Fully Automated Luxury Liberalism

Few books still actually shape discourses. But Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance is one of them. Hardly any work has set off as much hype in liberal circles in recent years. Everyone seems to have "read" it (or at least picked up the talking points somewhere), talks about it…and most importantly: everyone loves it. In progressive circles especially, the book has become part of the established folklore, reaching far beyond the niche of those pro-growth liberals who were ranting against NIMBYs, subscribing to Works in Progress, and hanging a framed Hockey Stick of Human History in their bedroom long before Ezra Klein.

That Klein, arguably the most influential intellectual of our time, has come out as an advocate of a liberalism of progress opens these ideas up to entirely new audiences — precisely those who were repelled by Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto for what were probably more sociological reasons (who wants to make common cause with a venture capitalist (!) and Trump supporter?). The bildungsbürgerlich Ezra-splaining speaks more directly to the Suhrkamp readership and, on top of that, avoids any reference to potentially toxic terms like accelerationism — with which Andreessen flirts through his explicit nod to the controversial (to say the least) thinker Nick Land. And yet both pamphlets push in a similar direction.

And I was hyped too. The introduction alone reads like the wet dream of my liberal utopia of progress: energy abundance from small nuclear reactors on every corner, lab-grown meat, miracle pills against obesity, cancer, and aging, beautiful green cities with delivery drones and self-driving cars instead of dreary parking garages, and much more. And of course I love the title: Abundance. It sounds so much nicer and more contemporary than the Cornucopianism of the 1980s. And rolls off the tongue more easily…

Reading the book, though, my enthusiasm shrank from page to page. The best way to describe it is probably the disappointed anticipation of the German translation of the word Abundance. There, the publisher ultimately settled on the rather restrained title “Der neue Wohlstand.” Perhaps this linguistic detail already tells us that Abundance is, in the end, nothing more than new packaging for the same-old-same-old liberal reform agenda. Which remains so “radical” that it would be palatable to Joe Biden and Friedrich Merz alike.

That raises the rather zeitgeisty question of whether this is really “good enough.” A little deregulation here, a little more innovative capacity there, plus a pinch of optimism about the future. Is that enough to break up the sclerosis of contemporary liberal democracies? After reading, I have to say: I don’t think so.

Instead, in the Germany of 2026, I am reminded of Mark Fisher’s dictum of the “slow cancellation of the future.” Even looking at Ezra Klein’s supposed utopia, it is plain what it has become for us: an unreachable castle in the sky. As a society, we said goodbye to the better world in our heads long ago, let alone to a golden age of the AI-powered fully automated luxury society. Only the reason is not, as Fisher assumed, the inevitability of a bleak and degrading neoliberal capitalism. The reason is the state. Or, once more with Fisher: it is easier today to imagine the collapse of our world than that of the administrative state.

Nor will all these ministries for state modernization or DOGE help anymore. The Kafkaesque nature of the expansive administrative state has long since corrupted our entire thinking. That is why neither reform nor chainsaw suffices. It takes collapse. In the tradition of Dark Liberalism, the fitting theoretical toolkit can be found in the dark niche debates of the accelerationism discourse. Perhaps the abundance crowd will, in the end, have to adopt the vocabulary of its unloved comrades-in-arms — or at least their acronyms, be it Marc Andreessen and Beff Jezos’s (e/acc) or Vitalik Buterin’s (d/acc).

It is easier today to imagine the collapse of our world than that of the administrative state.

This, however, is not quite so simple, and it takes some conceptual imagination. For liberals, in the history of ideas, have no real access to accelerationism at all. What we currently offer as acceleration thinking, and occasionally as supposed Accelerationism, has less to do with structural-material orders than with the sheer speed and implementation of neoliberal public policy: faster innovation cycles, faster permits, faster technology adoption. All of it, however, within a given political-economic order. For the accelerationists, it is about more. It is about systems, cybernetics, and feedback loops, about the interdependencies of these feedback loops and how they influence one another and regulate themselves. In the traditional reading of accelerationism, you have to intensify a system’s self-reinforcing loops until the limits of the regulating force fail. A system is thus overcome neither through resistance nor through the patience of institutional reform; but through the overloading of its own inner dynamic. Taking accelerationism seriously, then, means occupying ourselves less with reform politics than with the social ontology and mechanics of postmodernity. And thus with a bit of postmodern, or rather poststructuralist, theory.

That said, especially in these discourses (which never really took place in the academic mainstream anyway, but rather on blogs and in internet forums), there is a multitude of readings of the concept of accelerationism. Srnicek and Williams, for instance, understand acceleration as navigation rather than collapse, and even in the founding fathers Deleuze and Guattari (D&G), “accelerating the process” is phrased more as a conceptual question than as a political agenda. I still believe that precisely there, an interesting and perhaps even instructive world of thought opens up for liberalism.

For that, one has to return briefly to the primal scene of accelerationism in D&G’s Anti-Oedipus. It is there that the idea of deterritorialization is introduced. Capitalism, which the two describe as an axiomatic of decoded flows, detaches (read: decodes) people, labor, goods, land, and desire from their grown contexts of social meaning, transfers them into abstract exchange relations, and finally recodes them into artificial substitute forms such as corporations, markets, or alternative identities. This process is evolutionary and continuously ongoing. What remains in the end is a body without organs, in which every organ has been estranged from its biological purpose and recoded by the organism (read: capitalism). Human existence, as it were, transformed into a field of artificial desires.

Or something roughly in that direction.

A system is thus overcome neither through resistance nor through the patience of institutional reform; but through the overloading of its own inner dynamic.

What matters here is only that, for D&G, these recodings are no counterforces to the market; they are forms of compensation of a capitalist system that keeps expanding. The state, there, is no antagonist of capital; it is its technocratic organ of enforcement and stabilization (or, in their term, a “model of realization”). The dichotomy between an autonomous market and a state that intervenes or corrects from outside, as liberals understand it, does not exist in D&G.

This is precisely where the dark lord of accelerationism comes in: Nick Land. He breaks up D&G’s double movement. What in D&G are two sides of the same capitalist process, Land distributes onto two separate antagonists: technocapital becomes pure deterritorialization and thus acceleration; recoding becomes the task of the braking, negative feedback loop of the political: state and regulatory agencies, central banks, universities, trade unions, in short, everything Land contemptuously dismisses as the “Human Security System.” The later Land then dresses this cybernetic escalation in the vocabulary of the Austrian tradition. And there, of course, liberals prick up their ears. He adopts Hayek’s concept of catallaxy (read: the spontaneous, unplanned order) and sets it (albeit not explicitly) against taxis (read: the consciously constructed, hierarchical organization). Suddenly, Land’s model presents itself in a language even a liberal gets: two forces working against each other in a cybernetic system. Only the distribution of roles remains unchanged in Land, technocapital accelerates, the administrative state brakes and dampens. Which does raise the conceptual question of whether really only one side of the political economy deterritorializes.

It does not seem implausible that the modern administrative state possesses a deterritorialization logic of its own. Bureaucratic abstraction structurally performs the same operation D&G ascribe to the market: a concrete, grown relation is replaced by a general, quantifiable category of rule (!). The market turns labor into salable labor power, land into private property, possessions into capital; the administration turns persons into data records, families into households, the needy into benefit claimants, and power into competencies and offices. In the sense of James C. Scott, the state, too, can only administer what it has first translated into its own operational logic. And that (much like the commodification logic of markets) affects our thinking. For social dynamics that are only visible in administrative categories can, in turn, only be solved by the state: old-age provision, economic growth through industrial subsidies, universal basic income. You name it.

The deterritorialization process of the modern bureaucratic state has thus developed a life of its own that reproduces its own demand, and it has long outgrown its role as tamer of the market. Ludwig von Mises had already warned of that logic of expansion: every rule produces edge cases and evasive reactions, whose correction in turn creates new competencies, reporting duties, and procedures. Every intervention thus creates the distortion that justifies the next one, and rolling it back costs more than expanding it. So here we are: the market’s feedback check on the administrative state has long been overcome. The state has become autonomous! And this logic has reached our heads as well. We regulate before we create. The market is no longer merely braked by state intervention; capital is dominated by the state and transferred into its logic. In the end, only two kinds of business models remain: those that agoristically evade the state’s grasp; and those that make common cause with it. Elon Musk’s business models are, after all, called: state emissions trading and subsidies (Tesla) and NASA contracts (SpaceX). Social market economy becomes state capitalism.

The future, then, is not being commercialized away. It is being administered away.

In the end, it is probably the inverse Fisher after all. For while Mark Fisher speaks of a “market Stalinism” and thus of the marketization of bureaucracy, we are experiencing the exact opposite: the primacy of the permission state, which admits private initiative only once it can be described and classified in its own categories. An “administrative Stalinism,” so to speak. And that is why the technocapitalist utopia does not fail because late capitalism commodifies every conceivable fantasy. It fails because the new must first prove its congruence with the logic of the administrative state. No wonder that in present-day Germany, only the administration still grows. The future, then, is not being commercialized away. It is being administered away.

So what to do with an order that processes its own destructive sclerosis as input? There are three options:

1. Dismantling through deregulation: not a real option, we already talked about that. Even in Argentina, where Javier Milei’s government had more than 300 laws and decrees scrapped in its first year in office alone, the dismantling proceeds sluggishly, with pruning shears rather than a chainsaw. And even Milei knows that this will change again with the next change of government. At least he has understood that lasting change takes more than decrees: in this sense, accelerationist thinking itself must become culturally hegemonic, anchored in people’s minds.

2. Exit: evading the deterritorialization logic of the state. A lovely idea, but by now impossible. When the tech investor Balaji Srinivasan tried to escape traditional state dynamics with his Network State and moved his private academy to Malaysia as a privately run community, his business license was summarily revoked (a word entirely in the logic of state recoding). Even the most innovative technocapital, then, cannot de facto evade the functional logic of the state.

3. That leaves only the third, accelerationist option: overload to the point of collapse. If the apparatus can neither be reliably dismantled nor abandoned, you simply accelerate its own self-reinforcing process: more competencies, more decrees, more procedures, more bureaucrats, until the system finally hits its fiscal and legitimatory limits and collapses.

Voilà, that does sound like a manual.

For thought through to the end, it means: the liberal accelerationist does not vote for a party of deregulation. She votes for the party of “administrative Stalinism.” She votes for the Greens.

In the end, the only path to Fully Automated Luxury Liberalism indeed seems to be exactly that: to bin the thousandth attempt at an abundance/cornucopian/growth program and, for once, really run the thing into the ground. Whether a liberal order emerges from that remains to be seen. What do I know? At least the future will then, once again, be radically open and our thinking freed from the shackles of bureaucracy. Of course, the risk of civilizational collapse prophesied by Nick Land remains, very much in the spirit of the meme: “What did y’all think accelerationism meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” But honestly: How bad can it get?

Or things simply take their course: we liberal accelerationists wait for the collapse of the administrative state just as long as our Marxist friends have been waiting for capitalism to be overcome by its dialectical contradictions. That would be truly ironic.