Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
When things accelerate on their own, accelerationism is perhaps no more than a commentary on the slipping-away. A flight forward overtaken by the present.
In its origin, accelerationism is a reading of Marxism. Capitalism can be neither slowed nor stopped. One is rid of it only by letting its contradictions grow. The system must break apart on its own so that a new one can follow. There is a far-right accelerationism too. Abstractly it follows the same escalatory logic: the creation of an ethnically homogeneous state succeeds only through racial civil war.
The newer accelerationisms, by contrast, refer primarily to the advance of technology. Social developments are seen as technologically driven, enabled, or determined. They endorse acceleration — but formulate their hopes and conditions of success differently. The new discourse around automation and artificial intelligence marks an inflection point for all accelerationisms. Technological acceleration is no longer a desideratum but a fact. The only question left is whether the observable acceleration driven by digital technologies is good or bad. A decelerationist consensus seems to be forming, according to which much runs too fast and no one can keep up. For accelerationists, this compression of the timeline comes as less of a surprise than for others. It is the expected continuation of exponential curves. Yet they now find themselves in the strange situation of having been overtaken by their own forecast. For a fringe school of thought, the question of relevance arises.
In right-libertarian accelerationism, this after and before can be told apart well. Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto from 2023 is assigned to effective accelerationism (e/acc), which understands itself as a countermovement to both degrowth and the apocalyptic strand of the effective altruists. Andreessen formulates as a creed: “We believe everything good is downstream from growth.” In this he differs from Nick Land’s accelerationism of the 1990s. That one is a dark prophecy: “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” For Land, technologization as process and capitalism as its mechanism form a self-reinforcing feedback loop that runs toward a reshaping or annihilation of the human being. Land not only does not mind this, he revels in it. He writes in the style of a time traveler returned from the future. Now we are closer to that future, and Andreessen says soothingly of the very same process: no, this will turn out well.
Left accelerationism, too, knows a destructive and a constructive variant. There is the already mentioned dialectical hope that a growth of contradictions finally leads to their overcoming. That capitalism abolishes itself, if one lets it. But there is also, from the very beginning, the ambition to build a better society with the means of technology. In the Fragment on Machines, Marx says in 1858 that the metamorphosis of the means of production runs toward a replacement of human labor by machines. Lenin formulates in 1920: “Communism — that is Soviet power plus electrification.”
The idea of the environmental movement, that less is not less but more, has interrupted this left tradition. In the face of climatic tipping points and collapsing ecosystems, a path of preventive renunciation was taken, about which only now, after some fifty years, the doubts are growing louder. For transformation does not happen without industry, and coping with environmental problems does not succeed without wealth. It was also a strategic mistake to leave the field of hope to Elon Musk. A better left image of technology would have been: it allows one to do more with less. At some point, through it, one can do everything with nothing. Ephemeralization is what Buckminster Fuller called this.
Taking up the techno-modernist tradition of the USSR, China shows what is possible when one literally builds the better life — at least in its material dimensions. Output before input. The success of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance shows that in the global Northwest there is a longing for a course correction in this direction. This had been attempted several times before by left accelerationists, but found little attention. Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism from 2019 is one example. The stance formulated in 2013 by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in the ACCELERATE MANIFESTO could not be translated into politics either: “Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.”
The fear of the obsolescence of the office people now forms a new hurdle for a positive relation of left politics to technology. Advances in automation lead, among progressives, to a structurally reactionary behavior. Jobs that yesterday were called, variously, exploitative, alienating, or bullshit are suddenly supposed to form a bulwark against the slide into a permanent underclass. As if it did not already exist. The fight is for the preservation of a status quo that was previously criticized as untenable.
For this fight, the history of automation supplies forerunners but no justification. We rightly smile in retrospect at the ancient critique of writing and at the Luddite resistance to mechanization. It is true that industrialization first brought forth a lumpenproletariat and much suffering; the social legislation came later. Yes, in capitalism productivity gains do not lead to Keynes’s fifteen-hour week. And, sad but true, the diffusion of artificial intelligence within existing systems of screen addiction, advertising, surveillance, and monopolistic extraction could at first make everything worse.
Every technical revolution is ambivalent and provokes a countermovement. Only, the countermovement has rarely turned out to be right. And what would follow from the knowledge of an impending doom? Which infrastructures should one destroy, which means forbid, where does one draw the lines? And what permanence could these have? Immediately, because states cannot escape the dilemma of disarmament. And in the longer run, for, as Ted Kaczynski already noted in his manifesto: “… all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization.”
To dismiss the fear of the future as naive is nonetheless forbidden, because technical change plays out within a discredited system. Technology does indeed trickle down, only this gratifying circumstance is overshadowed by an advancing concentration of wealth and power. The frustration with the billionaires carries over to their projects. Rightly so, because these actors show little social motivation, and some even compete for capital with dystopian rhetoric.
Evgeny Morozov, in “Socialism After AI”, pointed out that artificial intelligence is not only a productive force but also a medium, a cultural form, and a machine of cognition. It is so transformative and dynamic that it is so far hardly conceivable how it could be hedged in a way oriented toward the common good or democratically. So it is, ironically, the acceleration of technology that strips left accelerationism, understood as the wish for democratic economic planning, of its plausibility.
Product cycles are faster than policy cycles. Sovereign is he who creates facts. Sovereign is he who is faster. That, sadly, is how it presents itself. Individual technology corporations have more resources and room for maneuver than most states. They make everyone their dependents. This diagnosis is sad, but the thought of controlling technology in the previous mode of legislation seems helpless, at best catching up, in any case anachronistic. For collective self mastery, an acceleration of politics itself would be needed. But how? Liquid Democracy and related concepts seem to have failed experimentally.
Land remarks of Srnicek and Williams that he considers it schizophrenic to believe that control and acceleration can in principle be reconciled. Curtis Yarvin’s CEO-monarch or Palantir CEO Alexander Karp’s Technological Republic resolve this problem in favor of autocracy. Thus one trades a problem for an even greater one. Liberal conceptions of order, meanwhile, struggle to find a way of dealing with accelerated technologization. Liberalism is in an awkward spot. As a project of balancing power, it was shot to pieces by the success of individual monopolists. To force the superplayers back into competition, a stronger state would be needed. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics.
If every claim to political control is plagued by illusions or normative trade-offs, what then is the programmatic alternative? Laissez-faire one need not set out to achieve. One reaches it by omission. One can, as Andreessen proposes, hope that everything will turn out fine. Because technology is ultimately a blessing. The subtext of this: no matter in which constellations of power it is applied. It is true that the slippery slope of technical progress has led us uphill rather than down. But this ride was neither smooth nor linear. To take such a long-term optimistic perspective is difficult when the economic struggle for survival is immediately at hand.
More consoling and more enlightened would be accelerationism as the hope that the technical disruption acts as a catalyst. That the growth of the problems brings us closer to their solution. That leads us back to the original, dialectical variant.
One should not glorify crises. But if they are unavoidable, then at least make the best of them. Perhaps it is not far now to the decoupling of individual productivity and standard of living. Perhaps the conditions for fighting for this goal will soon be in place.
The opponents of such an accelerationism are the defenders of the status quo. Preservers. Reactionary progressives. Enemies of labor-saving. Maintaining an Excel spreadsheet by hand is like tilling a field without a tractor. Drudgery. There is no utopia to defend. It helps to remind oneself actively of how the Western democracies were perceived before the arrival of artificial intelligence: as incapable of reform, gerontocratic, refeudalized, stagnating, plagued by polycrises. Naive is whoever believes that a slowing of technical development buys the time in which these problems can then be solved.
To be an accelerationist does not mean to be a cheerleader. No one needs cheerleaders. History least of all. But what it can mean: to accelerate in thought. At least to keep up in thought. Just don’t be behind the times.
