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Accelerationism

Abstract

Accelerationism is the idea that the way out of the present is through it: speed up capitalism and technology instead of resisting them. It began as an obscure strand of 1970s French theory, became a cult philosophy at a British university department in the 1990s under Nick Land, split into left- and right-wing versions in the 2010s, and reached Silicon Valley in 2022 as effective accelerationism (e/acc), a meme movement against AI safety that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen turned into a manifesto. The same word was also taken up by white-supremacist terrorists, who share the name and almost nothing else. Because the AI-policy fight it is part of is still running, its figures and positions reflect the state of play when it was last reviewed, in October 2026.

Origins

The intellectual history usually starts with Karl Marx. In a speech on free trade in Brussels in January 1848 Marx said he favored free trade, not because it helped workers, but because it hastened the social revolution by sharpening the conflict between capital and labor. Capitalism, in this reading, would be overcome by being pushed to its limit.

The passage most often quoted comes from Gilles Deleuze and FΓ©lix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972). Asking which way revolution should go, they suggested: “Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it.” How far Deleuze and Guattari meant this as a program is disputed; their commentators have argued about it ever since.

The word itself came later, and from a critic. The British theorist Benjamin Noys used “accelerationism” in The Persistence of the Negative (2010) as a pejorative label for theorists who believed that intensifying capitalism would destroy it. (The word had appeared before, in Roger Zelazny’s 1967 science-fiction novel Lord of Light; Noys later wrote that he had read the novel and found the term there only afterwards.) The people he described adopted it.

Nick Land and the CCRU

The philosopher who gave accelerationism its tone was Nick Land, a lecturer in continental philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987. With the cyberfeminist theorist Sadie Plant he founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the mid-1990s, an unofficial collective that mixed philosophy, cyberpunk fiction, jungle music and occultism into what its members called “theory-fiction.”

Land’s essays of the period, such as “Meltdown” (1994), described capitalism as an inhuman intelligence assembling itself from the future, using humans as temporary parts. Technology and markets were the same runaway process, and the human was what the process would discard. Land did not present this as a warning. He resigned from Warwick in 1998, withdrew from public life after a breakdown, and resurfaced years later in Shanghai. His collected writings appeared as Fanged Noumena in 2011, and in 2012 his online essay “The Dark Enlightenment” gave a name to the anti-democratic “neoreaction” of the programmer Curtis Yarvin.

Left and Right

In the 2010s the idea split.

Left accelerationism. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” in 2013. They argued that the left had given up on the future and retreated into local, small-scale resistance; it should instead take over technological modernity, automation and planning and steer them toward a post-work society. Their book Inventing the Future (2015) made the case for full automation and universal basic income.

Right accelerationism. Land, now in Shanghai, argued that capitalism and technology should be freed from democratic control altogether, and that the “Cathedral” (Yarvin’s term for the alliance of universities, media and civil service) was the obstacle. This strand fed into the neoreactionary corner of Silicon Valley (see Silicon Valley Philosophies).

Not the same movement

From the late 2010s, white-supremacist terrorists used “accelerationism” for something different: committing violence to provoke the collapse of society and a race war. The Christchurch attacker’s 2019 manifesto had a section titled “Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics for victory.” This movement shares a word and a vague idea of hastening collapse with the philosophical tradition, but not its texts, aims or people. The tech-industry e/acc movement has no connection to it.

Effective Accelerationism

Silicon Valley’s version appeared on Substack and Twitter in May–July 2022. Its name was a joke at the expense of effective altruism, whose followers were the movement’s main opponents in arguments about AI. The best-known statement, “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets,” was posted on 10 July 2022 by two pseudonymous accounts, “Beff Jezos” (a pun on Jeff Bezos) and “Bayeslord.”

The notes grounded the movement in physics. Drawing on the physicist Jeremy England’s idea of dissipative adaptation, they argued that life and intelligence arise because they dissipate energy faster, so the growth of technology and capital is a thermodynamic tendency that cannot be stopped, only slowed at a cost. Verdon later described the goal as climbing the “Kardashev gradient”: a civilization that captures ever more energy. The notes stated that e/acc had “no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life,” which put it closer to Land than to the transhumanists, who want to improve humans rather than replace them.

The movement spread as a Twitter identity: users added “e/acc” to their display names, and its opponents became “decels” or “doomers.” In December 2023 Forbes identified Beff Jezos as Guillaume Verdon, a Canadian former quantum-computing researcher at Google whose startup Extropic had just raised a $14.1 million seed round to build thermodynamic computing chips. Verdon confirmed the identification and continued to post under both names.

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Marc Andreessen gave the movement institutional weight. His essay “Why AI Will Save the World” (June 2023) called those who warned of AI extinction a “cult.” On 16 October 2023 he published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” about 5,200 words, on the website of his venture-capital firm a16z:

  • “We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.”
  • It described a “mass demoralization campaign” waged under the names of “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “ESG,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management” and “de-growth.”
  • It ended with a list of “patron saints of techno-optimism,” which included Nick Land, the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and “@BasedBeffJezos.”

The manifesto made e/acc’s arguments the stated position of one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture-capital firms.

Policy

The accelerationists’ practical target was AI regulation. In October 2023 President Biden signed Executive Order 14110 on “safe, secure, and trustworthy” AI, which required developers of the largest models to report safety tests to the government. Andreessen’s firm campaigned against California’s SB 1047 AI-safety bill, which Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed in September 2024, and in July 2024 Andreessen announced donations to super PACs backing Donald Trump, whom he then advised. On 20 January 2025, his first day back in office, Trump revoked Executive Order 14110, and three days later he signed an order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.”

d/acc

The best-known answer from inside the technology world came from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In “My techno-optimism” (27 November 2023) he agreed with Andreessen that technology had made life vastly better, but argued that “not just magnitude but also direction matters.” His d/acc (defensive, decentralized, democratic or differential acceleration) favors technologies that make defense easier than attack and make power harder to concentrate: open-source security tools, biosecurity, decentralized communication. Buterin argued that pure e/acc, by rewarding whoever moved fastest, would likely produce a monopoly on AI, which he considered as dangerous as the risks the safety movement feared.

Positions Compared

Strand Era Who What should be accelerated Toward what
Marx’s free-trade argument 1848 Karl Marx Capitalism’s contradictions Social revolution
CCRU accelerationism 1990s Nick Land, Sadie Plant Technocapital A post-human intelligence
Left accelerationism 2013 Srnicek, Williams Automation, planning Post-work society
Right accelerationism / NRx 2010s Land, Yarvin Capital freed from democracy Corporate sovereignty
e/acc 2022 Verdon, “Bayeslord” Energy use, AI, capital Kardashev-scale civilization
Techno-optimism 2023 Andreessen Technology, markets Abundance
d/acc 2023 Buterin Defensive and decentralizing technology Pluralistic future

Dead End: Acceleration Without a Destination

Each version of accelerationism has had trouble saying where the acceleration ends. Marx expected free trade to hasten revolution in the countries that adopted it, and none of them had one. The CCRU, which expected capitalism to dissolve the human subject, had itself dissolved by the early 2000s. e/acc’s thermodynamic argument, taken literally, says that any outcome which dissipates more energy is better, which does not distinguish between a flourishing civilization and a very large fire. Its political success in 2025 came from a narrower and older argument, that American companies should not be regulated while Chinese ones were not, which needed no thermodynamics.

πŸ“š Sources