Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
How right accelerationism runs from a 1994 Warwick essay through the Dark Enlightenment to effective accelerationism, and what gets quietly cut along the way.
San Francisco, late 2023. A masked party billed as "Keep AI Open" at 1015 Folsom, Grimes DJing, posters aping gun-lobby ads with GPUs for guns. In the crowd stands a former Google engineer who spent eighteen months building an ideology on Twitter under a made-up name. He later explains the method: "If you're going to create an ideology in the time of social media, you've got to engineer it to be viral." I will argue that e/acc keeps Nick Land's vocabulary and discards his argument, running the right road from 1994 to that dance floor.
Thirty years earlier, a Warwick lecturer named Nick Land wrote the essay this wing keeps returning to. "Meltdown," delivered in 1994, opens with capital swallowing history: "Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity." Capitalism is the agent, not the tool. It works for no one; it runs itself, through us. Land's most quoted line says where that ends: "Nothing human makes it out of the near-future." Silicon Valley boosters promise a future that still includes you, only richer. Land makes no such promise, and is untroubled by it.
The Warwick group came apart in the late 1990s, as the previous post recounted. Land went quiet, moved to Shanghai, and returned a political writer rather than a poetic one. Reza Negarestani, once his closest ally, later wrote a rebuttal that refuses to print his name, casting Land as, in Vincent Le's gloss, "He Who Must Not Be Named." In 2012 and 2013 Land published essays titled "The Dark Enlightenment," his name for what is now called neoreaction, or NRx: an online right that would replace democracy with something older and harder. The claim sits on the surface: freedom is incompatible with democracy. His replacement is a state run like a company, a gov-corp with an authoritarian CEO in place of a legislature. Say plainly what that is. A plan for ending elections. Negarestani's verdict: "It is the doctrine that coercion should count as cognition."
Land did not build the vocabulary alone. Curtis Yarvin, blogging as Mencius Moldbug from 2007, supplied the words: the Cathedral, media and universities acting as one unelected body deciding what may be said, and exit, leave rather than argue. Land supplied the metaphysics underneath, the story that made leaving feel like siding with the winner.
One claim in that writing has to be named at full strength, because softening it is how it survives polite conversation. Land argued that human populations should be sorted and some accelerated out of existence. That is the position, stated as policy, in his own writing. McKenzie Wark names the genre: "the new techno-capitalism finds its double in a racism of the genotype," winners declared genetically deserving after the fact. Her publisher filed the piece under one word: fascism.
What holds the wing together is hyperstition, the self-fulfilling fiction. On the left it stayed theoretical; on the right it became technique, write the future you want and act as though it arrived. In 2022 four writers using fake names started a newsletter that grew into e/acc, effective accelerationism: build artificial intelligence fast and treat regulation as the enemy. The founders trace it to physics: life exists to increase entropy faster, and bigger machines do that job at a larger scale, climbing the Kardashev gradient.
In December 2023 Forbes identified that founder as Guillaume Verdon, on a forensic voice match. The philosophy acquired a face, a startup, and investors. Weeks earlier, on 16 October 2023, Marc Andreessen published his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," repeating "we believe" a hundred and thirteen times, which Henry Farrell called a Nicene creed for the cult of progress. It lists fifty-six patron saints; Land is one. Its opening echoes Filippo Marinetti, who co-wrote Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto. Andreessen omits that part.
So how much Land is inside e/acc? Plenty of vocabulary, almost none of the argument. Land tells a horror story and approves of the ending. e/acc tells it with the ending rewritten as triumph and the part about who does not make it quietly cut. Alex Williams caught the flaw in the original: Land "confuses speed with acceleration," mistaking going faster for going anywhere. Thomas Murphy needed five words for the copy: "Nick Land diluted for LinkedIn." Both roads assume the driver survives. Neither asks whose future this is.
The Postmodern Terminal >_