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What accelerationism gets right, what it costs, and why a vocabulary its own critics call dead still shapes how people with power argue about AI.
On February 19, 2025, the President of the United States posted a picture of himself wearing a crown. Two weeks of headlines, then gone. Meanwhile Curtis Yarvin had spent two decades arguing that America should be run by a monarch titled CEO, and his plan for the civil service carries an acronym: RAGE, Retire All Government Employees. I argue that accelerationism has to be read with and against itself, by showing 1) how far its vocabulary has traveled toward power, 2) what its militant wing does, and 3) which claims survive.
That same season, DOGE pushed something like thirty thousand federal employees out of their jobs. RAGE was the plan; DOGE reads like a rough draft. Yarvin has blogged since 2007, first as Mencius Moldbug, and his position has not moved since he wrote in 2008 that humans "fit into dominance-submission structures." By 2012 the ask was direct: Americans who want to change their government "are going to have to get over their dictator phobia."
The link to Nick Land is not retrofitted. Benjamin Noys spotted it in 2013: Land's toying with neoreactionary theory "renders critique of this latest work superfluous." The theory curdled into politics on its own. Peter Thiel invested early in Yarvin's software company, wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy compatible, and put more than ten million dollars behind J. D. Vance's Senate campaign; Vance cited Yarvin by name in 2021. Call the cluster technomonarchism: rule by the people who own things, run as government. Say what it replaces. Elections.
Yarvin names the replacement patchwork, or the network state: the country broken into corporate territories you subscribe to rather than vote in, with Próspera in Honduras a live pilot.
Do not make this tidier than it is. The online right that reads Yarvin numbers maybe a couple hundred people, one of whom called the current "nihilism for cowards." Noys reads why the vocabulary works anyway: the Cathedral, their term for a monolithic liberal establishment, is a permission structure letting the unmarginal cast themselves as rebels.
A second movement also calls itself accelerationism, and it has nothing to do with venture capital. Militant accelerationism is a neo-fascist current built on one belief: reform is finished, and violence can collapse a society fast enough to build a white ethnostate afterward. Julius Evola described a "path of acceleration" in 1934; the line runs through Joseph Tommasi, James Mason's newsletter Siege, the Iron March forum, Atomwaffen, and Terrorgram. Mattias Gardell has documented the logic adherents use to justify a purge meant to consume ordinary white people too. Federal agents arrested two Terrorgram leaders in September 2024, and the United States designated its members global terrorists. I name the lineage because naming it is the only way to see its shape. The indictments call it terrorism.
Set it beside the left-wing strands and an asymmetry shows up worth stating rather than smoothing. Left accelerationism gets accused of utopianism, of asteroid mines that never pay off. Nobody has died of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The right-wing strand includes Christchurch, 2019, fifty-one dead, and attacks since that copied its manifesto style. The asymmetry is the finding.
So what survives? Technology is political terrain, not a lever outside politics. Nostalgia is not a strategy. Futures get made partly by being described, which is what hyperstition names. What fails? Speed is not a politics, since going faster tells you nothing about who benefits. And "inevitable" only ever serves whoever is driving. Reza Negarestani, once among Land's closest readers, puts it from inside the tradition: "Landian inevitability is counterfeit realism, a get-out-of-reply-free card stamped with 'what is coming.'" Land's method blurs winning with being right, which is how a theory excuses power.
Noys, who coined the word in 2010 to attack it, called the movement a corpse in November 2025, then said in the same breath that it still shapes how people argue about AI and survives corporately as e/acc. A corpse that keeps setting the terms is a strange kind of dead. Ray Brassier saw the deeper trouble in 2010: follow Land's logic through and the human bearer of intensification dissolves, leaving nobody to steer. The question was never whether to accelerate. It is who steers, who pays, and who owns what comes.
The Postmodern Terminal >_