Thoughts on Alexander Avila's Patreon-exclusive guide to accelerationismn

I’ve been working my way through Alexander’s recent presentation on accelerationism, and I have to say, it provides an excellent and deeply practical explanation of the philosophy. As the friend who sent me the view said, the immediacy he lends to the topic makes it feel like a genuinely universal angle on how we can understand the world — an actually useful, still-living framework that people can use — instead of just a bunch of historical subcultures that are now dead. This is good, because it is: it's a framework that helps me process and react to what is going on around us every single day.

His analysis of the Trump presidency, for instance, is precisely on point and mirrors how I've been analyzing things through an accelerationist lens. Both Trump and the big tech oligarchs represent a simultaneous deterritorialization of old orders, hierarchies, and codes, followed immediately by a second swing of reterritorialization. Trump represents the reactive reterritorialization of people who are terrified of the natural consequences of deterritorialization—fast travel, global capitalism, climate change, immigration, and the destruction of old industries, even as he represents a deterritorialization of the traditional political establishment and neoliberal expectations. Conversely, the big tech oligarchs, who initially clawed their way to the top through "moving fast and breaking things" via disruption and creative destruction, are now desperately trying to reterritorialize their environments to hold onto their powerful positions.

Alexander’s explanation of "cute accelerationism" as a new path forward is highly compelling as well, and I agree with him that popular cultural frameworks like it are forging a necessary way ahead.

However, I think it's there that cracks begin to show. Let's begin on the libidinal plane, so to speak — the aesthetic surface-level that maybe isn't so surface level at all: cute/acc tries to discard the dark occult cyberpunk attitudes and aesthetics of Land and the CCRU, and Avila praises it for doing so, pointing out that that older accelerationism isn't really attractive, or palatable, to most people, and thus hard to build a coherent cultural moment around. This is correct, as far as it goes. Yet, I still believe that that exact darkness and occult cyberpunk aesthetics of original-flavor accelerationism remains vital to understanding what this philosophy actually is, and making it function. You can use those aesthetics, and those emotions and attitudes, to be able to wrap your head around the chthonic nature of the systems around us, as well as to realize that the arriving future is simultaneously dark and exciting, and maintain intellectual interest, excitement, and investment despite that. Otherwise it turns into, well, a sort of cute-ified fully automated luxury gay space communism, or cute-ified doomerism, or cute-ified romanticism (and he has a very good critique of romanticism in the video!).

Of course, you can combine the two! There's a reason why things like Serial Experiments Lain and Ghost in the Shell and so on are popular: they combine this cuteness with a dark, psychological, cyberpunk, almost-cosmic-horror view of things! I'd say glitchbreak pretty much epitomizes this kind of synthesis accelerationist aesthetic, if you want a taste. This article actually explains in excellent detail how this modern "breakcore" (a misnomer) is, even at a musical level, a sort of rhythmic phenomenological exploration of digital dissociation, isolation, and so on, not by rejecting it but by leaning into it — very original-flavor accelerationist themes.

This libidinal/aesthetic tension is a pretty good rubric when looking deeper into the presentation, too. I found it very interesting — and a bit strange — that Alexander spends the bulk of his time talking about left accelerationism as the practical runway for these ideas, before pivoting to cute accelerationism as the better project. This is strange because the defining characteristic of left accelerationism is specifically a "ride the tiger" attitude: the belief that you can actually control technology, capitalism, and society, plan things out, and steer them. That is entirely contrary to how the 60s and 70s theorists thought, contrary to how Landian accelerationists think, and completely contrary to how cute accelerationists think as well. The fundamental substrate of cute accelerationism—this very idea of "cuteness"—relies on almost surrendering into a future you believe is inevitable in order to bring it about.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, cute/acc's "anastrophic passion" is, besides cute/acc itself, completely unique to Nick Land and the CCRU's work: it does not show up prior, and it certainly does not show up in left accelerationism. Hell, only the CCRU and Land have a specific term for exactly the cute/acc praxis Avila outlines: hyperstition, along with the practice devoted to building the subjectivities and imagined futures necessary for it, namely time-sorcery.

Thus, if you are going to discuss cute accelerationism, it seems important to acknowledge that its biggest heritage is Land and the CCRU, not left accelerationism. Hell, the two authors who wrote the book on cute accelerationism were big members of the CCRU. Even the book itself tries to scrub all Landian and CCRU influences from its pages, which is a strange move.

So, why the persistent omission? Why not mention Land and the CCRU-era accelerationism more, and why spend most of his time on left accelerationism and cute/acc, out of the four time periods (late '60s-early 70s theorists, Land/CCRU, l/acc, cute/acc) he had to deal with, even though the two he chose don't really feed into each other? The reality is simply that out of the four time periods and the theoretical horizons associated with them, only l/acc and cute/acc are really acceptable to a mainstream audience. Dystopian, inhumanist, hyperstitial cyberpunk occultism is just not palatable to most people, especially not most leftists. Combine that with Land’s later turn to the neoreactionary movement, and his work becomes socially toxic in leftist circles; it becomes something you aren't allowed to admit a deep interest in. Likewise, D&G and especially Lyotard are actively hostile to Marxists, and very difficult and impenitrable thinkers, so of course they'll be skipped. Because of this, the whole trajectory and focus of Alexander’s video feels very strongly shaped by an urge to be palatable and politically correct. I understand why he is doing it — we do need to move these concepts out into the mainstream — but it ultimately shaves off a lot of what makes the philosophy unique.

Honestly, this happens a lot when mainline leftists — especially those in academia who haven't fully repudiated their Marxism and their traditional leftism — get their hands on accelerationism. It’s basically the exact same thing that happened with left accelerationism in the first place! If you look at books born from that movement, like The People's Republic of Walmart, Inventing the Future, and Fully Automated Luxury Communism, you don't really see something that Deleuze and Guattari, let alone the CCRU, would recognize as accelerationist. What you see instead is an attempt to reinstate Promethean Marxism: talking about harnessing the productive forces of capital, instituting bureaucracy, and organizing society into a planned utopian system.

To be fair, there is something to be said for the theoretical lens those works apply (finding the seeds of the future in the present). Alexander does an excellent job of describing them, and they aren't inherently bad — especially if you take a different set of values alongside that lens to see how we can move toward a more decentralized future by finding the future in the present (Cory Doctorow is a great example of doing this well).

But on the other hand, there is a massive assumption that goes unquestioned — that we even can control the future — and so much is lost by turning accelerationism into just another Marxist revival movement, not just aesthetically and libidinally, but also theoretically: a lot of the key more academic theoretical works of the accelerationist retrochronic canon, like Anti-Oedipus and Libidinal Economy, are explicit critiques and rejections of Marxism, in order to establish more flexible, interesting, and newer philosophical projects (as seen with Anti-Oedipus's sequel, A Thousand Plateaus) that have a lot more promise than just a sort of atavistic Promethean Marxism. It feels like a massive reterritorialization following the deeply deterritorializing theorists of the 60s and 90s. In many ways, left accelerationism was just an earlier wave of exactly what Alexander is doing to the philosophy now: a bunch of leftist academics with strong commitments to Marx getting their hands on radical ideas, and sanding them down, over and over, to make them acceptable to their cohort until there just isn't a whole lot left.