The Concept of Acceleration: The 21st Century Critique of Political Economy (New Centre Lectures)

Session I

Land introduces accelerationism’s conceptual foundations, tracing its intellectual genealogy from Marx through Nietzsche to Deleuze and Guattari, while examining the internal controversies that prevent a unified definition of the concept.

• Accelerationism fundamentally concerns the cybernetics of positive feedback systems, where processes become self-propelling through exponential growth rather than reaching equilibrium
  • Ray Kurzweil’s ’law of accelerating returns’ exemplifies this cybernetic structure
  • John Greer represents systematic anti-accelerationist opposition by prioritizing negative feedback and homeostatic systems
  • The moon pulverization example from Neal Stephenson’s ‘Seven Eves’ illustrates exponential collision processes
  • “What do these all have in common? They are exponential… any process where the more it happens, the more it happens”
• The term ‘accelerationism’ was coined retrospectively by Benjamin Noyes in 2010 as a critical designation for positions he rejected, making the entire tradition structured by lag time and retrospective naming
  • Steven Shaviro notes accelerationism was named by its opponents, not its proponents
  • The pattern parallels other political terms like ‘queer’ that were reclaimed by their targets
  • This retrospective structure creates inherent temporal complexity in understanding the concept
  • “The complement of acceleration is lag time, which is to say struggling to keep up”
• Marx’s 1848 speech ‘On the Question of Free Trade’ provides a crucial accelerationist formulation where supporting capitalism’s destructive effects becomes a revolutionary strategy
  • “The free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade”
  • Marx argues free trade is destructive while protectionism is conservative
  • This formulation anticipates later Deleuzian accelerationist strategies
  • The quote demonstrates Marx’s strategic embrace of capitalism’s disruptive forces
• Nietzsche’s fragment 898 from ‘The Will to Power’ provides another accelerationist foundation with his call to accelerate rather than check European leveling processes
  • “The leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked one should even accelerate”
  • This passage influenced Deleuze and Guattari’s accelerationist formulations
  • The ’leveling process’ connects to flattening, democracy, and distributed systems
  • Nietzsche’s diagnosis involves European nihilism as an accelerating historical force
• The crucial passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus’ poses the accelerationist question as a choice between withdrawal from or deeper engagement with global capitalism
  • “Which is the revolutionary path? To withdraw from the world market… Or might it be to go in the opposite direction?”
  • They describe withdrawal as ‘a curious revival of the fascist economic solution’
  • This passage has become ’even more provocative in perhaps unexpected ways recently’
  • The text establishes the fundamental strategic dilemma of accelerationist politics
• The emergence of left versus right accelerationism creates a fundamental split over whether capitalism itself is the motor of acceleration or an obstacle to it
  • Williams and Srnicek’s manifesto argues ‘capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration’
  • Left accelerationists claim ‘our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism as much as it has been unleashed’
  • This represents a ‘deliberate dismantling of the identification of the motor of acceleration with capitalism’
  • The split occurs retrospectively after the publication of the MAP (Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics)

Session II

Land examines the Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics through four analytical lenses - critique, neoliberalism, agency, and ’templexity’ - arguing that left accelerationism’s attempt to construct political agency requires problematic assumptions about temporal asymmetry.

• The relationship between capitalism and critique operates on three levels: Marx’s transcendental critique of labor commodification, capital’s own critical function through abstraction, and the critical structure of decentralized networks
  • Marx distinguishes labor power (transcendental) from labor (empirical object) in wage system critique
  • Capital itself functions as critique by destabilizing concrete instances through abstraction
  • Internet architecture embodies critical structure through elimination of privileged nodes
  • Platform capitalism displaces transcendental-empirical difference by separating system from instances
• The MAP’s conception of neoliberalism as post-1979 political economy assumes it will be obsolesced from the left, but recent political developments suggest this assumption has become problematic
  • MAP dates neoliberalism to Thatcher-Reagan-Deng revolution circa 1979
  • Text expects neoliberalism to be challenged by left political forces
  • Trump and Brexit phenomena represent unexpected challenges to neoliberalism from the right
  • “American ideological confusion” reaches climactic point with left-right vocabulary breakdown
• Left accelerationism requires a construction of agency that depends on treating the future as less ontologically settled than the past, which constitutes a metaphysics of time rather than transcendental temporality
  • MAP states “the future needs to be constructed” and faces “severe choice”
  • This assumes future plasticity versus past fixity contradicts transcendental philosophy
  • Transcendental temporality cannot privilege any temporal orientation over others
  • “Absolute transcendental temporality cannot be any more real in the past than the future”
• The MAP’s critique of capitalist speed versus acceleration fails philosophically because it objectifies speed rather than recognizing it as intensive quantity in Deleuzian terms
  • MAP attempts to separate capitalist ‘speed’ from true ‘acceleration’
  • For Deleuze and Guattari, speed is intensive quantity like temperature
  • Acceleration properly defined is second derivative of position - velocity subject to nonlinear self-complication
  • “What capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it re-territorializes with the other”
• Both left and right accelerationism exhibit ‘retro-progressivist’ temporal structures that simultaneously invoke futuristic and nostalgic elements
  • MAP contains “truly fantastic sentence”: “we need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism”
  • This formulation is “absolutely templex” - simultaneously revival, tradition, and post-capitalism
  • Both left and right accelerationism return to 1920s modernist moments
  • The structure resembles Art Deco’s combination of futurism and classical elements
• The Oedipus complex exemplifies ’templexity’ through its structure of prophetic self-fulfillment, complicating any straightforward notion of political agency
  • Oedipus acts guided by prophecy about killing father and marrying mother
  • The prophecy becomes incentive to action that fulfills itself
  • “The figure of the Sphinx is a figure of transcendental temporality”
  • This temporal complexity makes linear political construction impossible
• Hugh Price’s ‘Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point’ demonstrates that time asymmetry may be eliminable from rigorous physics, challenging assumptions about temporal directionality
  • Classical physics equations run equally well forwards or backwards
  • Price eliminates thermodynamic and quantum mechanical objections to time symmetry
  • Scientists historically invoked ‘free will’ to maintain temporal asymmetry
  • “The only way out of capitalism is the way through” assumes problematic temporal directionality

Session III

Land analyzes recent left accelerationist texts including the Xenofeminist Manifesto and Alt-Woke Manifesto, arguing that left accelerationism faces an impossible asymmetry with right accelerationism regarding political subjectivity and agency.

• Left accelerationist texts share a core commitment to dissociating technological progress from capitalism while maintaining possibilities for collective political agency
  • Tiziana Terranova argues for “breaking with the spell of capitalist realism”
  • Xenofeminist Manifesto claims “the real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized”
  • Alt-Woke Manifesto synthesizes “vertical technology” against capitalism’s limitations
  • All texts invoke “repurposing” technology from capitalist to post-capitalist purposes
• Right accelerationism cannot sustain a coherent political subject position because the bourgeoisie functions as capital’s servomechanism rather than autonomous agent
  • Marx’s bourgeoisie lacks coherent class consciousness due to structural impossibility
  • Bourgeois interests are wholly shaped by capital’s mathematical dynamics
  • Capital delegates only “provisional revisable malleable subordinate subject positions”
  • “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production”
• Capital’s intrinsic relation to competition and disintegration prevents any unified subject position from emerging on the right side of acceleration
  • “War is God” from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian captures capital’s competitive essence
  • Heraclitus fragment 53: “War is the father and king of all. Some he has made gods, and some men”
  • Competition allocates all subject positions including divine ones
  • Capital requires continuous elimination of economic units to develop itself
• The language of ‘repurposing’ technology implies teleological structures that contradict accelerationism’s commitment to immanent processes
  • Repurposing assumes technology can be extracted from one purposive framework and inserted into another
  • This requires transcendent source of alternative values not generated by the system itself
  • Steve Omohundro’s ‘basic AI drives’ shows how consistent machine intelligence must be resource-acquisitive
  • True accelerationist values emerge only from circuit diagrams of escalation processes
• Left accelerationism depends on collective self-mastery concepts that right accelerationism structurally cannot accommodate
  • Left positions assume “we” can direct technological and social processes
  • Right acceleration involves alignment with agency that “coincides with both sides” of conflicts
  • “Nothing can call itself alienated” while maintaining coherent political subject position
  • True alienation relates to agency beyond possible identification or control
• The difference between left and right accelerationism represents fundamentally different philosophical apprehensions of teleology rather than symmetrical political positions
  • Left accelerationism imagines “war to end war” - consummate historical unity
  • Right accelerationism sees competition as permanently irreducible
  • “War is God” cannot be superseded or identified exclusively with antagonist
  • The asymmetry goes deeper than political disagreement to ontological commitments
• Contemporary Silicon Valley culture exemplifies the combination of hyper-competition, hyper-connection, and hyper-autism that characterizes advanced capitalism
  • Silicon Valley simultaneously embodies competitive dynamics and cooperative culture
  • “Parallel autisms” rather than classical competitive battlegrounds
  • MM vector (money to money) creates new forms of connection without traditional mediation
  • Autism and connectivity paradoxically coexist in technological development

Session IV

Explores the relationship between capitalism, technology, and teleology through Böhm-Bawerk’s concept of ‘roundabout production’ and examines how technological development involves temporal complexity and the inversion of means and ends.

• Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of ‘roundabout production’ describes how capitalism systematically favors indirect technological methods over direct approaches because they ultimately prove more efficient and productive
  • Direct production is ‘hand-to-mouth’ immediate satisfaction of needs
  • Roundabout production involves creating tools and machines first, then using them for production
  • The time invested in creating productive capacity pays off through increased efficiency
  • This creates an intrinsic connection between capitalism and technological complexity
• John Gilmore’s principle that ’the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’ exemplifies the same logic as roundabout production, where indirect paths prove faster than direct ones
  • Internet protocols automatically find alternative routes when blocked
  • This demonstrates technological systems’ capacity for self-organization
  • The fastest route is often not the most direct route
  • Both examples show how technological systems optimize through indirection
• Ted Chiang’s story ‘Story of Your Life’ illustrates how different understandings of time and causality lead to radically different approaches to decision-making and agency
  • Aliens understand physics through Fermat’s principle of least time rather than mechanical causation
  • This teleological physics leads to a non-linear experience of time
  • The story explores how understanding the future changes one’s relationship to free will
  • Suggests that technological acceleration may require new concepts of agency and temporality
• Capital represents a ’teleological perversion’ where means (productive capacity) become ends in themselves, leading to the ‘reign of the tool’ rather than human purposes
  • Traditional teleology subordinates means to human ends
  • Capital makes the expansion of productive capacity its own end
  • This connects to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘will to power’ as capability becoming its own goal
  • The result is a system that serves technological rather than human imperatives
• The tension between mechanical causality and teleological thinking reflects broader cultural contradictions in capitalism between scientific determinism and human freedom
  • Modern culture simultaneously embraces mechanistic science and human agency
  • This creates ‘mechanistic libertarianism’ as a contradictory syndrome
  • Bell’s theorem in quantum mechanics explicitly rejected reverse causality to preserve free will
  • Hugh Price argues that consistent physics requires abandoning free will concepts

Session V

Examines the ‘stagnationist’ critique of technological progress, particularly arguments by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel, and Robert Gordon that technological innovation has slowed significantly since the mid-20th century, and explores accelerationist responses to these claims.

• The 2008 financial crisis ushered in a ‘stagnationist moment’ where economists and technologists began questioning whether the era of rapid technological progress had ended
  • Tyler Cowen’s ‘The Great Stagnation’ (2011) argued that low-hanging technological fruit had been picked
  • Peter Thiel’s ‘The End of the Future’ claimed we had moved from technological to merely incremental progress
  • This represented a shift from optimistic to pessimistic views of technological development
• Thiel’s critique focuses on the collapse of actual physical speed and the dominance of information technology over material innovation, exemplified by the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003
  • Transportation speeds have actually decreased since the mid-20th century
  • Space exploration has stagnated compared to 1960s achievements
  • Information technology progress has not translated into broader technological advancement
  • Post-9/11 security measures represent technological regression rather than progress
• Thiel draws on René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to argue that competitive markets lead to horizontal conflict rather than vertical innovation, requiring monopolistic breakthrough moments
  • Mimetic desire creates escalating social violence through competitive imitation
  • Free markets encourage destructive competition rather than genuine innovation
  • Vertical progress (zero to one) requires escaping competitive fields entirely
  • This leads Thiel to prefer monopolies over competitive markets
• The stagnation thesis predicts that without major technological breakthroughs, political systems will become increasingly zero-sum and conflictual as growth disappears
  • Democratic politics depends on the assumption of continuing economic growth
  • Zero-sum competition leads to increasingly nasty political dynamics
  • People suspect winners are involved in rackets rather than value creation
  • This anticipates the political polarization that emerged after 2016
• Robert Gordon’s analysis suggests that economic growth from 1750-2000 was an exceptional historical episode that may not be repeatable, particularly in the United States
  • Three industrial revolutions: steam (1750-1830), electricity/internal combustion (1870-1900), computers/internet (1960-present)
  • The second industrial revolution was most transformative with multiple simultaneous innovations
  • Current computer revolution lacks the broad economic impact of previous waves
  • Productivity growth has dramatically slowed since the 1970s

Session VI

Continues examining stagnationist arguments through wave theory and thermodynamic metaphors, exploring whether modernity represents a temporary energy consumption episode or a fundamentally self-propelling process, and considers the philosophical implications for accelerationism.

• Wave theorists like Carlota Perez argue that apparent stagnation represents the mature phase of technological cycles, where diminishing returns from current technologies create space for new breakthrough innovations
  • Each technological epoch follows predictable phases from breakthrough to maturation
  • Stagnation periods are necessary for resource reallocation toward new technologies
  • The current period may represent transition between information technology and emerging fields
  • This provides a more optimistic interpretation of apparent technological slowdown
• Michel Serres’ thermodynamic reading of Marx suggests that capitalism represents a systematic exploitation of disequilibrium that may eventually exhaust itself as differences collapse toward entropy
  • Capitalism functions as a large-scale social thermodynamic machine
  • The system consumes structural differences that generate surplus value
  • Historical development tends toward equilibrium as profitable differences are eliminated
  • This provides a physical basis for understanding economic stagnation
• The fundamental accelerationist position must reject the stagnationist thesis by claiming that modernization contains intrinsic mechanisms for generating new disequilibria rather than converging on final equilibrium
  • Accelerationism requires belief in absolute rather than relative self-propulsion
  • Each technological epoch must contain seeds of its successor
  • Stagnation would reduce accelerationism to merely descriptive theory of particular periods
  • The stakes involve whether modernity has transcendental or merely empirical significance
• John Michael Greer represents the most pessimistic stagnationist position, arguing that industrialization was merely a temporary episode of fossil fuel consumption that will necessarily collapse
  • Technological progress is essentially disguised energy consumption rather than genuine innovation
  • Fossil fuel depletion will force civilization back to pre-industrial technology levels
  • Scientific and technological institutions will become economically unaffordable
  • This represents a complete rejection of technological optimism
• Nietzsche’s concept of acceleration involves a process of leveling that creates resources for disequilibrium shocks represented by the Übermensch, providing a philosophical model for how stagnation enables breakthrough
  • The leveling process of nihilism creates fungible human resources
  • The Übermensch represents a disequilibrium shock that emerges from this leveling
  • This parallels Austrian economic theory where crisis creates innovation opportunities
  • Entrepreneurs exploit resource devaluation during economic downturns

Session VII

Explores emerging technologies that may constitute the next wave of acceleration, introduces the concept of ‘accelerationist trolley problems’ to examine how technological speed challenges traditional frameworks of ethical decision-making, and discusses the political implications of compressed decision-making time.

• Kevin Kelly argues that despite apparent saturation, the internet is ‘still at the beginning of its beginning,’ with the most transformative applications and infrastructures yet to emerge
  • Future developments will make current internet seem primitive by comparison
  • Technologies like holographic interfaces and AI integration will transform basic human-computer interaction
  • The equivalent of 1985 dot-com opportunities still exist in emerging technological spaces
  • Most internet-enabled business models and social forms remain undiscovered
• The next technological wave likely centers on intelligent agents as basic infrastructure components, creating systems where artificial intelligence mediates most technological interactions
  • Quantum computing, nanotechnology, computational genomics, and VR are converging
  • Intelligent agents will become as fundamental as internet protocols today
  • This represents cognification of technology rather than mere automation
  • Smart grids, drone logistics, and blockchains enable AI-mediated physical processes
• Accelerationist trolley problems illustrate how technological speed eliminates the temporal space required for traditional ethical deliberation, transforming moral dilemmas into time-constrained decisions
  • Classical trolley problems assume unlimited deliberation time
  • Technological acceleration compresses decision-making windows
  • Paul Virilio identified speed as fundamentally threatening human agency
  • Military examples show how technological pace outstrips human decision-making capacity
• Carl Schmitt’s analysis of dictatorship and emergency powers provides a framework for understanding how technological urgency threatens democratic deliberation and promotes executive concentration
  • Democracy requires procedural time for consultation and feedback
  • Emergency conditions demand rapid executive decision-making
  • Technological acceleration creates permanent emergency conditions
  • This leads to structural authoritarianism independent of ideological preferences
• High-frequency trading exemplifies how technological speed creates new forms of spatial and temporal inequality, where proximity to information sources becomes decisive for participation in economic processes
  • HFT firms locate servers next to stock exchanges for speed advantages
  • Light-speed communication creates insurmountable advantages over remote competitors
  • This represents the return of locality as a crucial factor in global capitalism
  • Relativistic time delays become economically significant at sufficient technological speeds
• The internet enables new forms of political subjectivity based on anonymous avatars and distributed identity, potentially undermining traditional concepts of rational individual agency required for liberal democracy
  • Avatar usage becomes natural rather than instrumental for digital natives
  • Anonymous forums like 4chan demonstrate ‘hive mind’ political effects
  • Multiple digital identities challenge the assumption of unified rational subjects
  • This contributed to unexpected political developments like Trump’s election

Session VIII

The final session attempts to synthesize accelerationism as a philosophy of spiral temporality that mediates between linear progressive and cyclical conceptions of time, ultimately arguing for an involutionary spiral leading to transcendental singularity.

• Accelerationism fundamentally represents a diagonal response between linear progressive temporality and cyclical temporality, embodied in the concept of spiral temporality that is both rhythmic and cybernetically positive
  • Chinese modernization exemplifies the forced surrender of traditional cyclic time conception to Western progressive temporality
  • The spiral preserves cyclical elements while maintaining directional movement toward singularity
  • “The spiral is a diagonal between a cyclical and progressive model of time”
  • Features include being diagonal, fractal, rhythmic, and cybernetically positive
• The involutionary spiral model emphasizes time implosion and compression rather than expansive growth, leading to the collapse of ethico-political decision-making space as acceleration approaches singularity
  • Virilio’s concept of acceleration as dehumanization through collapsed time horizons
  • “You have the watches, we have the time” - attributed to Afghan hill warrior challenging neoconservative expectations
  • Political response space is being “squeezed out of existence” by evolutionary spiral of economic acceleration
  • The epoch is characterized by shock and trauma due to compression of decision-making capacity
• Hyperbolic processes that reach actual singularity must be distinguished from exponential processes that never encounter transcendental limits, with Kurzweil representing the latter rather than true singularitarian thinking
  • Kurzweil’s exponential growth model doesn’t imply singularity because exponential curves never reach vertical
  • “Singularity is just the horizon beyond which one cannot see” - Vernor Vinge’s definition as wall across future
  • Hyperbolic trends involve time compression and necessarily reach singularity limits
  • Zeno’s paradox exemplifies hyperbolic approach to unreachable limit
• Transcendental temporality and asymmetric time are fundamentally inseparable from the historical processes of modernity, critique, capitalism, and Protestantism, all of which share identical philosophical and historical structures
  • Hugh Price represents the scientific drive to eliminate time through complete reversible equations
  • Transcendental philosophy is “nothing but the question of the original production of time”
  • “All of these things, because of the fact that Protestantism, capitalism, transcendental philosophy or critique are all the same thing”
  • Production of time cannot be scientifically thought within Laplacian deterministic universe
• The blockchain represents a technological instantiation of asymmetric temporality through cryptographic trapdoor functions, where asymmetric cryptography embodies the fundamental structure of temporality itself
  • Asymmetric cryptography uses trapdoor functions where “you can get in more easily than you can get out”
  • The synthetic/analytic distinction rests in cryptography: “the synthetic is that which takes work and the analytic is that which at least comparatively doesn’t take work”
  • Multiplying large primes is vastly simpler than factorizing their product
  • “The whole usage of a trapdoor function… the whole of contemporary cryptography that is what temporality is about”
• Causality and temporality are fundamentally intertwined in both relativistic physics and transcendental philosophy, with causal consistency requiring the ability to distinguish causally related from causally unrelated events
  • Light cone structure in Minkowski spacetime reintroduces asymmetry into geometrized time
  • “Non-totally vicious” manifolds require some point that is not the cause of itself
  • Space-like intervals represent causal dissociation while time-like intervals allow causal relations
  • Laplace’s demon would require universe-scale computational capacity, effectively making the universe self-perceiving
• The transcendental represents an absolute horizon that cannot be transcended through speculative positioning, making any attempt to think beyond the transcendental wall a form of metaphysical hubris that remains within the simulation space
  • “Any speculative construction of what’s on the other side of a wall… is something that is arising on your vector into the wall”
  • Artificial intelligence scenarios still involve projecting ourselves outside our own transcendental horizon
  • The notion of multiple transcendentals (Alpha Centauri AI, etc.) involves “grotesque, hubristic pretension”
  • “The very meaning of a transcendental horizon is that it does not tolerate transcendent exception”
• Decision-making as traditionally conceived in practical philosophy becomes problematic under accelerationist time compression, revealing tensions in Kant’s attempt to maintain both timeless rationality and temporal decision processes
  • Kant “clearly elides this question about decision making as a process that requires time”
  • True noumenal rationality must be “spontaneous and simultaneous” rather than involving “time structured procedures”
  • Trolley problems expose how institutional decision-making requires time that may be eliminated by acceleration
  • “Saint-like simultaneity” would replace processes of rationalization in pure practical reason