Vincent Lê writes:

It surfaces in terrorism reports and tech presentations, in the manifestos of mass shooters and the public declarations of billionaires. What is ‘accelerationism’? Over the past decade, especially the past few years, this term has migrated from the dark corners of the internet into mainstream politics and culture – and in the process has split into two dominant forms that could not be more contradictory. One group of accelerationists dreams of burning down the world and building a white ethnostate from the ashes. The other dreams of new technologies lifting humanity towards something close to paradise. Both have it wrong. Accelerationism stretches across an abyss. Will we look down?

In August 2024, ASIO, the national security agency of Australia, raised its terrorism threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’. When asked what threats the agency had in mind, ASIO’s director-general Mike Burgess listed off the usual suspects: far-Right extremists and Islamic jihadists. But he also added a new candidate: ‘accelerationists’. When the perplexed interviewer enquired ‘What’s an accelerationist?’ Burgess responded: ‘It’s people with a far-Right ideology, neo-Nazi or even further, where they believe in white supremacy and they don’t like the way the world is run today and they want it to downfall to return things to what they believe is the rightful order.’

The world, and many of its security agencies, had been alerted to the rising probability of ‘accelerationist’ terrorist attacks on 15 March 2019, when an Australian man named Brenton Tarrant livestreamed himself murdering 51 people and wounding 89 others at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the manifesto Tarrant posted online, titled ‘The Great Replacement’, he included a particularly disturbing section called ‘Destabilisation and Accelerationism: Tactics for Victory’. In it, he writes:

True change and the change we need to enact only arises in the great crucible of crisis. A gradual change is never going to achieve victory. Stability and comfort are the enemies of revolutionary change. Therefore we must destabilise and discomfort society where ever possible.

In this sense, so-called ‘accelerationism’ is nothing new. It’s a white supremacist ideology that promotes violent acts of terror to intensify racial conflict and push social division to breaking point. Its advocates see this rupture as a means of ushering in a white ethnostate. Think of the US group the Order (aka the Silent Brotherhood) who tried to trigger a race war in the 1980s, or the British neo-Nazi behind the London nail bombings in 1999.

But this violent white supremacist dream is neither the only version of accelerationism, nor the first.

In the early 2020s, those doomscrolling on Twitter (now X) might have observed a number of prominent Silicon Valley tech bros – including Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the first widely used web browser, and Garry Tan, an early employee of Palantir Technologies – identifying as ‘effective accelerationists’, abbreviated as ‘e/acc’. Coined in 2022 by two pseudonymous Twitter users (named ‘Beff Jezos’ and ‘Bayeslord’), effective accelerationism treads a very different path to the one described by the Christchurch shooter: it espouses a radical version of tech solutionism in which the optimal way to solve any problem is through the technological innovations that emerge from capitalist competition. There is no natural or technological problem, as Andreessen writes in ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ (2023), ‘that cannot be solved with more technology.’ For effective accelerationists, techno-capitalism – even the most inhuman, AI-driven version of it – only improves our lives. Global problems like poverty, war and climate change can all be fixed by ramping up unrestricted market competition. Andreessen continues:

We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.

During the 2024 US presidential race, e/acc-aligned figures in the American tech industry came out in strong support of Donald Trump, and their campaign donations and constant meme-posting helped hurl him back into power. In office, Trump returned the favour by announcing the Stargate Project, a joint venture between the US government and OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX that aims to invest up to US$500 billion in AI research and development by 2029. He also proposed using executive orders and emergency declarations to fast-track technological projects that would hopefully lead to vaccines to cure cancer, among other miracles finally made feasible.

So, what is ‘accelerationism’? In the past decade, two forms seem to have consolidated in the public imagination. The first evokes violent terrorists like Tarrant. The second involves titans of the tech industry striving to build a ‘pro-human’ science-fiction utopia. But neither reflects the original and much stranger philosophy of accelerationism, which began neither as an ideology of white nationalism nor of techno-utopianism.

It began with one man’s ecstatic philosophy of human extinction. [Continue reading…]