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A plain account of what accelerationism claims, where the word came from, and why its vocabulary now runs through the fight over artificial intelligence.
On Friday, 17 November 2023, OpenAI's board fired its own CEO. The next day Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful investors in technology, posted a single word: "e/acc!" Not a sentence; a faction. Within days the press had a frame for the fight: doomers versus accelerationists. Both words come out of French theory books from the 1970s. I will argue that accelerationism is a wager about strategy rather than a claim about speed, and I will show it by holding together two sentences a careful reader has to keep in the same hand: the formula, and the flinch.
The plain version first. Accelerationism is the family of ideas that says the exit from capitalism runs through capitalism, not around it. You do not get out by slowing down, and you do not get out by standing outside the system waiting for it to fall over. You get out by pushing harder. Steven Shaviro compressed the position into one line: the only way out is through. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, who edited the field's standard anthology, put it less gently: the only radical response to capitalism is to accelerate its own uprooting, alienating tendencies. The forces which tear up old jobs, old towns, old certainties (deregulation, automation) get treated as the door rather than the wall.
The history fits in a breath. Karl Marx, in notebooks from 1858, noticed that machinery might eventually turn against the system that built it. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in 1972, told the left to accelerate the process instead of pulling back. Jean-François Lyotard pushed further in 1974. In the mid-1990s a group at Warwick University turned it into something closer to a séance than a seminar. In 2013 two writers published a manifesto with a hashtag in the title. In 2022 anonymous accounts turned it into a movement with a name short enough for a bio: e/acc.
The bet runs like so. Capitalism keeps generating forces that could tear it apart, machines that replace the workers who tend them, markets that outrun any owner's control. If so, meeting capitalism head-on is the wrong move; better to make it more completely itself, faster, until something else comes out the far side. Benjamin Noys, who named the tendency, compressed the bet into a formula: "if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better." Then the flinch. Shaviro, who wrote a book taking accelerationism seriously, told a lecture audience that in its most maximal expression the approach "is dangerous and stupid and clearly ridiculous." He defended a smaller version anyway. Formula and flinch mark the range.
Now break the tidy definition, because it will not hold. The same two words, speed it up, argue for a universal basic income and for the abolition of elections. People who agree on nothing else agree on that verb. Some want to speed toward everyone owning the machines; others toward nobody being in charge, voting included. They even have a name for opponents who counsel slowing down: decelerationists, "decels" for short. You could read that instability as a flaw in my explanation. Read it instead as the subject.
The word's provenance is stranger still. Noys coined it around 2010 as an attack, the way one says "nihilism" to warn people off. He lifted it from Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light, having already test-driven a nastier label for the same crowd: Deleuzian Thatcherism. Within a few years the people he was attacking had put the insult on a manifesto and worn it as a badge.
Taking this seriously is not agreeing with it. Parts of the tradition amount to a plan for replacing elected government with a corporate monarchy. Noys describes that wing without euphemism: cyber-entrepreneurs who "believe in a future kind of feudalism where they're obviously in charge." I will not soften those parts. Nor will I treat the tradition as a costume worn by people who were already villains. Some of it is a real argument about what technology is for, made by people convinced that slowing down is the more dangerous choice. That argument now sits inside the firms building the machines, which is reason enough to learn its grammar.
The Postmodern Terminal >_