Accelerationism's Factions

A multifaceted cluster of beliefs.

It’s vanishingly rare for me to simply pick up someone else’s work and republish it, but this by Guido Palazzo deserves to be seen and credited.

Three terms are necessary to understand what is happening right now in the USA.

1. TECHNO-UTOPISM: Silicon Valley leaders like Musk, Thiel, or Andreessen envision a future where technology, markets, and strict hierarchy lead to an optimized, efficient, and stratified society. It will be superior to today’s world with its inefficient democratic decision-making processes. The world which they want to create embraces aggressive competition, inequality, and elite (male) control as desirable outcomes of technological advancement. They find so much support among old-school libertarians, because this is a continuation of the good old ideas of Friedrich Hayek who was already skeptical about democracy. Freedom is market freedom and technology the better driver of efficiency (the key value of Hayek’s thinking).

2. ACCELERATIONISM: This brave new techno-utopian world has to come fast. It would never emerge from reforms within the democratic system itself. Regulation and deliberation are the enemies of speed and disruption. People like Musk want unleashed AI and government-independent crypto money now not in 100 years. Therefore, one has to push the entire society as it is now with its institutions over the cliff. Only a total collapse of the Western society can lead to techno-utopian freedom. Chaos is not a side-effect of making the US bureaucracy more efficient. Chaos is the aim and regulation through democratic authorities has to disappear completely. What needs to be done is to dismantle democracy, accelerate societal division, amplify any existing crisis (e.g. the climate crisis) while strengthening elite power. Accelerationism has collapse as its goal. On the debris of the old world, the new elites will create a new techno-utopian society. So first, there will be a kind of Mad Max world or an empire with an American Caesar, then later Homo Deus, the fusion of man and machine.

How is this compatible with all those Christians voting for Trump? Well, they believe in something that on the surface is very much aligned with the beliefs of Silicon Valley. We need to get familiar with a third term:

3. RAPTURE: Premillennial dispensationalism (sorry for so many technical terms) describes the belief that we are in the endgames of the secular world because the return of Christ is imminent, meaning it could happen at any moment. Then, Christ will reign on earth for 1000 years. True believers in Christ will be taken up (raptured) into heaven, while non-believers will be left behind to endure tribulation, chaos, and divine judgment on Earth. Evangelical Christians are convinced that what we see today, wars, natural disasters, political instability are proof of Christ’s return because the biblical prophecies have predicted fire and floods and chaos as signals of the Rapture’s beginning. Whether Trump is a good Christian or not doesn’t matter. He is God’s instrument.

Techno-utopian disrupture and evangelical rapture are brothers in arms.

The only thing I might add here is that Accelerationism is a mode of societal change. There’s no specific end state, but the true believers believe that whatever is coming needs to happen NOW. The end of days types and tech bros are major components of those who advocate for it, they are the ones that are politically active, but there are other facets to this.

Some people scan the skies, looking for the space aliens coming to take us away, but they often believe there are changes that must happen first, and that they must be triggered in some way. The NESARA/GESARA faithful buy Iraqi dinar and Zimbabwe dollars, believing that at some point in the near future there will be a global reset that makes all currency equal, so they’ll all be trillionaires. The hopeful Qanons expect doctors and hospitals to give way to “medbeds” - akin to the “audodoc” machines seen in Alien and other science fiction franchises.

Those are all utopian in their beliefs. There are dystopian Accelerationists, too. These are mostly environmentalists, the core tenet is that capitalism is an end stage cancer for our biosphere, and they envision society coming to agree with them. The mechanism of winding down to Earth’s solar max varies, but some of them believe they need to act to make this happen. They tend to be saboteurs (attack things) rather than terrorists (attack people).

Conclusion:

Things are intentionally messy right now - Space Karen pushes one sort of precipitous action, the religious right quite another, and the Accelerationist in chief, Mother Nature herself, has perhaps unleashed The Demon Nonlinearity.

A bunch of people died in Ukraine. A bunch more died in Syria. Texas had the first measles death in ten years and an Infowars Reporter was gunned down outside his home in Austin late Sunday night. We have no idea if his murder was ideologically motivated or if it was just a robbery, but Alex Jones is already spouting venom at George Soros.

I largely disconnected from U.S. news the second week of November. I cancelled my Washington Post subscription and have barely glanced at my 400+ Inoreader feeds. If it doesn’t rise to the point where Al Jazeera, BBC, CNA (Singapore), Deutsch Welle, France24, or PBS are covering it, I don’t need to know. The “anywhere but the U.S.” focus is keeping me sane. I have friends who can’t look away and it shows in their faces.

Conserving one’s resources, and an economy of motion when moves must be made, these are the rules for 2025.