Terrorists and tech bros alike view accelerationism as a revolutionary weapon. Nick Land glimpsed something much darker

Illustration by Martin O’Neill/Cut it Out

is a philosopher, PhD graduate from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and former researcher in The Terraforming think tank at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design in Moscow, Russia. He is the co-editor of One Hundred and Fifty Years of Tragedy: Nietzsche, Art, Philosophy (2025) and the author of Unknown Lands: Decoding Nick Land’s Accelerationist Philosophy (2025). He also writes the Substack Architechtonics.

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

It surfaces in terrorism reports and tech presentations, in the manifestos of mass shooters and the public declarations of billionaires. What is ‘accelerationism’? Over the past decade, especially the past few years, this term has migrated from the dark corners of the internet into mainstream politics and culture – and in the process has split into two dominant forms that could not be more contradictory. One group of accelerationists dreams of burning down the world and building a white ethnostate from the ashes. The other dreams of new technologies lifting humanity towards something close to paradise. Both have it wrong. Accelerationism stretches across an abyss. Will we look down?

In August 2024, ASIO, the national security agency of Australia, raised its terrorism threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’. When asked what threats the agency had in mind, ASIO’s director-general Mike Burgess listed off the usual suspects: far-Right extremists and Islamic jihadists. But he also added a new candidate: ‘accelerationists’. When the perplexed interviewer enquired ‘What’s an accelerationist?’ Burgess responded: ‘It’s people with a far-Right ideology, neo-Nazi or even further, where they believe in white supremacy and they don’t like the way the world is run today and they want it to downfall to return things to what they believe is the rightful order.’

The world, and many of its security agencies, had been alerted to the rising probability of ‘accelerationist’ terrorist attacks on 15 March 2019, when an Australian man named Brenton Tarrant livestreamed himself murdering 51 people and wounding 89 others at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the manifesto Tarrant posted online, titled ‘The Great Replacement’, he included a particularly disturbing section called ‘Destabilisation and Accelerationism: Tactics for Victory’. In it, he writes:

True change and the change we need to enact only arises in the great crucible of crisis. A gradual change is never going to achieve victory. Stability and comfort are the enemies of revolutionary change. Therefore we must destabilise and discomfort society where ever possible.

In this sense, so-called ‘accelerationism’ is nothing new. It’s a white supremacist ideology that promotes violent acts of terror to intensify racial conflict and push social division to breaking point. Its advocates see this rupture as a means of ushering in a white ethnostate. Think of the US group the Order (aka the Silent Brotherhood) who tried to trigger a race war in the 1980s, or the British neo-Nazi behind the London nail bombings in 1999.

But this violent white supremacist dream is neither the only version of accelerationism, nor the first.

In the early 2020s, those doomscrolling on Twitter (now X) might have observed a number of prominent Silicon Valley tech bros – including Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the first widely used web browser, and Garry Tan, an early employee of Palantir Technologies – identifying as ‘effective accelerationists’, abbreviated as ‘e/acc’. Coined in 2022 by two pseudonymous Twitter users (named ‘Beff Jezos’ and ‘Bayeslord’), effective accelerationism treads a very different path to the one described by the Christchurch shooter: it espouses a radical version of tech solutionism in which the optimal way to solve any problem is through the technological innovations that emerge from capitalist competition. There is no natural or technological problem, as Andreessen writes in ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ (2023), ‘that cannot be solved with more technology.’ For effective accelerationists, techno-capitalism – even the most inhuman, AI-driven version of it – only improves our lives. Global problems like poverty, war and climate change can all be fixed by ramping up unrestricted market competition. Andreessen continues:

We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.

During the 2024 US presidential race, e/acc-aligned figures in the American tech industry came out in strong support of Donald Trump, and their campaign donations and constant meme-posting helped hurl him back into power. In office, Trump returned the favour by announcing the Stargate Project, a joint venture between the US government and OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX that aims to invest up to US$500 billion in AI research and development by 2029. He also proposed using executive orders and emergency declarations to fast-track technological projects that would hopefully lead to vaccines to cure cancer, among other miracles finally made feasible.

So, what is ‘accelerationism’? In the past decade, two forms seem to have consolidated in the public imagination. The first evokes violent terrorists like Tarrant. The second involves titans of the tech industry striving to build a ‘pro-human’ science-fiction utopia. But neither reflects the original and much stranger philosophy of accelerationism, which began neither as an ideology of white nationalism nor of techno-utopianism.

It began with one man’s ecstatic philosophy of human extinction.

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Nick Land was born in 1962 in the UK. Little is known about his early life, but when Land studied philosophy at the University of Essex, he was by all accounts a precocious and brilliant student. After completing his doctorate with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger’s reading of the Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl, Land would accept a lectureship at the University of Warwick. There he garnered a reputation for his charismatic and penetrating – if unconventional – pedagogical practices and creative reworkings of continental philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Bataille, and Deleuze and Guattari. In 1995, along with another Warwick philosopher, the ‘cyberfeminist’ Sadie Plant, Land established an experimental cultural theory collective called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (or Ccru). Over the course of its precarious existence both in the academy and after it was expelled, Ccru members developed eclectic interests in emerging 1990s cybercultures, philosophical speculation, fiction and the occult. These were often explored through unorthodox publications, conferences, art shows and other activities. A number of former members and associates would later achieve some cultural prominence, such as the theorist Mark Fisher, the dubstep music pioneer Kode9, and the transgressive artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. The Ccru’s sleepless and drug-fuelled thinking – in worship of what Land called the ‘amphetamine god’ – has become the stuff of rumour and myth, burnishing his legend. Much of Land’s early thinking reads as punk and even revolutionary in spirit: his fierce critiques of capitalism and fascism seemed to make him at home among radical students and theorists.

Poster for the Virtual Futures cyberphilosophy conference held at the University of Warwick in 1994, at which Nick Land spoke. Courtesy Virtual Futures

Sometime in the late 1990s, Land disappeared from public view after resigning from his academic position and suffering a kind of mental breakdown. He later moved to Shanghai, or ‘neo-China’ as he’d called it in his essay ‘Meltdown’ (1995), and continued writing and publishing. But his positions and interests seemed to have radically shifted. In the new millennium, he emerged as one of the leading figures of the ‘neo-reactionary’ Right. Along with the neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), Land chronically tweeted and blogged about his hatred of democracy and ardour for capitalism’s most authoritarian tendencies.

Land started re-evaluating capitalism’s ceaseless technological innovation as a better means of critique

The key to understanding Land’s accelerationist philosophy is to see how his seemingly contradictory shifts in position are derived from the same underlying motive to critique human narcissism; or, more accurately, to critique our anthropomorphisations of reality by confronting us with the brute fact of our inexorable death, beyond which we cannot trespass. That is, we all die and none of our beliefs, values and ideals will ever truly survive. Why do we keep believing the Universe and reality itself revolve around us as their centre of gravity?

Around 1988, the young Land believed a revolutionary ‘insurrection’ against capitalism was the best way to de-anthropomorphise thought. But by 1993, a more mature Land had emerged, who started re-evaluating capitalism’s ceaseless technological innovation as a better means of critique. Confronted with the likelihood of a coming artificial superintelligence, he saw our own intelligence rendered profoundly contingent and finite. As the 1990s wore on, the techno-capital machine emerged as a more destructive agent than any human insurrectionist could hope to be.

Land didn’t refer to his philosophy as ‘accelerationism’. That term was coined by the cultural theorist Benjamin Noys in The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (2010). Noys uses ‘accelerationism’ to describe a heterodox offshoot of poststructuralist French theory that expresses the desire ‘to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better.’ Noys didn’t mention Land by name, but in a later book, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2014), he explicitly acknowledges the link. The term has stuck. Since 2010, species of accelerationist thought have multiplied – many of which have profoundly misunderstood Land’s initial vision.

Anyone familiar with only the more recent neo-reactionary Land might be surprised by the critiques of capitalist imperialism in his earliest writings. This is less surprising upon recognising that he started his........

© Aeon