelerationists, whether of the first or second wave of blogospheric discourse, might have also rejected the claim that all we wanted was societal collapse, but if our dissenting retorts never quite broke through the popular reductionism, it is because we did not reject notions of creative destruction absolutely. Why? Because that is precisely the revolutionary sentiment at accelerationism’s heart. It is mischaracterised by many, but so are all revolutions.
I was reminded of this whilst proofreading Jon Greenaway’s forthcoming Capitalism: A Horror Story. In a chapter on the monstrous, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in particular, Jon writes:
The poor, the non-white, the exploited, and the enslaved are an amalgamation of bodies forced into exploited labour, and despite the ambiguities of the novel’s politics — and the politics of its author — the creature becomes a powerful symbol for the revolutionary potential of the monster. And this is not, as the Burkean conservative would insist, a revolution that would destroy the social order in an orgy of violence and death; that is already the bedrock of the social order, after all. It is the bourgeois revolutionary Victor who meets out violence on the defenceless. Rather, the revolution promised and glimpsed by Frankenstein’s creature is a fulfilment and dialectical sublation of the social order: the construction of a world wherein all are included within the universal fraternity of which the Enlightenment liberal spoke, but which they would not extend to all.
Accelerationists have often identified with capitalist monstrosities, but it is telling that the disparagement the movement has received from all quarters — left, right and otherwise — is always an unthinking parroting of this “Burkean conservative” position. Accelerationism certainly wants to destroy some stuff — namely, the unjust structures of capitalism that keep us forever indentured to those whose interests are not our own. And it certainly likes speed, but mostly through an acknowledgement of its inaccessibility. The William Gibson line that “the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed” was apt for the accelerationists; accelerationism was the blogosphere’s militant wing in the Time War, pushing forward as the hauntologists brought up the rear. If they identified with the machines, with the perverse enjoyment of our libidinal economy, that was their prerogative, but they also wanted to understand these things so that they could seed dissent from capitalism’s most suffocating tendencies.
As Mark Fisher argued, accelerationism “does not mean accelerating any or everything in capitalism willy-nilly, in the hope that capitalism will thereby collapse. Rather, it means accelerating the processes of destratification that capitalism cannot but obstruct” — that is, accelerating the proliferation of desires that capitalism cannot itself fulfil; accelerating the need for something other and proliferating those subjectivities that capitalism hopes to obstruct but cannot stop producing.
There is, then, in the accelerationist position, a sort of immanent critique at work: we hate capitalism and wish to move beyond its bounds, but this subjective position is nonetheless the product of capitalism itself. This was Lyotard’s position, and there are echoes of it in Deleuze and Guattari. Nick Land differed from this in that he didn’t hate capitalism and instead expressed an unabashed admiration for its shredding of subjectivities. Indeed, he affirmed capitalism’s claim that it had a monopoly on desire, and that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible. The accelerationists of the 2008 blogosphere took Land’s writings seriously, finding his analyses of contemporary capitalism to be appropriate and accurate in their feverishness, but they fundamentally disagreed with his conclusions and wanted to empower the left to prove Land wrong. In a later essay on Land’s legacy and influence, Fisher frames two of Land’s disparagement as productive questions for the left as follows:
Instead of the anti-capitalist ‘no logo’ call for a retreat from semiotic productivity, why not an embrace of all the mechanisms of semiotic-libidinal production in the name of a post-capitalist counter-branding?
Where is the left that can speak as confidently in the name of an alien future, that can openly celebrate, rather than mourn, the disintegration of existing socialities and territorialities?
These are the questions that accelerationism and its blogosphere were most consistently interested in. (If I stand by this blog’s “patchwork” writings at all, it was as a full-hearted — if naive — attempt to respond to the second question.) But harking back to Jon’s forthcoming book, in answering these questions, there is often (or should be) a subject at the heart of it. For the early accelerationists, no such subject seemed to exist, and therefore had to be constructed. Later attempts to introduce one, however — such as my own writings on unconditional accelerationism that sought to introduce a kind of Stoic subject into the heart of things — were more often than not rejected as a humanism that wasn’t posthumanist enough.
Simon O’Sullivan is particularly insightful on this. This question of subjectivity is where accelerationism runs into problems. “As with utopian modernism and its attempt to separate Geist from Reason, today’s accelerationists have run into the old problem of differentiating their version of progress from that of capitalist development itself”, Simon argued almost a decade ago. And it is with this in mind that we might find something useful in e/acc.
E/acc backs the logics of neoliberal capital absolutely. There is no intention of differentiating their version of progress from capitalist development itself. As Adam quipped, it is a version of /acc that almost makes him sympathise with Nick Land, but perhaps that is because e/acc’s pointlessness casts the nuances of prior accelerationisms in greater relief. As a movement of woeful reterritorialisation, it better illuminates the strategies of deterritorialisation that accelerationism, at the point of origin in 2008, was first trying to utilise. In attempting to construct a “positive” accelerationism, e/acc only makes the negativity of prior accelerationisms all the more attractive.