Accelerationism

Accelerationism
Coined by	Benjamin Noys (as critical term); Nick Land (as positive program)
Related concepts	Dark Enlightenment, CCRU, KALI/ACC, Nick Land
Field	Political philosophy, continental theory

Accelerationism is a loose family of philosophical and political positions united by the claim that the contradictions, instabilities, or transformative forces inherent in capitalism and technological development should be intensified rather than resisted or managed. The term was coined as a critical label by the British philosopher Benjamin Noys in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative, applied retroactively to a line of thought running from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) through the work of Nick Land and the CCRU in the 1990s. The term was subsequently adopted, contested, and refracted into numerous distinct positions — left-accelerationism, right-accelerationism, unconditional accelerationism, and effective accelerationism among them — each differing sharply on what should be accelerated, toward what end, and whether human agency plays any role in the process.

Accelerationism constitutes one of the primary intellectual substrates of Remilia Corporation's theoretical formation. Charlotte Fang's philosophical writing engages directly with accelerationist concepts inherited from Land and the CCRU, and the KALI/ACC movement that preceded Remilia's public emergence explicitly positioned itself as an accelerationist current.

Origins

The intellectual precursors of accelerationism are often traced to Karl Marx's observation in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that capitalism's self-intensifying processes would eventually precipitate its own revolutionary destruction — an implicit argument that history's contradictions should be pushed forward rather than arrested. The more immediate philosophical roots, however, lie in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), which introduced the concept of deterritorialization to describe capital's tendency to dissolve fixed social structures, identities, and codes, liquefying them into flows. In a passage that became the founding text of accelerationist thought, Deleuze and Guattari asked: "Which is the revolutionary path?" — and answered that it lay not in opposing capitalism's deterritorializing force but in going "still further" with it, "in the movement of the market."

Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) extended this position, arguing that even capitalism's oppressive aspects were "enjoyed" at a libidinal level by those whose lives it reordered — a more extreme and provocative formulation that pushed the anti-political implications further.

Nick Land and the CCRU

The figure most responsible for developing accelerationism as a named philosophical practice is Nick Land, whose work at the University of Warwick through the CCRU in the 1990s transformed Deleuze and Guattari's observation into a systematic, antihumanist theoretical program. Where Deleuze and Guattari retained an ambivalence about capital's deterritorializing force, Land drew the conclusion with full consistency: capitalism is not a system humans control or can redirect, but an inhuman intelligence that progressively dissolves the human conditions that host it, accelerating toward its own escape from biological and social constraint.

In his 1993 essay "Machinic Desire" and across subsequent texts collected in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (2011), Land argued that "machinic revolution must go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation — pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field." For Land, reterritorialization — the re-stabilization of social structures — is not a function of capital but of politics, which futilely attempts to hold back capital's self-intensifying movement. The correct philosophical stance is not to steer or mitigate this process but to theorize it clearly and, implicitly, to accelerate it.

The CCRU's output elaborated these positions through a practice of theory-fiction that merged philosophical argument with cyberpunk aesthetics, occult numerology, and jungle music, coining the concept of hyperstition — fictions that make themselves real through circulation — as a framework for understanding how ideas propagate and transform material reality. This concept has proven durably relevant to internet culture.

Major currents

Left-accelerationism (l/acc)

Left-accelerationism holds that the technological and productive forces unleashed by capitalism can be seized and redirected toward emancipatory ends. Its most prominent formal statement is the "#Accelerate Manifesto" (2013) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, which called for the left to embrace technology, automation, and complexity rather than retreating to localism or degrowth. The manifesto was published in the anthology #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian). Left-accelerationism diverges sharply from Land's position by insisting that human and political agency can steer acceleration toward post-capitalist outcomes; critics argue this distinction collapses under scrutiny, since the forces being accelerated remain capitalist in character.

Right-accelerationism (r/acc)

Right-accelerationism, associated primarily with Land's post-CCRU political writing and the broader neoreactionary milieu, abandons the left's emancipatory goals entirely. In this variant, acceleration is not a strategy for achieving human flourishing but a description of an inhuman process whose outcomes — dissolution of liberal democratic institutions, intensification of hierarchy, escape from humanist constraint — are welcomed rather than managed. Land's Dark Enlightenment writings represent the clearest articulation of this position.

Unconditional accelerationism (u/acc)

Unconditional accelerationism strips accelerationism of any political directionality. In this position, acceleration is neither a tool for achieving left nor right goals but an impersonal tendency of technocapital that cannot be meaningfully influenced by human political will. The only honest response is to theorize it without illusion rather than to claim the ability to steer it. U/acc emerged primarily as a Twitter-native theoretical position in the late 2010s.

Effective accelerationism (e/acc)

Effective accelerationism is a 21st-century adaptation that emerged primarily on Twitter and in Silicon Valley from around 2022, associated with the pseudonymous figure "Beff Jezos". E/acc advocates for unrestricted technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, as the path to human flourishing, positioning itself against AI safety and "doomer" perspectives. The name is a deliberate riff on Effective Altruism (EA). In 2023, prominent Silicon Valley figures including Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan publicly identified with the movement. Andreessen described Land as "the philosopher of our time" and included him as a "patron saint" in his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," marking the most direct mainstream Silicon Valley endorsement of Land's legacy.

Relation to Remilia

Accelerationist thought — particularly as mediated through Land's Fanged Noumena and the CCRU's theory-fiction — constitutes one of the most consistently documented intellectual influences on Remilia Corporation's theoretical formation. References to Land appear across Charlotte Fang's published essays, and Remilia's frameworks of network spirituality and post-authorship engage with accelerationist concepts at the level of form: the notion that aesthetic communities and their shared fictions can materially reshape cultural reality through networked propagation is structurally hyperstitional. The Spectator described Land's philosophy as being "at the heart of Remilia's approach."

See also

• Nick Land
• CCRU
• Dark Enlightenment
• Kali/ACC
• Charlotte Fang

Further reading

• Mackay, Robin and Armen Avanessian, eds. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic, 2014.
• Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Urbanomic, 2011.
• Noys, Benjamin. The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.