Accelerationism: Collapse, Singularity and Postcapitalism
Accelerationist theories have gained popularity in extra-academic sectors in recent years. The advancement of techno-scientific progress and the transformation of humanity’s relationship with cybernetics, along with the understanding of the inexorability of these dynamics, invite us to consider proposals regarding the possibility of shaping the future by accelerating certain aspects of these processes rather than attempting to construct something external to them. “There is no outside” is one of the core ideological tenets of all accelerationist currents. The foundations for constructing alternatives to the status quo are contained within the present reality and its social relations.
Starting from the premise of capitalism’s victory over all alternative models proposed so far, accelerationists argue that instead of actively opposing it, we should seek to intensify some of its tendencies, whether with the hope of reaching a new post-capitalist social model or pushing the development of capital to its extreme, represented by the technological singularity.
“But what revolutionary path is there? Is there one? — To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises the Third World countries, in a curious renewal of the fascist ‘economic solution’? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? That is, to go even further in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? Perhaps the flows are not yet sufficiently deterritorialized, sufficiently decoded, from the standpoint of a theory and practice of flows of the highest schizophrenic level. Do not withdraw from the process, but go further, ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche said: truly, in this matter, we have not yet seen anything.”
G. Deleuze, F. Guattari. (1972) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
This brief passage is often cited as the starting point for the development of accelerationist theory. In response to the question emancipation, rather than seeking “opposing” options to present tendencies, Deleuze and Guattari offer an atypical thesis for their time, advocating for the idea of “going further” within these tendencies. Without intending to glorify free-market dynamics and globalization processes, Deleuze and Guattari propose deepening and, in essence, accelerating these dynamics under the belief that they will eventually lead to their own reconfiguration and create the conditions for new forms of social organization, pressuming that the fundamental functioning of the current productive model is finite and unsustainable.
However, these ideas have historical precedents. Both Nick Land and left-accelerationists identify similar positions in Marx’s writings:
“But, in general, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the system of free trade is destructive. It corrodes old nationalities and pushes the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat to its extreme. In short, the system of free trade accelerates the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense, gentlemen, do I vote in favor of free trade.”
K. Marx. (1848) Speech on Free Trade
By understanding the capitalist mode of production as self-destructive, due to the presence of inherent internal contradictions in its operation and reproduction, there emerges the idea of “feeding” these contradictions by accelerating market dynamics. We can thus identify a latent accelerationist tension from the very beginning of capitalist theorization and even trace accelerationist theses back to the foundational ideas of Marxist socialist thought and its derivatives.
The debate on accelerationism is, at its core, a debate on the functioning of capitalism and its processes. The most reactionary sectors advocate for a radicalization of the current model, aiming to reverse Enlightenment ideals and achieve the total liberation of capital from the institutions that restrict its operation. Meanwhile, left-aligned perspectives see capitalism’s own potentialities as an opportunity to establish a dialectical process leading to new socio-economic models. The use of acceleration as a mechanism for change by both sides presents different ways of understanding capitalism as a productive model and its potential. This raises new concerns regarding technology’s role in capitalism and its relationship with humanity, the ethical validity of accelerating certain processes, and the position of singularity as the possible endpoint of capitalist dynamics. All of these issues will be addressed in this essay.
Nick Land and the Neoreaction
Modern accelerationist theory traces its origins to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in the 1990s. Led by Nick Land, the group positioned itself within the realm of experimental theory. Their research spanned from cultural studies on the internet, technology, and the emerging “cyberspace” to more unorthodox fields such as numerology, rave culture, and even occultism. Eventually, the group dissolved after only a few years, leaving behind a series of philosophical texts that would serve as the foundation for the development of accelerationist thought.
Land’s philosophy is complex and highly controversial, even within the realm of postmodern thought. Initially, his provocative style and admiration for the work of Deleuze and Guattari in the 1990s led some to associate his ideas with post-communist leftism, a claim that would later be disproven as his theory evolved.
Land’s thought is rooted in a specific conception of capitalism as synonymous of autonomous technological development. Capitalism, in his view, is the only mechanism capable of driving progress toward the future, whereas any alternative to it represents regression. In his work Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism, Land identifies the libidinal mechanics of capitalism as the key factor that makes it a superior productive model compared to any alternative. The material capacities of capital to construct and satisfy human desire form the core mechanism that has allowed it to absorb the sources of social dynamism, the concept of progress and growth, and even time itself as integral components of the present productive model.
For Land, capitalism is an entropic autonomous machine that operates beyond human agency, using desire to advance indiscriminately, profaning the sacred, sacralizing the profane, and reterritorializing structures at its own will.
The theories developed by the CCRU depict capitalism as a dynamic force present since primitive human societies, evolving throughout history. Based on this perspective, in Meltdown, Land explains how this force explodes in modern capitalism due to the introduction of techno-scientific rationalization and global navigation processes, which accelerate market forces. At this point, the autonomous machine of capital embarks on an indiscriminate advance toward a clear final destination: technological singularity and the collapse of human structures.
In the early phase of Land’s work, there is a conscious and intense desire for posthumanity, a longing for a process of differentiation and destruction of all established civilizational structures. It is not a lack of hope for the future that guides Land but rather a veneration of collapse and technological singularity. In his thought, human life, society, and politics hold no intrinsic value; only the development of technoscientific capital matters. Anthropocentrism disappears, and humanity becomes merely an obstacle on the path toward singularity — the ultimate and inevitable endpoint of capitalism, where technology, shaped by capitalist logic, develops independently of human influence. In this process, it breaks free from human limitations, escapes control, and accelerates toward the collapse of all existing structures and subjectivities.
Humanity dissolves in favor of the emergence of new entities driven by this technological singularity. It is not humanity that emancipates itself from capital but rather capital that, through its own development, liberates itself from human limitations, ascending to form new structures beyond current imagination. In Landian thought, capital is the sole accelerating subject, and its singularity is the final goal, not only inevitable but also entirely desirable.
Land’s philosophy took a drastic turn with the publication of The Dark Enlightenment, in which he embraced the theses of neoreactionary movements. His accelerationist political theory became intertwined with white supremacist ideas, eugenics, and a call for the reversal of Enlightenment ideals such as democracy and formal equality. What had once been an experimental line of thought offering intriguing perspectives on capitalism and posthumanism, despite its controversial foundations, ultimately degenerated into an amalgamation of ideas that sought to merge the glorification of capitalism’s destructive power and technological singularity with social traditionalism and racialist politics.
Capital remained the central accelerating subject, but acceleration was now directed toward achieving neoreactionary ideals. Through hyperstition, the process of making fictional narratives materialize as real social forces, this ideology sought to delegitimize gender equality, incite racial conflict to promote the creation of white ethnostates, and discredit state regulations to consolidate the political power of the corporate elite.
Nick Land’s early ideas represent the clearest expression of postmodern nihilism taken to its ultimate consequences. The complete disregard for human life, legitimized in favor of a destructive process dismantling all existing structures, reflects a deeply pessimistic view of social change beyond capitalism, as well as an existential void regarding the meaning of existence itself. Land’s ideological shift should not be understood as an assertion of a new possibility against the status quo but rather as a continuation of his nihilism — now materialized and instrumentalized through hatred and violence against marginalized groups, while elevating and sacralizing specific social classes.
Despite his neoreactionary turn, Land’s original ideas remain fundamental to contemporary accelerationist thought, influencing both those who seek to accelerate capitalism as a means of reinforcing it and those who view acceleration as a path toward new postcapitalist structures.
Effective Accelerationism and Tecno-Utopism
At the height of American neoliberal development, a new Californian bourgeoisie emerged within the technological and digital sectors, distinguishing itself both aesthetically and ideologically from the traditional bourgeois class. This new Silicon Valley elite brought with it a vision of human progress in which technological development played the central role. Later dubbed the “Californian Ideology,” this worldview strongly advocated for minimal state intervention in technological sectors and the unrestricted expansion of productive development. Its core belief was that technology was the key to solving all social problems and represented the fundamental driver of human progress. According to this perspective, any social harm caused by capitalism would ultimately be resolved by accelerating its own dynamics, as future technological advancements would inevitably eliminate all present-day negative externalities.
These deterministic and techno-utopian ideas merged with Landian thought, giving rise to what became known as Effective Accelerationism (E/ACC). This political theory structured itself around the central goal of accelerating technological progress, with a particular focus on singularity, transhumanism, and the overcoming of interconnectivity as it is currently understood. Unlike original Landian accelerationism, which was guided by nihilism and a desire for collapse, E/ACC instead builds upon a form of technological messianism that sees the acceleration of techno-scientific development as the key to human evolution. Progress is conceived as a linear phenomenon, with technological advancement as its sole driving force. Consequently, any attempt at regulation, censorship, state control, or even taxation is perceived as a direct attack on progress itself.
Within effective accelerationist strategy, the concept of hyperstition plays a crucial role. This idea posits that it is possible to create narratives through popular culture with the potential to materialize as a reality in the future. Land, the key theorist of hyperstition, defines it as “the experimental technoscience of self-fulfilling prophecies.” Superstitions are born as fiction and remain as such, whereas hyperstitional narratives, by contrast, channel their potential to become reality through the autonomous or directed manipulation of cultural flows and desires. Through hyperstition, fiction ceases to be “unreal” and instead becomes a vital tool in shaping the future. Informational media and cultural producers, from the most dominant mainstream platforms to smaller voices amplified by algorithms, see their influence magnified through their role in shaping popular culture’s worldview.
Effective accelerationism adopts Land’s concept of hyperstition and integrates it with its techno-utopian vision of social progress. It advocates for the introduction of utopian narratives about technocapitalist development in order to eventually bring them into reality. Like Landian accelerationism, E/ACC also understands capitalism as an autonomous machine operating beyond human agency, one that, through its thermodynamic flows, serves as the engine of social progress toward the realization of the utopian ideals embedded in the collective unconscious and stimulated through hyperstitional processes. From a techno-optimist perspective, merely expressing confidence in the developmental potential of capital makes those potentials more likely to become real in the future. According to hyperstitional theory, widespread belief in the messianic properties of technological development is precisely what allows these properties to manifest in reality over time. Through hyperstition, futuristic concepts present in popular culture, ranging from space colonization to singularity and posthumanism, are framed as already-promised realities, leaving only the task of accelerating toward them.
However, the techno-utopian theses of effective accelerationism raise more doubts than answers. While the role of technological progress in improving human quality of life is undeniable, its unregulated expansion within the chaotic order of capital and its logic of maximization has also generated new problems and perpetuated existing ones, many of which it initially claimed to solve. Blind faith in techno-scientific advancement as the sole condition for human development is no longer a rationalist position of confidence in progress itself, but rather an abstract, almost religious faith in technology’s ability to resolve social issues and absolve humanity of all forms of suffering. This messianic vision of technological capacity is ultimately a messianic vision of capital itself, treating its market-driven technological progress as an unquestionable force of salvation.
These ideas function as a reaffirmation of neoliberalism and capitalist market logic, providing an ethical and political justification for existing power structures and their numerous negative consequences. The messianic faith in technological acceleration leads to the belief that all structural problems are merely temporary historical contingencies that will inevitably be resolved by the very structure that produced them — without requiring any alternative proposals. This is why effective accelerationism has found supporters among the American bourgeois elite within certain technological sectors. Figures such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman have expressed alignment with these ideas. For them, E/ACC not only offers a structured ideological framework but also provides a moral justification for accelerating existing trends in ways that serve their private interests. Trump’s 2024 election victory, for instance, can largely be attributed to the media and financial support of these elites, who sought increased government influence to accelerate capital’s expansion through deregulation and state funding, all under the guise of a techno-utopian vision.
After decades of unchecked technological progress, we have yet to see the liberatory potential that techno-utopianism promises. While productivity has increased, purchasing power and reductions in working hours have not evolved at a similar pace. The benefits brought by technological and industrial advancements remain largely concentrated in the hands of the ruling classes. What reason do we have to believe this dynamic will change simply by accelerating the process further?
Techno-utopianism and its prophets promise the most extravagant desires of popular culture to justify themselves while simultaneously ignoring or trivializing present-day struggles. They preach space colonization while intensifying ecological exploitation on Earth. They champion transhumanism and the posthuman world while disregarding modern technology’s role in eroding social interconnectedness. They promote more efficient production of goods without addressing the inequalities in their distribution.
Techno-utopianism employs preexisting cultural desires to justify its ideological framework, always relying on the supposed realization of past desires as proof of its validity. Through this mythology, it attributes historical improvements in material well-being — such as the reduction of working hours due to automation or the universalization of consumer goods access — to the natural course of technological progress, conveniently overlooking the role of organized external forces in securing these advancements.
Yet all of techno-utopianism’s grand promises either fail to materialize or prove incapable of fulfilling their expected potential. Ultimately, it presents a vision in which we are asked to maintain blind faith in the dynamics of the present, believing that they will inevitably lead to solutions for our current problems, using desire and its stimulation as mechanisms of control.
Left Accelerationism and the Reappropriation of Technology
The so-called postcapitalist accelerationism or left-wing accelerationism (l/acc) emerges from a reinterpretation of the theories developed by Nick Land and the CCRU in the 1990s. From a more vitalist stance, l/acc understands capitalism as the real productive foundation upon which there is the potential to develop new socioeconomic models, not as an abstract ‘negation’ of capitalism itself, but as its ultimate dialectical overcoming. It posits that the development of technocapitalism has reached a point where it has opened the possibility of harnessing its productive forces toward new modes of organization. Contrary to other strands, left-wing accelerationism sees capitalism as an obstacle, a limiting system in which the prevailing logics restrict the dormant potential for development embedded in the form of fixed capital, which must be reappropriated under socialist conditions to serve as the basis for a new productive model. Capitalism is not portrayed as an evil to be rejected, but rather as a historical phase that once enabled unprecedented levels of human development but now acts as a limiting barrier to progress. Overcoming this model involves building upon it, as its foundations and contradictions contain the genesis of the productive system that will succeed it.
Postcapitalist accelerationism offers a strong critique of the modern left for its intransigent horizontalism and abstract anticapitalism. Nick Srnicek, one of the movement’s leading theorists, coins the term “folk politics” to refer to these defeatist movements already entrenched within the political dynamics of capital. According to Srnicek: “There is a broad acceptance of certain judgments in these groups: small is beautiful, local is ethical, simple is better, permanence is oppressive, progress is over. These ideas are preferred over a counterhegemonic project: a politics capable of competing with capitalist power on larger scales.” The anticapitalist politics of these sectors are reduced to horizontalist direct action aimed at constructing ‘small spaces’ seemingly detached from capitalist social and economic relations, as they lack the material capacity to challenge capital beyond the local scale. As Fisher later argues, these movements end up internalizing the logics of the current productive model and, in practice, deny the possibility of overcoming it. Thus, this “folk politics” proves sterile in establishing political alternatives to capitalism, constrained by a lack of understanding of how capitalism functions, rendering it incapable of transcending the barriers of hegemonic social democracy. In contrast, left-wing accelerationism proposes constructing the future from a broader framework, advocating for progress, development, and the overcoming of the present through the reappropriation of technology and fixed capital, rejecting both the nostalgic idea of returning to an idyllic past and the demoralized vision of modern degrowthism.
Ray Brassier, along with various leftists, rejects these tenets. He coins the term ‘Prometheanism’ to refer to the beliefs within left-wing accelerationism that claim humanity can somehow take control of social and technological forces to reorient them toward specific ends different from the current ones. Even more radical voices call for a crusade against all modern forms of technology, attributing an inherently negative character to technological progress through the alienation of a supposed naturalized human essence. Their proposal involves dismantling all forms of technology predating an indeterminate period, considering any transformation or reorientation of technology as impossible or undesirable.
The fundamental characteristic of technology is its irreversibility. Once a new technology emerges, there is no effective process to reverse it, as the new machine, product, or concept becomes integrated into human social essence and forms part of the shared knowledge within the general intellect. Neo-Luddites and other fervent believers in a holy war against technology will see their ideas frustrated due to a lack of understanding of the enemy they claim to fight. This dynamic is key to understanding the continuous acceleration of technology: the integration of new inventions into the general intellect enables a process of invention-reinvention, which, in the current context, is driven and limited by the logics of capitalist production. Nonetheless, the way technology is expressed, evolves, and relates to humanity is contingent and, therefore, changeable, opening the possibility of exploring ways to transcend these limits through the reappropriation of current systems, shaping and building upon what is already established. Every productive model is constructed on the foundation of a previous failed model, from which it draws its forces and structures of interest to redirect them toward new social models. This same process is demonstrated historically in the transition from precapitalist productive models to the current one, which originates not only from internal contradictions but also by leveraging previously established elements to develop them in specific directions. The same process must be replicated in the current situation, with technology as an essential element that, while remaining a product of capitalism, harbors potentials that transcend the capitalist order and constitute the basis for its overcoming. Here lies the real value of left-wing accelerationist theories: an understanding of how technology, productive forces, and their transformative capacities function, along with a proposal for directing them toward emancipation.
One of the key concepts for this process of reappropriation is the automation of production, elaborated in depth by Srnicek. Automation represents the liberation of human labor in favor of machines, while maintaining the production of socially necessary goods and services. It is only through this process of automation that the overcoming of the current productive model can be consolidated, through the factual abolition of the modern form of work. Any alternative that fails to grasp this element is destined to fail in achieving real emancipation. Clearly, the capitalist form of private property acts as a repressive obstacle to enabling this process, necessitating a complete shift in the logic of property. In this sense, Srnicek’s proposal diverges from classical Marxism in favor of more reformist stances, where the role of the liberal state is vital for reconfiguring productive forces by transferring property from the private to the common sphere. There is no conquest of the means of production, but rather a process of reappropriating the state as an autonomous element to pave the way for a collective nationalization of technical infrastructure. The liberal state, then, is understood as a transformable platform for this reconfiguration process, which would ultimately affect the state itself.
Here, one of the major limitations of this theory becomes apparent: it treats the political mechanisms of the status quo as organisms with the same potential for reappropriation as the productive forces of the economic structure, ignoring their different nature. The political system and its structures, such as the state, are determined products of the productive model in which they exist and serve specific purposes within it. Attempting a ‘reappropriation’ of the liberal state does not hold the same possibilities as reappropriating fixed capital, as there is no potential or ‘margin of neutrality’ to exploit.
Technology, in this case, should not be conceived from a techno-utopian position, as is common in other strands. There can be no cult of technology’s potential as a messianic concept destined to arrive sooner or later. The postcapitalist situation must be seen as a goal to achieve, not a moment to await. The realization of this goal will necessarily require a process of total reappropriation of technology to unleash its emancipatory potential, which will not awaken simply by ‘accelerating’ its development indefinitely or by intervening from within the structures of the status quo. A structured political project is needed to overcome the conflicts generated by capital through the effective construction of new political structures capable of carrying out this process of reappropriation, not through the reform of current institutions that do not grasp this possibility. In other words: technology does not deliver socialism by itself, but socialism will not arrive without the reappropriation and acceleration of technology.
Certainly, we do not yet know what a modern techno-social body can do, and it will not be known until collective control is exerted over it. By breaking the limitations imposed by the capitalist model, new possibilities, currently unimaginable, are opened, revolutionizing all present structures and paving the way for an optimistic future for humanity. As Nietzsche said: truly, in this matter, we have not yet seen anything.