By Marcus Gilroy-Ware
That future in which we are safe from the dangers we face and our quality of life meaningfully improved has never in my own lifetime felt more distant. Prior movements for change that actually achieved something in historical terms – independence or civil rights movements – continue to haunt the political imaginary with precedents for the victories that are still to be won, tempting us with a cruel optimism about what we “should” be able to manage. Speaking to journalists or podcasters about my work, I have regularly been asked, “What are we going to do about all this?” On one occasion, I have even been required by editors to include “solutions” in my writing on these topics. Within the parameters of a certain kind of simplifying journalistic or editorial bluster, this may seem like a reasonable enough question to ask, but there are overtones to how this question is posed, as if the person asking it knows deep down that there is no convincing answer I could give, that feel specific to this conjuncture.
This conjuncture is the combination of, on the one hand, a sense that “something” needs urgently to be done, and on the other, a profound bankruptcy of imagination and aversion to disruption when it comes to what that something should be. It is not only exhausting but also characterises the bleak paralysis and profound crisis of political agency of our moment. Faced with horrific violence in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and many other places, widespread mental health crises and cognitive burnout, increasingly difficult economic conditions, and most of all a terrifying climate emergency, it is no wonder that the answers are elusive. The political imagination is as historically contingent and vulnerable to the conditions of its moment as any other part of the conjuncture, and it is the theories and “paths of escape” imagined under these conditions of fatigue and collective impotence that I wish to explore here. The “disappearance of the future” has been remarked upon for decades, but seldom in these analyses has that disappearance been total and permanent. In the Jameson-Zizek-Fisher analysis of this cultural dynamic, any totality has been cast as an ideological illusion in itself, if an overwhelming one – an artificial appearance of the foreclosure of alternatives or escape as part of how the very system works. But the analysis generally implies a small ray of light, however remote or unlikely, that implies a possible way out of the mire of post-postmodern, “capitalist realism”. In addition to its accessibility and cultural literacy, what made the book by that name a classic of its time was surely that, however gloomy its view of the cultural landscape at the moment when it was written, it still encouraged a belief in the possibility of an “emancipatory politics”. When Fisher died in 2017, it was a much-quoted passage describing the strategic imperatives to which that emancipatory shift must be subject that his students spontaneously wrote on an outside wall at Goldsmiths in his memory:
“emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” (2009)
At the moment at which Fisher wrote these words, the difficulties were already apparent. In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, a range of movements and discourses had emerged that in seeking to challenge the prevailing order, had quickly stalled, become exhausted, or been ruthlessly crushed. In the UK, the student protests of 2010 were met with the introduction of “kettling,” which signalled the limits of dissent within the existing order. In the United States, the 2011 Occupy movement, despite its global visibility, struggled to translate its procedural commitment to horizontality and inclusion into a sustained political vision.
Almost a decade since Fisher passed away, however, the vision of that emancipatory future remains elusive. The work of defending the incomplete emancipatory battles of the past is already so exhausting that engagement with the battles of the future is frequently overlooked or underestimated. The consequence has sometimes verged towards a disproportionate focus on strict categories of personal identity and self-definition, sometimes more detached from broader structural critique, or applying it in an undialectical and simplistic fashion. Upon Fisher’s death, some of those people most invested in this type of politics who he had categorised as “sour-faced identitarians” gloated over his death (Nagle, 2017). While we must continue to express our rage about what is happening, and our petitions, leaflets, demonstrations and sit-ins must not cease, the ways we imagine and communicate and build the future are important alongside our cultural and political memory if we are to survive at all.
There is a lot to be said about the “chronopolitics” of the reactionary right in the current conjuncture: the strange mix of optimism (e.g. Trump’s reappropriation of “Make America Great Again” in 2016 and 2024; Turkey’s AKP, whose 2023 slogans included “We will walk into the future together;” and Argentina’s Milei, whose 2023 presidential slogan was “The only solution”) with regression and reterritorialisation of a lost, bygone era. Key to the conjuncturally specific relationship between emancipatory politics and the reactionary right in our current moment, however, is the “hegemonising” of emancipatory discourses as a kind of political fuel for these movements has become clearer. It is of course an essential premise of the historical materialist worldview that all culture exists only in a specific historical context. Emancipatory politics is no exception, and it is precisely this fact for which many contemporary progressive causes have failed to account. Today, ideas that were once revolutionary or the subject of sustained emancipatory movements, such as universal suffrage, remain in a bizarre, contradictory, hollowed-out zombie state of non-existent existence. It is not just that because, as Fisher observed, paraphrasing Zizek, “anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism” in the sense of arguments specifically about “capitalism” as a system.
Rather, so hegemonic has this discourse become that in a much broader sense, the racism of anti-immigration protests must be denied for mainstream acceptance (e.g. Pearson, 2025), green-sounding discourses are a common, if not essential part of contemporary climate destruction (de Freitas Netto et al. 2020), feminist-sounding discourses feature regularly in some of the newer misogynies (Banet-Wiser 2018), and so on. Whether it is Pride marches, Black History Month, or International Women’s Day, it is organised in ultimate collaboration with the same oppressive structures of capital that have long oppressed minorities. Exemplifying what Olúfémi Táíwò has termed “elite capture” (2022), elements of what was once genuinely emancipatory thought—environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism—have increasingly assimilated into the language of corporate and institutional power, in ways that further neutralised their already-waning political edge. In other words, what Wendy Brown has called the “historically outmoded character of liberal democracy” (2025) has, through its development of a kind of rainbow-green-feminist branded corporate camouflage of progress, both neutralised the politics of emancipation and emboldened its enemies by assuming its messages and promises in increasingly complex guises since the 1990s, all while violating them mercilessly at the structural level.
Discursively prominent and widely accepted by a large section of most populations those promises may be, they are also hollowed by decades of neoliberal governance, and too materially incongruent with most people’s lived realities to have much of an emancipatory impact. Meanwhile, they are under renewed attack by a loud minority of the reactionary population, who have already turned explicitly against the same values, mistaking the inner corruption and injustice of capital that dominates their material conditions for the gleaming egalitarian, eco-friendly costume it wears, conflated in the now-pejorative label “woke”. In other words, continued, straightforward advocacy for these once-revolutionary emancipatory causes, however important, is essentially a trap. Double down, and you are ensnared into rehearsing an out-of-date argument to which most are already thoroughly, if sub-consciously, desensitised, becoming complicit in the co-optation and anachronistic progressive self-parody so derided by the angry ones and the apathetic ones alike. Say nothing, and your silence is taken as consent by all parties. It is in precisely this type of predicament – zero political power, the victories of the past exhausted yet under renewed threat, and the future somehow undiscernible – that impotence starts to turn to desperation, and humiliation into rage.
In the shadowy background of Western neoliberalism, particularly since its “end of history” moment, the emergence of strange ideas and political impulses anticipating rupture, sabotage, or ‘switching sides’, has accumulated a parallel history, with their own contributions to the true meaning of “reactionary.” Amongst this detritus, people started to turn for answers toward a series of related but distinctive theories known as “accelerationism.” The relationship between acceleration itself and modernity has been the subject of valuable critical social theories in itself (Rosa 2013; Wajcman, 2015). However, with (or without) a variety of guiding principles, “accelerationism” is essentially the political name for the deliberate intensification of deterritorialisating forces of capital when forms of resistance do not appear to work.
There is a standard genealogy of accelerationism that usually starts with Nietzsche’s call to “accelerate the process”, and develops via Deleuze and Guattari (1972) and Lyotard (1974) a full account of which is beyond the scope of this article and has been helpfully summarised elsewhere from a variety of perspectives (Noys, 2014; MacKay and Avenassian, 2014). Increasingly, “accelerationism” came to be associated with the prolific reactionary thinker Nick Land, whose own version of accelerationism drifted toward a technologised anti-humanism, in which humans (or “meat puppets”) should essentially die out and be replaced, through intensified market logics that Land saw as an artificial intelligence. In the 1990s, Land had formed the “Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit” (CCRU), which can be summarised as a cult-like “real-life 4chan meets cultural analysis” group of philosophy staff and students collectively exploring this same impulse at the University of Warwick, where he worked before resigning his post and eventually moving to China. While many of these individuals, of whom Mark Fisher was one, did not necessarily share Land’s increasingly reactionary views, the CCRU were tightly bonded as a group and enjoyed the militaristic overtones of ‘unit’ (Beckett, 2017). Sadly, very few to this day, even those still nominally on the left, have condemned outright the darkly anti-humanist impacts of Land’s work, except perhaps in narrow, scholarly quibbles–even after he came to be the alt-right’s favourite philosopher, years later (Blincoe, 2017).
One proposal in response to the strangle-hold that neoliberalism appeared to have on the world, and the perceived inefficacy of the political movements fighting it, has been that of “Left Accelerationism.” Inspired in part by dialogue between Mark Fisher and its authors Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (Beckett, 2017), the idea first arose in a document titled “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (MAP), which claimed to revive and apply the broader project of accelerationism to this stagnation, for and from within the left (Srnicek and Williams, 2013). After much critique, enthusiasm and discussion, its authors followed up two years later with a book – Inventing the Future (2015) – that elaborated on its ideas but quietly ditched the explicit embrace of accelerationism as a philosophy, while elaborating many of the suggestions and critiques of MAP.
In this issue, we collectively appraise the applicability of the project of “left accelerationism” for the seeming slow-motion apocalypse of our current conjuncture. However, I want to emphasise that both publications were authored more than a decade ago, prior to the emboldening of far-right reactionary politics to which I have referred, at a time when a blander liberal democracy still held a tight grip and a vestigial sense of legitimacy for many. Without this concerning wave of mainstream regressive politics, in parts of which Nick Land would come to be such an important figure (Burrows, 2019), it is understandable why elements of the left thought it was worth experimenting: if the stagnant present appears to live in the past, and that past has been ruthlessly co-opted by your political enemies in the present, then let’s bring about the future by any means necessary. In hindsight, this impulse in itself has a petulance that feels somewhat reckless, if not reactionary in its own small way. It would be profoundly unfair to engage both critically and retrospectively at this conjuncture, as I have been asked to do, with the project of “left accelerationism” as though it were proposed more recently. However, without the option of stepping back to 2013 for a chat (and left-accelerationists have not yet been able to invent time travel), it is impossible to redeem what might have been right about this contribution unless we also critique in some measure the aspects of this train of thought that were profoundly misguided. Before either of these analyses however, I want first to illustrate the starting objections of MAP to its own conjuncture, in its own words:
“The most important division in today's Left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity; globality; and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning.” (Srnicek and Williams, 2013)
There were certain ingredients that gave the Left-Accelerationist project significant merit. Even if some might contest the wording above, one area where at least the kernel of the project was valid was in highlighting the over-engagement in emancipatory movements with strategies drawn from the victories and traumas of the past. For all the inspiration historic instances of overcoming oppression might provide, pastiching the strategies and epistemologies of past conflicts and victories, especially when neoliberalism has already appropriated them, is not always the correct approach. The call was not one for amnesia, but for a recognition of the contingency of specific forms of action: “No given mode of political action is historically inviolable,” they wrote. Just because something has worked before, there is no reason that it should be considered an easy means of success in future. “Indeed, over time, there is an increasing need to discard familiar tactics as the forces and entities they are marshalled against learn to defend and counter-attack them effectively. It is in part the contemporary Left's inability to do so which lies close to the heart of the contemporary malaise.” (Srnicek and Williams, 2013)
Over-engagement with past simulacra is strewn across the political landscape. As I have discussed above, many of the very areas of politics that we now find ourselves fighting anew – nationalism, misogyny and xenophobia – also entail a mythologisation of simpler, earlier modernities. For emancipatory movements, the effect of looking back at the past for inspiration, or indeed for political issues themselves, does seem to create a kind of exaggerated ethical self-critique that results in paralysis. Aspects of collective strategy such as a commitment to secrecy, or a consideration of entrepreneurship as a means of resolving the harsh irony that you sometimes need capital to fight capital, are in my experience quickly shut down as wholly unethical, simply because our political adversaries also use them.
Finally, perhaps one of the most valuable insights in Srnicek and Williams’s project was that the left could not afford to be outright technophobic or anti-science, just because technological projects are produced from capitalist markets. Indeed, an undeniable alienation of emancipatory politics from digital skills and scientific literature has arisen. While our electricity still runs and our phones still connect and charge, the fact that so few within left circles seem literate in technological foundations such as software engineering of microprocessor design has always concerned me for the forms of dependency it creates, if for no other reason. Likewise with science, despite the corrupt, apolitical histories of scientific research or even its enduring entanglements with stock markets and hedge fund portfolios of our moment, and the need for healthy caution, we cannot afford the out-of-date heuristic of suspicion, now very common on digital media platforms like Instagram, that conflates neuroscience, biochemistry, epidemiology or any other areas of scientific enquiry with these historical and discursive misuses and thus verges away from historical materialism into illiteracy, danger and disease, as the pandemic has since shown. Not only could these areas of knowledge be invaluable in guiding some of the pragmatics of emancipatory politics, like technological literacy, but they can also provide invaluable should the material conditions of existence that support digital technology rapidly degrade in some kind of crisis.
The recognition that alienation from technology is unhelpful to would be reparative or anti-capitalist movements is by no means unique to the “Left-Accelerationist” project I address here, nor does such a view constitute any type of accelerationism at all. On the contrary, as Wajcman has observed, “An implicit antipathy to science and technology forecloses appreciation of the scope that digital technologies might afford for control over time, enabling people to have not only more time but time of their choice.” The (unevenly and variously kept) promise of all technology at the individual level is invariably that it extends its user’s agency. While this narrative has long been regarded as misleading (van Dijck, 2009), it is still understandable why a general crisis of agency should point to exploration of available technologies as one starting point. The “Xenofeminist manifesto” is another, simple example of political thinking that has called for a re-approximation technology:
“the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. Today, it is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that both supports and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world”. (Cubonicks, 2018)
It further “[urges] feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends.” Of course, in a feminist context, these words have a somewhat different resonance given the early alienation of disproportionate numbers of women and girls from technology, and STEM subjects generally (Hardey, 2019).
So far, I have explored some of what “Left Accelerationism” got right. However, the project also entailed grave shortcomings that not only made it flawed then, but which make it profoundly unhelpful to our present circumstances too. The first very serious issue is that the scale of the task, and the nature of the enemy, has been drastically underestimated. The stated goal in MAP is to “unleash latent productive forces”, and neoliberalism, they wrote “does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends.” There is of course no strict agreement about how exactly “neoliberalism” should be defined (Brown, 2015), but many reading these words will be briefly permeated by a shudder. It sounds like the deranged reasoning of the once-left-wing academic or public official, perhaps even a sometime firebrand of the picket line, who has become ensnared in the delusional conceptual gymnastics of senior management.
Perhaps a victim of its own historical vantage, left-accelerationism seems to have mistaken a momentary lull of “boring dystopia” where (neo)liberal capitalism came to rest after the 2008 financial crash, for a permanent stagnation. For all the “boring dystopia” of the 2010-2015 conjuncture however, both globally and in the UK, the idea that neoliberal capital, with its healthcare privatisation, relentless arms-trading, publicly-listed social media corporations, and militarised police protection had not retained its menacing character of surveillance, repression, displacement and deterritorialisation seems hard to fathom. In the follow-up book to MAP, Srnicek and Williams wrote that “the dominant tactics – protesting, marching, occupying, and various other forms of direct action – have become part of a well-established narrative, with the people and the police each playing their assigned roles” (2015). In other words, they look at the standoff between the technologically advanced, violent, and unaccountable regimes of late-neoliberal governance and “the people,” and imply that the latter are at least partially at fault for their collective inability to fight back, because their “folk politics” are, in the language of the later book, permeated with failure (2015). Even if the tactical frustrations that they hold regarding the myopia, confusion and sentimentality of emancipatory politics are not without some justification, as I have accepted, it does not follow that the conditions of disempowerment and alienation are a matter of mere strategic or technological ineptitude, nor that the foe is weak and inclined towards failure. In the student protests of 2010, there were admittedly strategic shortcomings, but the experiences of the police “kettle” were a sobering indication at that time of how quickly that neoliberal order was able to escalate when challenged. We can never afford to underestimate our opponents.
Drawing on Marx’s acceptance of technology, Srnicek and Williams also proposed that the technologies and other affordances furnished by capitalism could be the fastest path to post-capitalism if used correctly. They wrote of the need to “accelerate the process of technological evolution,” suggesting that “the true transformative potentials of much of our technological and scientific research remain unexploited, filled with presently redundant features (or preadaptations) that, following a shift beyond the short-sighted capitalist socius, can become decisive.” Srnicek later said in an interview that accelerationism, in MAP:
“meant taking an interest in the latest technology, thinking about how exactly they can be used as technologies for liberation rather than tools of control, and thinking about the ways in which we can build a world of abundance and experimentation beyond the strictures of capitalist society.” (2017)
From the underestimation of neoliberal capitalism which I have outlined above, it should already be clear that some of the project’s big technological claims, like the insistence on an emancipatory labour automation, are rendered fantastical enough that they require no real reply. Even a cursory glance at the history of labour and automation begs the question “whose automation?”. However, the relation between these ideas and the digital platforms that permeate our world even more comprehensively than they did then remains a more relevant and useful area for engagement with this theory. The first problem here is that they were already ten years too late even, when these arguments were made. In the early 2000s, as “open source” became broadly acceptable through projects such as Firefox, Wikipedia, WordPress, PHP/MySQL and GNU/Linux, an opportunity for the adoption and development of alternative sociotechnical forms arguably presented itself. The failure of left-wing political groups to explore the possibilities that may have existed then meant that the chance to build infrastructures that might have shaped our present moment was, to a substantial degree, squandered - quite possibly because of exactly the technoskepticism that MAP subsequently identified. In any event, the door was already shut by the time of MAP’s intervention, and the consumer internet, already privatised, has since been further enclosed, commodified, and technologically mystified by digital platforms and “App Stores”. The Free and Open source software movement essentially split between libertarians aligned with the Free Software Foundation and capitalist speculators fleetingly intrigued by “open source”, before pivoting to attention economics and platform capitalism once they realised there were no other ways to make money from freely distributed code.
We are therefore in a defensive position with regard to technology, in which a cautious critique of technology must play a key advisory role. Techno-utopianism will mislead everyone (as it has done recently with the quest for “Artificial General Intelligence” via large language models), which leads to a second issue with left accelerationism’s technological thesis: the relative lack of criticism in some of the more prominent calls to technologise. As Haraway (quoted in Wajcman 2015) puts it, “The issue is no longer whether to accept or oppose technoscience, but rather how to engage strategically with technoscience while, at the same time, being its chief critic.” To its credit, MAP did try to caveat technological utopianism:
“Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.” (2013)
In other words, technology is not the solution by itself, but without it, many more solutions are out of reach. This is only a valid distinction when one is specific about which technologies and under what conditions. The caveat also seems to be contradicted later the words, “The utopian potentials inherent in twenty-first-century technology cannot remain bound to a parochial capitalist imagination” (emphasis added). As with their contention that technologies can be “repurposed towards common ends,” this claim thoroughly understates how deeply and indelibly capitalist priorities of extraction and repressive desublimation are sedimented, not only in technological forms, but in the reality that, ideologically speaking, form is also content–as we have known for some time (McLuhan, 1964).
A prime example of this underestimation of the challenge, and neat cauterisation of technology from the market forces that created it, is in the suggestion that digital platforms specifically might be made useful to anti-capitalist or post-capitalist projects. Platforms are still often seen in a post-Habermasian light, as fractured, uneven public spheres or counterpublics, and anxiety about “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles”, though oversimplified, continues to rehearse the view that platforms function reliably and primarily as tools of ideological amplification, even if this has never been well-supported (Zuiderveen Borgesius et al., 2016; Bruns, 2019). Occasionally, conspicuous cases seem to confirm this “loudspeaker in the public sphere” role, such as the footballer Marcus Rashford’s 2020 use of social media around free school meals in the UK, which prompted a government U-turn (Siddique, 2020). Episodes like this just are frequent enough to sustain the illusions that widespread discursive manipulation is a viable option for counter-hegemonic movements, or even that ideological disagreement and negotiation are the primary usage and social impact of digital media platforms.
Working on precisely these assumptions, MAP urged that “the Left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of global society. They establish the basic parameters of what is possible, both behaviourally and ideologically” (2013). In their follow-up book, the claim verged further in this direction, asserting in the opening pages that “the internet and social media are giving a voice to billions who previously went unheard,” (2015). Years earlier however, it was already well known that, for example, “Usage of social media is highly uneven amongst participants and much content is dominated by a small percentage of people” (Fenton, 2012). Similarly, Tiziana Terranova has written that “these new technologies of the social […] open the possibility of experimenting with many-to-many interaction and thus with the very processes of individuation,” and that they draw on widely socialised knowledges and soft skills, offering “affordances […] for political action that cannot be left to capitalist monopolies” (2014). Platforms are not neutral ground and MAP does not state that it is. However, their design for attention, reaction, and distraction makes them more like booby-trapped enemy terrain than open infrastructure with which to build revolution. While they can build awareness of aspects of the crises we face, attention economies repeatedly remind us that consciousness-raising does not in itself lead to action or structural change. As I have written elsewhere, “social media are often a far more important source of non-information and even disinformation than they are a bona-fide source of trusted information” (Gilroy-Ware 2017). The dominance of recommender systems, surveillance metrics, and ad-tech has only increased in intensity and breadth, permeating social media more thoroughly and intertwining with newer affordances such as generative AI. Meanwhile, the explicitly anti-democratic, pro-technology ideas of right-wing accelerationism that became known as the “dark enlightenment” were already published when MAP was written and have since found favour at the very hearth of digital platforms and Silicon Valley (Smith and Burrows, 2021), via the work of fascist keyboard-warrior and Peter Thiel investee Curtis Yarvin. Most recently, they became the inspiration for Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s “DOGE” endeavour after the 2024 Presidental election (Foroohar, 2025).
While we must be competent and fluent in these technologies as with others—including the now-familiar technologies of conflict and attention, the option of doing so primarily on our own terms is, for the time being, foreclosed. Instead, for emancipatory political projects on digital platforms, it is “Moscow Rules” – assume nothing, trust no-one, blend in and leave no traces behind. Any role for increased technological adoption and literacy in emancipatory politics will be defensive, asymmetrical, and tactically constrained: modest productivity gains from prudent, restrained use of AI, strong encryption and other counter-surveillance, scraping, automation, disruption and sabotage against the prevailing “psychopolitical” forms. It is perfectly fair that these thinkers, in their desire to build and to hope, might not have been able to foresee the flood of apolitical or information-avoidant Tiktok and Instagram micro-entertainment that would come later, or the growth these were intended to generate through the capture of human cognition and affects. But form was content then and the same is true now. Meanwhile, Srnicek, has since proven one of the most astute and reliable commentators on the political economy of digital platforms.
Having dealt with the practicalities and capitalist entanglements of technology, I come finally to the symbolic role this technology plays, and in particular the future (re)orientation that it is meant to signify, at the heart of “left accelerationism”. The question of whether, as Audre Lord phrased it, the “master’s tools” will ever dismantle the “master’s house” is as lively as it is protracted, and it is by no means an accelerationist question in itself. As its name inevitably and very deliberately conveys however, the authors of “left accelerationism,” in initially choosing the accelerationist lens, surely implied that the “master’s tools,” rather than mere practicality or strategic advantage, could have a role in intensifying the immanent contradictions and instabilities of their status quo bringing about its eventual rupture. However, subsequent to the LA project, Srnicek said in an interview with Verso that what accelerationism meant to him and Williams was the “simple idea” that “capitalism was building the basis for post-capitalism, for the movement beyond itself,” (2017) which is a very different view. It remains unclear why, other than perhaps the influence of Mark Fisher and his links to Land’s CCRU (Beckett, 2017), the project had to be forced to wear the jacket of “accelerationism” at all. Rather than being merely nominal, this objection traverses two very serious issues.
The first huge issue of “Left-Accelerationism” is, ultimately, the way it initially strained to align itself with the broader epistemological traditions of accelerationism at all. In 2025, I know very few politically active people on the “left” who would not concede the practical and strategic arguments ventured in various parts of the project to some degree, especially that a greater openness to and exploration of new techniques and forms of impact is not only justified but sorely needed. From board games to cryptocurrencies to painstaking legal work to a sea of podcasts, I have the unsystematic impression at least that people are trying to do things differently. In my admittedly limited sample size however, what does make many of these same co-conspirators immediately frown or shudder, however, is the idea of being associated with “accelerationism.” Srnicek and Williams wrote that: “It is Marx, along with Land, who remains the paradigmatic accelerationist thinker. [...] Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical data available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He was not a thinker who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene within it, [...] Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints [of] the capitalist value form.” (2013)
Rooting so-called left-accelerationism in Marx’s grudging respect for capitalism, Mark Fisher, in response to MAP, asserted that “Everyone is an accelerationist," watering down the concept beyond any meaning, and further that “Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist”. I like to think that Marx himself might have been one of the first to resist such an oversimplified and all-encompassing statement. Even if not however, honestly so what if Marx was not hostile to new tools of analysis? We know he wasn’t stupid. It is a pretty big jump from acknowledging this important aspect of Marx’s work to placing his cherry-picked ideas within the framework of a writer who was already a published advocate for a “Dark Enlightenment” and believed that the dynamic forces of the market would ultimately cause humans to be replaced by AI. We could also infer from the way Marx wrote about commodity fetishism that he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about what would later be called deterritorialisation. Rather than do all this work to make these thinkers go together, possibly because of something Deleuze and Guattari wrote or because Mark Fisher suggested it might be cool, maybe this contortion should have been a sign that accelerationism was utterly the wrong framing. If they were trying to build an effective, inclusive movement unburdened by the past, then actively seeking at least tangential commonality with the broader trend of accelerationism associated with Nick Land and the CCRU was a huge strategic miss-step.
Most accelerationisms entail a degree of iconoclastic transgressiveness in respect of established, accepted philosophical premises, although this is not constitutive of accelerationism by itself. The guiding logos I have referred to is key, here: why are we intensifying again? As Srnicek observed in an interview with Verso, he was “yet to see any interesting questions, provocations, or insights emerge from the idea that there’s a common accelerationist project that subdivides into a right and left genre” (2018). However, Left-accelerationism’s common ground with Land was at the very least that it saw the status quo of neoliberal capitalism’s camouflage within progressive-sounding values of human rights and equality as hypocritical, stagnant, and moribund, and realised something had to give way. The authors of MAP acknowledged that accelerationism was regarded as “political heresy”, but as their words above about Marx may suggest, they appeared to feel secure that accelerationism always has an oppositional relationship to capitalism: “at the basis of all accelerationist thought lies the assertion that the crimes, contradictions and absurdities of capitalism have to be countered with a politically and theoretically progressive attitude towards its constituent elements” (emphasis added). However, by the time MAP was written, this intrinsic opposition to capitalism was already well repudiated in Land’s right-wing accelerationism (e.g. 2012), which might reasonably have been regarded as “heresy” precisely because it had abandoned any meaningful aspiration to counter capitalism at all (MacKay and Brassier, 2012). Rather, its guiding logos was a nihilistic one that appeared to embrace destruction (e.g. Land, 1992). Left-accelerationism obviously diverged sharply from Land, implying that it has retained its commitments to human wellbeing and its desire for a world after and thus without capitalism. However its general alignment and proximity with accelerationism at that historical moment meant its critique of “relentlessly horizontal” “folk politics”, like Mark Fisher’s jibes at “sour-faced identitarians”, inevitably appeared to echo Land’s own, far less sympathetic sentiments about the left, articulated for example in “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism” (2007).
If, as Robin (2018) argues, “reactionary” is usually characterised by the “demarche” against historical struggles for equality, then any politics that objects to the current forms that “democracy” has assumed, however flawed, must be examined closely in how it deals with the difficult question of democratic self-determination, not only in the state but in counter-hegemonic movements. Thinking the difficulties, or even impossibilities, of ideal democratic process does not preclude an honesty about, and frustration with its practical shortcomings – particularly with the outmoded liberal forms described by Brown (2025). As Astra Taylor has noted, “Democracy is [...] a promise that can never be wholly fulfilled because its implications and scope keep changing. [...] Democracy destabilizes its own legitimacy and purpose by design, subjecting its core components to continual examination and scrutiny. [...] Democracy may not [even] exist, yet it still manages to disappoint. Political gridlock, corruption, unaccountable representatives, and the lack of meaningful alternatives incense people across the ideological spectrum” (2019). Indeed, self-critical acknowledgements of the paralysis, myopia and hypocrisy of movements at least nominally associated with progressive politics are necessary, if framed and directed respectfully. However, as soon as the call is for the difficult work of integrating, resolving and negotiating the agency and interests of diverse groups of people to be disrespected, curtailed or abandoned altogether, reactionary territory is very close at hand. The frustrations of “left accelerationism,” while they do not quite follow the general legacy of accelerationism into this territory, certainly leave an irresponsibly loud silence in how they deal with the difficult question of collective agency. Without a lot more work to acknowledge that past trauma and pain, the alternative rationalities and spiritual entanglements, and all the other “folk” traditions evoked in their nomenclature, all of which was feasible, their Euro-Atlantic rationalism never really felt like a plan for the rest of us, with or without its overt contortions into “accelerationism”.
Unless we do acknowledge that there is some kind of guiding collectivist emancipatory ethic that our movements do have in common with our antecedents, and which sever any chance of collaboration with reactionary, anti-democratic movements, and make proper space for these conversations, the argument that we should be less horizontal and “take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society” (Srnicek and Williams 2013) sounds like an argument that the left should be developing its own laser-guided bombs and funding the revolution through commercially mass-produced ultra-processed food products.
Does it actually involve any real “acceleration” at all?
The second issue with having framed this project as it was, is that even if it seeks to rebuke or distinguish itself from the worst aspects of accelerationism, the choice of this name inevitably also communicates a very clearly under-theorised relationship to temporality itself and to its relationship to modernity. I am not the only author to find this naming unhelpful: Negri wrote, in his response to MAP, “The name 'accelerationism' is certainly unfortunate, as it ascribes a sense of 'futurism' to something that is not at all futuristic” (2014). Likewise, Patricia Reed noted in her own response to MAP that its name “unfortunately, obfuscates its content” (2015). To these authors’ credit, they did stop using the term “accelerationism” and acknowledge that it wasn’t right: “We’ve given up on the term now,” Srnicek told the Guardian in 2017. “It’s been too popularised. And we don’t just want everything to go faster, anyway. Arguing for a shorter working week is arguing for people’s lives to slow down.”
According to the sociologist Harmut Rosa, “social acceleration represents one, if not the, fundamental tendency of modernity” (2013). However, in Rosa’s compelling view, the foundational acceleration “has turned against the very project of modernity that originally motivated, grounded, and helped set it in motion.” Even the climate crisis, he has said elsewhere, can be read as a pathology of acceleration: we have accelerated to a speed that outpaces nature’s ability to regenerate and adapt.
The dialectics of culture under these conditions were always guaranteed to produce calls for, and some politics of, slowness. Indeed, as Wajcman has noted, “the resignification of slowness as a life-enhancing quality has to be understood as a response to the acceleration society.” However, she argues, “there is a tension between slowness as a realm of the elite (mostly Western) individual and the need to share the pleasures of slowness equitably” (2015). Further, a fast/slow distinction is flawed because “a social movement rooted in a politics of consumption cannot fully engage with the inequalities in time sovereignty that result from money, status, and power.” (Wajcman 2015). Since these words were written, the forces of the anti-modern have become more insistent and reactionary in their own way, being not only anti-speed but anti-science, anti-tech, anti-screen, or even anti-vax. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most frequent anti-vaccination arguments was that the mRNA vaccines had been “rushed” and, essentially, had not taken long enough.
What these issues suggest is that for emancipatory political movements to adapt, rather than speeding up or slowing down, we need to develop a new chronopolitics entailing a more intelligent, more nuanced, more dialectical relationship to time, none of which need be hostile to the most useful enduring aims of the LA project: greater strategic openness, and greater literacy with and use of technology. However, before we place our faith in technology too eagerly, it is precisely the human brain’s astonishing ability to recall and remember that will keep us that will give us any chance of survival, if and when Google is no longer available to tell you how to survive radioactivity poisoning or which berries you can eat, and ChatGPT is not able to “advise” you on how to build improvised solar arrays or prepare food in the wild. Memory, intuition, ingenuity, and reasoning - all of which are effaced by an over-reliance on technology. This is not an argument to return to some primitive existence but to remind us that if we are not aware of what it is we are without technology of the human and her extraordinary achievements, we have no chance.
Our future work is therefore filled with contradictions we must embrace. We must be pragmatic and focused on material improvements, yet maintain an ethical continuity appropriate to long term socialistic and reparative principles of collective benefit. We must acknowledge the limitless scale of the challenge, and even assume that the crisis will hit us, but do everything to avert it, and esteem those actions that materially improve our chances of success. We need to become literate and competent with digital technology, medicine, neuroscience, modern construction methods, and other areas that provide relief and open up possibility, yet remain critical of them and remember we are on enemy terrain. We must, yes, accelerate our technical and scientific ingenuity in the face of enormous challenges, such as the climate crisis or antibiotic resistance, yet decelerate and frustrate the capitalist logics that brought us here. We must remain humanistic, yet learn from the pitfalls and blindspots of the anthropocene. We must acknowledge that while our past is all we have, the future is all we have left.
Marcus began his scholarly career in journalism studies imagining a future for digital journalism, later shifting to the broader picture of “factual media” and online culture, and working to build critical theories of technology, discourse, power and capital. He is author of After The Fact? The Truth about Fake News (2020) and Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media (2017). His work is frequently interdisciplinary, drawing on multiple literacies, and he has prior academic training in cognitive science, linguistics and law, while his doctoral work was in cultural studies and political economy. Marcus is co-ordinator of the SOAS Digital Research Network.