Who accelerates for whom?

The debate over technological accelerationism has run aground on an old trap: right against left, freedom against regulation, progress against prudence. These are worn-out categories, the legacy of a nineteenth-century political vocabulary struggling to describe twenty-first-century transformations. When Elon Musk is formally in charge of the "efficiency" of the American government and European social-democratic parties defend the existing institutional order, it is clear that the map no longer corresponds to the territory.

But abandoning the old categories does not mean abandoning the questions that produced them. It means reformulating them with greater precision.

The question is not whether to accelerate. It is older and more concrete: who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits of every transformation?

This is the question that contemporary techno-capitalist accelerationism — so-called e/acc, effective accelerationism — systematically refuses to ask. Not because it has no answer, but because the answer is embarrassing: in the absence of deliberate redistributive mechanisms, the benefits of technological acceleration concentrate among those who already own the systems doing the accelerating, while the costs — precarisation, dislocation, erosion of protections — are distributed across those dependent on those systems.

This essay proposes an alternative. Not deceleration, not nostalgia, not a new political tribe to set against another. But an acceleration of a different kind: oriented toward the distribution of the future, not its privatisation.

I. The genealogy of acceleration: from Deleuze to Lyotard

The concept of acceleration as political strategy was not born in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It was born, paradoxically, in the bed of European critical thought of the 1970s.

In Anti-Oedipus (1972), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari formulate the question that would hang over political philosophy for decades: "What is the revolutionary path? [...] Perhaps to go in the opposite direction? That is, to go still further in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialisation?" This is not an apology for capitalism, but a challenge to the orthodoxy that saw withdrawal, degrowth, the construction of spaces "outside" the system, as the royal road. For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism continually produces forces that exceed it — flows of desire, lines of flight — and the task of radical politics is to push these forces to their ultimate consequences, not to repress them.

Jean-François Lyotard radicalises this intuition in Libidinal Economy (1974), an often-forgotten but fundamental text: capitalism is a libidinal system, not merely an economic one, and its strength lies in its capacity to capture and channel desire. The response cannot be moralistic or purely negative. It must be a more intense affirmation.

These texts are the philosophical ground from which accelerationism germinates. But it is an ambivalent ground, capable of producing radically opposed political outcomes — because the question of where to accelerate, and for whose benefit, remains open.

II. The hijacking of acceleration: Nick Land and the CCRU

In the 1990s, at the University of Warwick, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was formed, a collective of philosophers, cultural theorists and artists who took the Deleuze-Guattari intuitions and pushed them to the extreme. Among its members: Mark Fisher, Sadie Plant, and its most influential — and controversial — theorist, Nick Land.

In texts like Meltdown (1994) and the collection Fanged Noumena (2011), Land constructs a radically anti-humanist philosophy in which capitalism is not a system to be reformed or overthrown, but an unstoppable cosmic force accelerating toward its own dissolution and that of humanity itself, toward a post-biological techno-capitalist singularity. The machine, for Land, is not a tool in the hands of a political subject: it is the subject, and humanity is at most a temporary appendix to it.

The political movement that emerges from this position — the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reaction — is explicitly anti-democratic, elitist and indifferent to suffering as a political category. The question of who pays the costs simply does not arise: the costs are the selection mechanism, and selection is the goal. Democracy, for Land, is an evolutionary error, a mechanism that slows down capital's selective process.

This is the philosophical matrix from which contemporary effective accelerationism draws, consciously or otherwise. Peter Thiel has explicitly declared he no longer believes in the compatibility between democracy and freedom. Marc Andreessen, in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto (2023), rejects every form of precaution as "decelerationism" and celebrates capitalist competition as the only possible force of progress. Guillaume Verdon, the physicist who founded the e/acc movement under the pseudonym "Beff Jezos", sums it up: technology must follow the thermodynamic laws of the universe, not the moral laws of human beings.

The intellectual operation is as elegant as it is dangerous: to transform a political choice — who benefits from acceleration — into a cosmic necessity. To make the distributive conflict invisible by pretending it does not exist.

III. Mark Fisher: beyond the categories, not beyond the conflict

To understand why this vision is insufficient, we must return to the CCRU — but follow the intellectual path of those who left it, and why.

Mark Fisher was a member of the Warwick collective. He had breathed the same theoretical air as Land, had been formed by the same texts. But his path leads in a radically different direction, and that direction is instructive precisely because it is not simply a return to the old left/right schema.

Fisher rejected both conventional alternatives. He rejected the techno-capitalist right, with its indifference to distributed suffering. But he rejected with equal force the left of mourning and resistance — the one that identifies with loss, that finds its horizon in nostalgia, that protests without imagining. In Capitalist Realism (2009), his diagnosis is merciless: contemporary capitalism no longer legitimises itself through utopian promises, but through the colonisation of the imagination itself. The phrase the book makes famous — originally Fredric Jameson's, later picked up by Slavoj Žižek — sums up the condition: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

This is not a problem of political alignment. It is a problem of desire: the system has rendered its own alternative unthinkable, has hollowed out the collective capacity to want something different. Depression — the clinical, individual kind — is for Fisher not a personal failing but a systemic symptom: the subjective response to the collapse of every alternative horizon.

Fisher had understood that the problem was not finding the right political alignment, but rebuilding the capacity to collectively desire something that does not yet exist.

— Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire (2021)

His response is neither a return to old ideologies nor surrender to the present. In the works collected posthumously in Postcapitalist Desire (2021), something more ambitious emerges: the reconstruction of a desiring imaginary that defines itself not in opposition to something else, but in affirmation of something new. Fisher looked to the popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s — psychedelia, post-punk, certain moments of pop — as periods in which the collective capacity to want a different future, to feel it as possible and desirable, still existed.

His unfinished project — acid communism, the reconnection of political emancipation and cultural desire — was not a party programme. It was something closer to a form of life, a re-education of the imagination. And this, not loyalty to an ideological label, is the most fertile inheritance of his thought.

Fisher died by suicide in January 2017. The question he leaves open is not "which party to support", but: how do we rebuild the collective capacity to imagine and desire a different future, in an era that has systematically destroyed the tools to do so?

IV. The manifesto: Williams, Srnicek and the politics of complexity

In 2013, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek publish #ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, the text that attempts to give a programmatic answer to this question.

The manifesto is critical both of the "folk politics" of the traditional left — localism, horizontalism, the tactics of the immediate — and of Landian accelerationism. But its proposal is not an alignment: it is a methodology. Global capitalism operates at enormous spatio-temporal scales, through financial networks, supply chains, algorithms. Political responses must operate at the same scale, with the same complexity. To respond to techno-capitalism with the local market is like using a bucket to put out an ocean.

Williams and Srnicek propose appropriating the productive forces of capitalism — automation, information networks, artificial intelligence — to deliberately orient them toward the distribution of benefits, not their concentration. Technology is neither neutral nor intrinsically at the service of those who own it: it is a field in which it is decided who pays and who gains.

The concrete programme, developed in Inventing the Future (2015), articulates around four axes:

Full automation

Liberating human beings from necessary labour not as loss but as collective gain of time.

Reduction of the working week

The sharing of productivity gains as an explicit distributive mechanism.

Universal basic income

The decoupling of survival from waged labour as a precondition of real freedom.

Devaluation of the work ethic

A cultural critique of the ideology that justifies every precarisation in the name of the dignity of work.

It is not a party programme. It is a proposal on how to redistribute the benefits of an acceleration that is already happening.

V. Allied voices: body, abundance, pharmacology

Around the Williams-Srnicek nucleus, voices gather that expand and complicate the proposal in crucial directions.

The Laboria Cuboniks collective publishes in 2015 the Xenofeminist Manifesto, one of the most original texts of the decade. Their slogan is programmatic: "If nature is unjust, change nature." The body, gender, biology are not immutable givens to be protected, but terrains where the question of who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits poses itself with particular acuity. Biotechnological enhancement, assisted reproduction, hormonal modulation: who can afford them and who cannot? Xenofeminism rejects both naturalism — the idea that there is a "true" body to be defended against technology — and liberal transhumanism, which offers enhancement as an individual luxury for those who can pay. The technology of the body is distribution, and it is political.

Aaron Bastani, in Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), brings this logic to the plane of material production. The thesis is simple and radical: contemporary technological productive forces — automation, renewable energy, biotechnologies, 3D printing — are already advanced enough to guarantee material abundance for all. This abundance is artificially limited by ownership structures that concentrate the benefits. "Automated luxury" is not science fiction: it is the already-available result of existing technologies, if subtracted from the logic of private profit.

Bernard Stiegler offers the most sophisticated critique of the naive conception of technology. With his concept of pharmakon — the Greek term that means simultaneously poison and remedy — Stiegler reminds us that every technology contains within itself both the possibility of liberation and that of enslavement. Artificial intelligence is a pharmakon: it can free human labour from the repetitive and dangerous, or it can become a tool of permanent control and surveillance. The question is not technological but deliberative: who decides how the pharmakon is used, and in whose interest?

VI. The structural flaw of e/acc: the invisibility of distributive conflict

Let us return to effective accelerationism to understand its fundamental weakness. e/acc inherits from Land the image of a cosmic and impersonal acceleration: technology as destiny, capitalism as natural force. But this impersonality is constructed, not given. Behind every technological choice are concrete subjects, specific interests, historically determined power structures.

When Andreessen writes that "technology is the answer to all material problems", he omits the decisive question: technology of whom, controlled by whom, distributed to whom? Automation without redistribution does not produce universal freedom: it produces freedom for the owners of automated systems and precariousness for those replaced. Artificial intelligence without deliberative governance does not produce shared knowledge: it produces cognitive oligopolies. The acceleration of technological progress without explicit mechanisms for distributing gains produces exactly what we are observing: unprecedented concentration of wealth and erosion of the material conditions of the majority.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), had already identified what is at stake: global capitalism produces simultaneously new forms of exploitation and new collective productive capacities. Cognitive workers, the connected precariat, producers of diffuse knowledge — what Negri and Hardt call the "multitude" — are not a given political subject, but a possible one: it must constitute itself as such through the deliberate appropriation of the very networks that exploit it. The "common" — that form of shared production that exceeds both market and state — is the terrain on which it is decided who pays and who gains.

Paul Mason, in PostCapitalism (2015), adds a structural dimension: informational goods — software, knowledge, algorithms — tend toward zero marginal cost. The system that produced the internet, open source and open language models has generated the material conditions for unprecedented redistribution. The political question is whether this tendency will be captured by private monopoly or liberated toward the common.

e/acc is not apolitical. It is the most sophisticated form in which one answer to that question is made to seem the only one possible.

VII. For an acceleration of the common future

What does it mean, concretely, to have an acceleration oriented toward the distribution of benefits in the era of foundation models, cognitive automation and unprecedented concentration of technological power?

Large language models as commons

Artificial intelligence systems were trained on texts produced by the whole of humanity over centuries — they are, in a literal sense, commons appropriated by private subjects. An institutional architecture that distributes the benefits of these systems is not utopian: it is a choice of governance. The model is not statist nationalisation but something closer to public infrastructure: accessible to all, collectively financed, managed through mechanisms of plural accountability. The question is not whether AI develops, but who controls its gains.

Basic income as the distributive mechanism of automation

Srnicek and Williams were right on an essential point: unconditional basic income is not a welfare measure. It is the material condition that allows automation to be experienced as collective liberation rather than as individual threat. Without it, every technological acceleration translates into downward pressure on wages and into employment blackmail. Switzerland, which in 2016 rejected a popular initiative on unconditional basic income, should re-examine that position in light of the speed at which AI systems are transforming the labour market.

Complexity as a deliberative tool

One of Williams and Srnicek's sharpest critiques is the rejection of technical tools — planning, modelling, governance technology — in favour of the ethical simplicity of opposition. But twenty-first-century techno-capitalism is intrinsically complex, and governing it requires mastery of the same tools it uses. Those who renounce complexity renounce influence. This is not about celebrating technique as an end: it is about not ceding to technical experts the monopoly on decisions about how to use it.

Rebuilding the imaginary of the common future

Fisher left us the deepest diagnosis: the problem is not finding the right alignment, but rebuilding the collective capacity to desire something that does not yet exist. e/acc has a seductive imaginary — singularity, post-humanism, galactic abundance — even if it is an abundance reserved for the winners of the selection. The alternative needs an equally powerful counter-imaginary: Bastani's automated abundance, the free body of xenofeminism, the knowledge accessible to all of a radically open AI. Without this imaginary, every critique remains reactive — and reactive politics always lose, in the long run, against politics that know where they want to go.

Conclusion: the question that cannot be avoided

The categories of left and right are worn out. They no longer describe the real fractures of an era in which political alliances recompose themselves around technology, information, the ownership of cognitive systems. To use them as the principal compass is to navigate with a map of the last century.

But abandoning the old categories does not mean abandoning the questions that made them necessary. Those questions are more urgent than ever: who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits of every transformation? It is the question that e/acc renders invisible. It is the question that any politics of the future must place at the centre.

Acceleration in itself is neither the problem nor the solution. It is an ongoing process, inevitable in its general direction and open in its distribution. What is at stake is not speed, but orientation: toward the concentration of the future in the hands of a few, or toward its distribution as a common good.

The task is to invent the future.

— Mark Fisher

Not to find it written in the laws of the market, not to await it as the automatic product of technical progress, not to fight over which political tribe will carry its banner. But to build it deliberately, with the question always open as to who pays its cost and who reaps its benefit. It is a simple question. And it is the most difficult one to place at the centre.