We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries).The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an experimental theory collective that existed from 1995 to 2003 at the University of Warwick,[24] included Land as well as other influential social theorists such as Mark Fisher and Sadie Plant as members.
[25] Benjamin H. Bratton's book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty has been described as concerning accelerationist ideas, focusing on how information technology infrastructures undermine modern political geographies and proposing an open-ended "design brief".
"[16] In “Meltdown”, a CCRU work and one of the writings compiled, he claimed that the bourgeoisie lost control of technology in the late 19th century, resulting in the emergence of "technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / social democratic) political cultures", as well as in the consolidation of both eastern and western governments into "population policing Medico-Military Complexes with neomercantilist forgeign [sic] policy orientations."
He also alleges that the west devolved into statism and opposing deregulation, with left wing politics subsiding into nationalistic conservatism and creating "securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction."
He views democratic and egalitarian policies as only slowing down acceleration and the technocapital singularity, stating "Beside the speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator [...] comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress.
[33] While both strands of accelerationist thinking remain rooted in a similar range of thinkers, left accelerationism appeared with the intent to use technology for the goal of achieving an egalitarian future.
[32] Declaring that "Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist", Fisher critiqued Land's interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari in 2012's "Terminator vs Avatar", stating that while superior in many ways, "his deviation from their understanding of capitalism is fatal."
Nick Srnicek befriended him, sharing similar views, and the 2008 financial crisis, along with dissatisfaction with the left's "ineffectual" response of the Occupy protests, led to him co-writing "#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics" with Alex Williams in 2013.
At the same time, they consider the modern left to be "unable to devise a new political ideological vision," as they are too focused on localism and direct action and cannot adapt to make meaningful change.
They also advocate for "collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality" in contrast to standard leftist political action which they deem ineffective.
Moving past the constraints of capitalism would result in a resumption of technological progress, not only creating a more rational society but also "recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms.
[37] In response to this strand of accelerationism and its optimism for egalitarianism and liberation, which departs from prior interests in experimentation and delirium, Land rebuked its ideas in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, saying that "the notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism is a deep theoretical error.
[38] This contrasts with more traditional effective altruism (referred to as "longtermism" to distinguish from e/acc), which tends to consider uncontrolled AI to be the greater existential risk and advocates for government regulation and careful alignment.
[41][42] An often-cited example of this is Žižek's assertion in a November 2016 interview with Channel 4 News that were he an American citizen, he would vote for former U.S. president Donald Trump as the candidate more likely to disrupt the political status quo in that country.
[45] The inspiration for this distinct variation is occasionally cited as American Nazi Party and National Socialist Liberation Front member James Mason's newsletter Siege, where he argued for sabotage, mass killings, and assassinations of high-profile targets to destabilize and destroy the current society, seen as a system upholding a Jewish and multicultural New World Order.
[13] His works were republished and popularized by the Iron March forum and Atomwaffen Division, right-wing extremist organizations strongly connected to various terrorist attacks, murders, and assaults.