omniharmonicAccelerationism
Accelerationism is a family of political and philosophical theories that argue the best response to capitalism’s self-destructive trajectory is not to resist or reform it but to push it further and faster toward its internal contradictions. The concept originates in a provocative suggestion by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that the “true revolutionary path” might be to “go still further in the movement of the market,” and was radicalized by philosopher Nick Land into a comprehensive metaphysics in which capital is not a human tool but an alien intelligence using humanity as temporary scaffolding for its own emergence. In Land’s formulation, capitalism’s deterritorializing force — stripping things from their embedded contexts and converting them into abstract units of exchange — is an impersonal cosmic process indifferent to human flourishing.
Accelerationism matters in the current landscape because its logic has been adopted, explicitly or implicitly, by the Silicon Valley elite now reshaping political institutions. Marc Andreessen cited Land in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” and the structural parallel between Land’s vision of capital as an alien intelligence and Elon Musk’s description of humanity as a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” reveals a shared eschatology. The accelerationist wager — that breakdown should be hastened rather than delayed — takes on existential stakes when the people making decisions about artificial intelligence, surveillance technology, and government structure operate from this framework. As diagnosed through the Indigenous concept of wetiko, accelerationism in its techno-capitalist form functions as the cannibal spirit given philosophical voice, making possession look like liberation.
The concept is critically engaged through the framework of regenerative accelerationism (re/acc), which accepts that acceleration cannot be stopped but redirects it toward life-affirming feedback loops rather than extraction. Where degrowth challenges accelerationism by questioning whether technological acceleration alone can solve ecological overshoot, re/acc attempts a synthesis: accelerating the transition to post-capitalist, regenerative civilization by harnessing capitalism’s self-amplifying dynamics and redirecting them toward community, ecology, and open protocols. This reorientation draws on metamodernism’s capacity to hold sincere commitment alongside critical awareness — working earnestly toward alternatives while understanding the structural forces at play.