Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
Srnicek and Williams give a vocabulary for the speed and direction of change; Aristotle's phronesis supplies the judgment about which speed is right here.
Most debates about practice quietly assume the right direction is more. More efficient, more rapid, more scaled. I will argue that every proposed innovation wagers on tempo whether or not its author admits it, showing it through accelerationism, set beside phronesis and an older argument about alienation.
Accelerationism treats the speed of modern technological and economic life as the thing to be examined: not taken for granted, not simply resisted. Much critical thought since the 1970s has been about slowing down, localising, stepping off the treadmill. Accelerationism asks the uncomfortable counter-question: what if the way through a system is not to brake but to grab its momentum and steer? Notice how your field's language leans on speed: rapid deployment, faster turnaround, real-time response, scaling up. Values dressed as verbs.
The reference point is Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' 2013 "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics." Capitalism, they argue, has built an immense technological and logistical infrastructure. Do not smash it. Repurpose it toward a post-work future where automation frees human time instead of intensifying labour. They are not saying speed is good. They are saying the real question is which direction the acceleration heads, and capital currently sets it, not us. So "is this innovation faster?" becomes "faster toward what, and chosen by whom?"
The word has travelled into strange places, and there is no single accelerationism. Srnicek and Williams sit on the left, where acceleration serves emancipation and speed is a means: planning, automation, and collective direction steer technology toward shared flourishing. On the other side runs the lineage associated with Nick Land and its online cousin, "effective accelerationism" (e/acc): let the process run unchecked, trust that markets and machines self-accelerate toward something, treat runaway momentum as an end. That strand shades into the techno-monarchist corners of the tech right. Know which one you mean when you say "acceleration," since the two answer "toward what?" incompatibly.
Srnicek and Williams write that "the command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of The Network." It refuses total top-down control and equally the fantasy that accelerating markets deliver a just outcome. What it insists on is steering.
So hold any proposed innovation against three possibilities. Is it 1) faster, accelerating a trajectory the field is already on; 2) slower, introducing friction, protecting some slow good that speed was destroying; or 3) redirected, aiming the same energy somewhere wiser? Then the harder follow-up: which does your evidence support, and which does your profession need? The two answers differ more often than not, and the gap between them is where the honest contribution lives.
Here accelerationism meets phronesis, Aristotle's practical wisdom, which is no formula for fast or slow but discernment of the right tempo for this situation. Accelerationism supplies the vocabulary; phronesis supplies the judgment.
Accelerationism only asks about tempo. It cannot tell you what a practice does to the person who enacts it, day after day. For that, turn to Christoph Henning's Theories of Alienation (2025). The classic account is Marx's, in the 1844 manuscripts on estranged labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the process, from species-being (the creative capacity that makes work human), and from others, as colleagues turn into competitors. Lukács adds reification, where living judgment freezes into a procedure and then rules over the people it came from.
The direct hit follows. Rote, deskilled "best practice" is an engine of alienation. A checklist replaces judgment. A practitioner becomes a functionary executing steps they did not design and cannot question. The practice can be perfectly efficient and thoroughly alienating at once.
Flip it over: a real innovation is often an act of de-alienation. It gives judgment back to practitioners and reconnects them to purpose and to one another. Hartmut Rosa names what alienation forecloses: resonance, the living relationship to your work that deadening procedure kills. Rosa is also the bridge back, since he argues that social acceleration drives alienation.
So say whether your innovation is faster, slower, or redirected, and why that tempo is right. Then name one practice that has gone alienating, and show how yours restores judgment. Speed and meaning together turn "does this work?" into "does this let people flourish in their work?"
The Postmodern Terminal >_