Lexicon Leadership & Relationship

Accelerationism

Definition

Accelerationism is the demand that the processes of capitalism and technology should not be slowed down but sped up. Benjamin Noys gave the current its name in 2010, as a critic; its formula “accelerate the process” comes from Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari (1972).

By Gwendolin Kirchhoff · Philosopher 13 min read

Accelerationism is the demand that the processes of capitalism and technology should not be slowed down but sped up. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, put it in a single sentence in 2023: “We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development” (Andreessen, 2023). The name itself, however, came from a critic: in 2010 the theorist Benjamin Noys gave it to an attitude he regarded as a pathology, the desire for the flood of globalised capitalism to rise even faster (cf. Peden, 2011). Today the word stands for Nick Land’s philosophy, for a left-wing manifesto, for e/acc in Silicon Valley and for a current of right-wing terrorism. Gwendolin Kirchhoff does not use the word in the conversations quoted here. What she says about the technological progress the accelerationists want to speed up is set out in the last two sections, kept apart from what the accelerationists themselves hold.

#Where does the term accelerationism come from?

The term accelerationism goes back to a formula that is older than the word: “accelerate the process”. In Anti-Oedipus (1972), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ask whether the revolutionary path is to withdraw from the world market or to go still further in the movement of the market; their answer is not to withdraw from the process but to go further and, as Nietzsche put it, to accelerate the process (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, quoted in Land, 2017).

In 2017 the philosopher Nick Land describes the basic schema accelerationism is about as a positive feedback circuit in which commercialisation and industrialisation excite each other in a runaway process; the process grows in order to grow. Of humanity, Land writes: “Mankind is its temporary host, not its master.” Critique of the process is not on his agenda: “The process is not to be critiqued.” (Land, 2017). According to Land, the whole thing was only named four decades after Anti-Oedipus, and critically, by Benjamin Noys (cf. ibid.). The reviewer Knox Peden sums up the attitude Noys has in mind as the idea that the worse it gets, the better it gets (cf. Peden, 2011).

#Was Nietzsche an accelerationist?

Nietzsche did not know the word accelerationism, but one of his posthumous fragments calls for accelerating a process. It reads: “The levelling of European man is the great process that cannot be checked: one should even accelerate it.” (Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, selection by Brahn, 1917, no. 672). What is to be accelerated in this fragment is the levelling; from it, for Nietzsche, follows the necessity of “tearing open a gulf”, of distance and order of rank, and the levelled species finds its justification in the service of a “higher sovereign kind” (ibid.). Nick Land counts Nietzsche, alongside Karl Marx, among those who captured important aspects of the trend (cf. Land, 2017).

In the Everlast debate with Joscha Bach (2026), Gwendolin Kirchhoff names as Nietzsche’s greatest achievement “the depth and the precision of his phenomenology in the first person”; he is weak, she says, where he could not integrate love into his system: “He stopped at a striving for autonomy.” (Kirchhoff & Bach, 2026, 2:18:23–2:18:30 and 2:19:49–2:20:02). In his next reply Joscha Bach calls Nietzsche, in a certain sense, a father of the Dark Enlightenment in his own era (cf. ibid., 2:21:49–2:22:38). How Nietzsche is read in this philosophy is described in the entries Nietzsche and Übermensch.

#What is effective accelerationism (e/acc)?

Effective accelerationism, e/acc for short, is a current which, according to Forbes, has swept Silicon Valley. Its principles appeared in July 2022 as “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets”, signed by Beff Jezos and bayes. The notes declare that e/acc aims to accelerate the advent of a limit state often called the “technocapital singularity”, and they set themselves apart from the anti-AGI factions of effective altruism. On life, they say: “e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism” (Jezos & bayes, 2022). According to reporting by Forbes, Beff Jezos is Guillaume Verdon, a former Google quantum computing engineer (cf. Baker-White, 2023). Marc Andreessen lists Nick Land and @BasedBeffJezos in his manifesto among the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism” (Andreessen, 2023). The contrast is explicitly with transhumanism: according to the notes, parts of e/acc consider themselves post-humanists (cf. Jezos & bayes, 2022).

#What types of accelerationism are there?

Besides Land’s accelerationism and e/acc there is a left-wing and a militant accelerationism. In 2013 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek published the “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics”, which calls for a new left global hegemony. In Land’s vision of capital, they write, “the human can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence”, and “Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration” (Williams & Srnicek, 2013). They themselves want to accelerate the process of technological evolution, but they warn: “Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us.” (ibid.).

Militant accelerationism is something else. As a concept of political action, it aims to bring the social system of liberal and capitalist societies to collapse, writes the research centre CeMAS (Center für Monitoring, Analyse und Strategie) in its 2022 report; central to it is the acceleration of contradictory social processes or of processes perceived as problematic by discursive means or by “violent means such as terrorism” (CeMAS, 2022, pp. 12–13). According to CeMAS, the concept reached the militant far-right milieu by two routes: through Nick Land and, more formatively, through Siege, the newsletter collection of the American neo-Nazi James Mason (cf. ibid., p. 13). In its chapter on the beginning of the first transnational wave of terror, CeMAS names the Christchurch attack (New Zealand) of March 2019 and explains that the brutal professionalism with which the attacker publicised his crime set off a wave of imitators in the USA, in Norway and in Germany (Halle); by 2019 a right-wing terrorist subculture had already established itself on Telegram, Terrorgram (cf. ibid., p. 8). Green members of the German Bundestag call it, in a parliamentary question of 2026, “a relevant phenomenon of right-wing terrorism for years” and report that since 2018 CeMAS has counted several groups and numerous individuals in Germany as militant accelerationists, among them the 2019 Halle attacker (cf. Deutscher Bundestag, 2026).

#Is more technology the same as progress?

Gwendolin Kirchhoff doubts that technical effort is already progress. She would question “whether everything that is technically more elaborate necessarily represents progress” (Kirchhoff, 2025, 18:35–18:42). Her example in the conversation with Everlast AI (2025): whoever spreads pesticides until the bees stay away and then builds tiny bee robots has gone to enormous technical lengths; “But the question is: the whole package we get here, is that progress?” (ibid., 17:36–18:34). And further: “I would, for a start, call the story of progress into question”, which does not mean that some things are not progress too (ibid., 19:52–19:58).

In the same conversation she compares the build-up of control systems around AI to a great pyramid: “We all build it, inevitably, because every single player within this whole game has to do it, because of external economic pressures” (ibid., 15:01–15:11; cf. 14:59–15:30). In the debate with Joscha Bach (2026) she calls technological progress a Promethean project that began with the Enlightenment: the idea of rebuilding life and, by now, consciousness. She asks why anyone would want that (cf. Kirchhoff & Bach, 2026, 17:42–17:55). Of the destruction of living systems that her bee example shows, she says: “And it can perfectly well be refrained from. It is not a compulsion we are subjected to.” (ibid., 19:34–19:40; cf. 19:29–19:34). Only from a different basic understanding of the human being and the cosmos, she says, can one judge “what meaningful progress is and what is not” (ibid., 19:26–19:29; cf. 19:18–19:26). The entry Promethean impulse develops this thought.

#Why does Gwendolin Kirchhoff speak of pathogenesis instead of evolution?

Gwendolin Kirchhoff doubts that the fusion of the human being with technology is an evolution. She asks: “Why should a fusion of the human being with AI and technical components represent an evolution, with the implicit assumption of a higher development? One could just as well speak of a pathogenesis, that is, a progressive development of symptoms of a particular psychological, even psychophysical illness.” (Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2023, 01:12–01:29). The entry Pathogenesis, not progress unfolds this reversal. The accelerationist texts themselves speak of the human being as a way station: Land calls mankind the temporary host of the process, and the e/acc notes declare no particular allegiance to the biological substrate of life (cf. Land, 2017; Jezos & bayes, 2022).

Where things are heading at present, Gwendolin Kirchhoff states in the debate with Joscha Bach: “At present the vector is not that we fall back into an agrarian feudalism, but that we fall forward into a techno-feudalism” (on the term: techno-feudalism); in the so-called Dark Enlightenment philosophy circulating in Silicon Valley, many want to go into a feudal space (Kirchhoff & Bach, 2026, 25:35–25:44; cf. 26:00–26:18). Jochen Kirchhoff explains that he distilled the term megatechnical pharaoh from Lewis Mumford’s mega-machine; the megatechnical pharaoh, he says, rests on an abstractionism, it is about “the rule of abstract systems” (Kirchhoff, J. & Kirchhoff, G., 2018, 01:44–05:17 and 07:56–09:28).

For the whole game in which, in her words, everyone is caught up, Gwendolin Kirchhoff first proposes a pause: “One can first pause for a moment, take a step back and say: okay, do we want this? Are we perhaps even against it?” (Kirchhoff, 2025, 15:26–15:40). The question is addressed to you as well: what would you accelerate if you did not have to, and what would you leave alone?

#Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

What is accelerationism?
Accelerationism is the demand that the processes of capitalism and technology should not be slowed down but sped up. In his 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Marc Andreessen professes accelerationism as the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development.
Who coined the term accelerationism?
The formula “accelerate the process” comes from Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1972), who invoke Nietzsche for it. The theorist Benjamin Noys used the word as the name of a current in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative, and he used it critically; Nick Land confirms this in his own introduction of 2017.
Was Nietzsche an accelerationist?
Nietzsche did not know the word accelerationism, but one of his posthumous fragments supplies the cue: the levelling of European man is a process that cannot be checked, and one should even accelerate it. Deleuze and Guattari invoke Nietzsche in 1972, and Nick Land counts him among the thinkers who captured important aspects of the trend.
What is effective accelerationism (e/acc)?
Effective accelerationism, e/acc for short, is a current which, according to Forbes, has swept Silicon Valley; its principles appeared in July 2022 as Notes on e/acc principles and tenets. It aims to accelerate the arrival of a technocapital singularity and declares no particular allegiance to the biological substrate of intelligence and life. According to Forbes, the pseudonym Beff Jezos belongs to Guillaume Verdon.
What is militant accelerationism?
Militant accelerationism is a far-right current which, according to the research centre CeMAS, seeks to bring the social system of liberal and capitalist societies to collapse, including by violent means such as terrorism. A parliamentary question in the German Bundestag (2026) calls it a relevant phenomenon of right-wing terrorism for years; the research centre CeMAS counts the 2019 Halle attacker among its adherents, among others.
What does Gwendolin Kirchhoff say about technological progress?
Gwendolin Kirchhoff would question whether everything that is technically more elaborate necessarily represents progress, and she doubts the story of progress itself, without denying that some things are progress. Instead of an evolution of the human being into technology, one could just as well speak of a pathogenesis, she says.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff
Gwendolin Kirchhoff “Leadership begins with the one who can lead themselves.”

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