Accelerationism, AI and Dark MAGA

How an occult critical theorist from Coventry shaped the ideology of the Tech Right and (maybe) the future of AI

Brief notes:

• Accelerationism was a weird, quasi-occult critical theory developed by Nick Land and others at Warwick University in the 90s at a research centre called Ccru

• It was a nihilist version of Californian Extropianism / Transhumanism, calling for the acceleration of techno-capital beyond the human.

• The Ccru left academia and slid into amphetamine abuse, occult ceremonies, and madness

• Land had a breakdown, moved to China and embraced Curtis Yarvin’s Neo-Reactionary illiberal politics, and also explored ‘hyper-racism’, or racist eugenics in space and the dream of creating a new superspecies.

• Accelerationism has been taken up by influentual figures in Silicon Valley in the last few years, thanks to the effective accelerationist or e/acc movement.

• Prominent e/acc figures include the Twitter account ‘Beff Jezos’ (a former Google engineer called Guillame Verdon), VC investor Marc Andreessen and to some extent investor and ideas-patron Peter Thiel. e/acc is often associated with the idea of breakneck development of AGI without too much concerns for risks to humanity, as opposed to Effective Altruism’s ‘doomerist’ concerns with ‘existential risk’

• e/acc celebrated Trump’s recent victory and vice-president JD Vance’s call (at the AI conference in Paris this week) for softer-touch regulation of AI development. One industry observer described his speech as ‘jingoistic accelerationism’.

• Contemporary US Accelerationism also has some influence on edgelord new right art-cult movements like Romilia…and also on far-right white supremacist terrorism.

• So how did an obscure 90s drum-and-bass-loving philosopher from Coventry end up influencing US AI policy…?

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In 1993, at Warwick University in Coventry (UK), a techno-feminist called Sadie Plant set up a research unit in the Warwick philosophy department called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru). It wasn’t a ‘real’ academic centre — it didn’t have a large grant or any institutional status, it was just a piece of paper on a door. But the name drew people into its vortex. The dominant influence in the CCRU became a 30-year-old mid-career researcher called Nick Land.

Land and the Ccru mixed together French critical theory, cyberpunk, science-fiction, cryptocurrency, drugs and post-humanism and created Accelerationism. Guardian journalist Andy Beckett has a good definition:

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified — either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

Accelerationalism began life as the British cousin of the Californian philosophy of Extropianism, which also began in the early 1990s (as I wrote here). There’s a similar anarcho-libertarian, hyper-capitalist worship of new technology and Millennarian expectation of a sudden leap beyond the human. But this wasn’t California, it was Coventry — and Ccru Accelerationism was much darker and more nihilistic than Californian transhumanism. After all, Land’s first book was called Thirst for Annihilation.

Land has said: ‘I have no interest in human liberation, or liberation of the human species. I’m interested in liberation of the means of production’. In other words, Accelerationism had nothing to do with expanding human potential. This was not Esalen self-help. This was about liberating the machine from the human. Accelerationism aimed to push capitalism further and faster, until it’s just machines whirring round in a lifeless universe. Pure Fordism.

The Ccru grew out of cybernetics, and the sense that humans are agents in a world full of other agents — machines, ecosystems, DNA, perhaps demons as well. All these entities have desires. Machines have desires. Why foreground human desires and aspirations? The obvious answer is because we’re human. But that’s not enough for post-human philosophies. For Accelerationists, the aim is the liberation of What Technology Wants. Here’s a quote from a good write-up by Yuxi Lin at LessWrong:

our world, with its cars, finances, AI, and other industrial technologies, has a clear goal of its own: a future dominated by more upgraded versions of these technologies, with humans becoming extinct or irrelevant.

You can come across this idea in Californian transhumanism / Extropianism too. It’s humans’ glorious destiny to be supplanted by AI. But transhumanists like Ray Kurzweill typically imagine super-intelligent spiritual machines, far smarter than humans. It’s a worship of intelligence and consciousness. With Accelerationism, at least in Land’s case, I get the feeling it’s more a misanthropic hatred of the human condition and a desire to annihilate consciousness and replace it with the machine. It’s philosophy as modish death-wish. That’s how I read it anyway.

Pot noodles and black magic

The Ccru was an unconventional academic research centre. The Guardian’s Andy Beckett interviewed philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant, a former undergrad in the CCRU, who recalls how Land’s office became a Ccru hub:

he had good drugs — skunk [cannabis]. Although it could be grim going in there, once he started living in his office. There would be a tower of Pot Noodles and underwear drying on the radiator, which he had washed in the staff loos.

Rather like Tim Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard, a personality cult grew up around Land. Another former student, Robin Mackay, recalls:

Before I met Land, I already knew of him through the gossip of new undergraduates taken aback by what they had heard on the grapevine: Did Land really claim that he had come back from the dead? Did he really think he was an android sent from the future to terminate human security? In person he belied these outrageous claims (both of which he did indeed make in writing), being thoroughly polite and amiable and, above all, willing to engage in earnest conversation with anyone…He preferred to spend his time in the bar with undergraduates, always buying the drinks, smoking continually, and conversing animatedly (and where possible, vehemently) about any topic whatsoever.

Land insists the Ccru became so tightly intertwined it became an ‘entity’…'irreducible to the agendas, or biographies, of its component sub-agencies … Utter submission to The Entity was key’.

It didn’t go in for publishing much, and preferred live events, like the Virtual Futures conferences held at Warwick in the mid-1990s, where DJs played drum-and-bass while Land writhed on the floor and screamed into a microphone. Land did occasionally write papers…on drum-and-bass.

The Ccru eventually got booted out of academia, and members moved to an apartment in Leamington Spa. Led by Land, the members got more and more into the occult, following the lead of Aleister Crowley, who had also lived in Leamington in the 1900s (indeed some of the Ccru rented his former house). Their writings from this period are obsessed with Theosophy, William Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, secret societies, strange rituals, Nazi eugenics, egregores and demonic entities — this is philosophy merged with science-fiction and occult horror. One of their ideas in this time is ‘hyperstition’, a play on superstition. This from a collection of Ccru texts:

According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical fiction, that is ultimately unworthy of belief. Nothing is true, because everything is under production.

So you can destabilize and remake reality with stories, sci-fi, with conspiracies and hoaxes (a similar idea to Crowleian chaos magic, or the mindfuck hoaxes of Robert Anton Wilson, or the ‘sci-phi’ fiction of Wilson and Leary in the 1970s). Here’s one of their fictional reports of their own activities:

Ccru’s contributions had taken the form of nightly ‘rituals’ dedicated to what they openly called ‘demons’… They claimed to traffick with demons who had told them many secrets drawn from a ‘Lemurian’ tradition of ‘time-sorcery’ that contained within itself everything that was and will be. Lemuria was supposedly an ancient sorcerous culture populated by nonhuman beings…Ccru also said that they had been taught to count by a sea-beast called Nomo which they had first summoned during an elaborate ritual with took place in Western Sumatra. It was clear to me from the unspoken undercurrent that human sacrifice had been involved, probably on a massive scale.

Did they really believe in occult numerology and Lemurian time travel? Who knows? Maybe! Meanwhile, they were taking more and more amphetamine. If transhumanism’s drug is MDMA or Modafinil, then Accelerationism’s was definitely Speed. Before long, several of the CCRU reportedly experienced breakdowns and Land himself had a meltdown, becoming ever-more obsessed with occult numerology.

According to Robin Mackay, ‘the Ccru became quasi-cultish, quasi-religious…it descended into sheer madness’. He writes

In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad.’ Afterwards he did not shrink from meticulously documenting this process, as if writing up a failed (?) experiment. He regarded the degeneration of his ‘breakthrough’ into a ‘breakdown’ as ultimate and humiliating proof of the incapacity of the human to escape the ‘headcase,’ the prison of the personal self.

In his last text from this period, ‘Meltdown’, Land scribbled like Kurtz in the jungle:

Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo.

Retro-disease.

Nanospasm.

Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve:

1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 …

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

In the late 1990s, the Ccru and Accelerationism splintered into different directions. Some members like Mark Fisher created a more left-wing Accelerationism, which challenged the idea that the ‘Progressive Left’ should merely be what Frederic Jameson called a ‘handbrake on progress’ and should instead be more…progressive. That meant embracing new technologies and being more radical than capitalism. He later called it ‘acid communism’.

Ccru members were also influential in culture. One former member, Steve Goodman, went on to become dubstep producer Kode9, who released the album ‘Nothing’, celebrating the idea of a post-human world of pure machines. The novelist Hari Kunzru emerged from the CCRU, as did Turner-prize-nominated Afrofuturist artists the Otolith Group. Nihilist arthouse edge-lords Jake and Dinos Chapman were also shaped by the Ccru and Land’s deathly vision. They say:

The combination of delirium and the crispest thinking turned the political pessimism of the time into an intensive fatalism that was productive without reserve. Land somehow stamped his mark on the death-drive, and anyone who had the courage to read his work was pulled along in the wake.

Land and the Neo-Reactionary Dark Enlightenment

Meanwhile, once Nick Land had recovered his sanity, he went to Shanghai, where he still lives, and started publishing again, gradually finding new young followers drawn to his modish dark philosophy.

He now lauded Asian authoritarian capitalism (China, Singapore) as true Accelerationism, as opposed to the sclerotic welfare democracies of the West, which groaned under the bullshit of liberal egalitarian ideology. He published an essay called Dark Enlightenment in 2013, in which he celebrated the vision of American far-right ‘Neo-reactionary’ Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug, and bought into his rejection of multicultural liberal democracy. Land wrote:

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative..If the state cannot be eliminated, Moldbug argues, at least it can be cured of democracy (or systematic and degenerative bad government), and the way to do that is to formalize it.

In other words, turn it into a corporation or a ‘gov-corp’ run by a CEO. ‘Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice, free exit.’ He used examples like Dubai and Singapore: ‘These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic freedom.’

This grumbling against the western democratic welfare state is popular with Silicon Valley tech-libertarians like Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan and (later, when he got red-pilled) Elon Musk, who didn’t like how western bureaucracy stood in the way of technological innovation. Tech-libertarians also despised Wokism and grievance culture, which they saw as getting in the way of meritocracy, rationalism and technological innovation (not to mention threatening their corporate control). For the Tech Right, everything that is good about San Francisco comes from them — the genius founders — while everything that is bad comes from left-wing progressivism. So why don’t the founders leave the shit-strewn streets of San Francisco and launch their own ‘start-up societies’, perhaps run by an enlightened founder-dictator, a modern Napoleon or Frederick the Great? Why not accelerate beyond mass democracy. ‘Democracy is not productive’, Land declared in 2013, never imagining that his and Curtis Yarvin’s fringe ideas could go mainstream, influence leading figures in the MAGA revolution and help inspire the appointment of a libertarian job-slasher for the US Gov-Corp - Elon Musk.

US Gov-Corp’s Tom and Greg

The Dark Enlightenment also accelerated beyond the liberal ideal of human equality and into race politics and techno-eugenics. Land, following Curtis Yarvin, now suggested that the West is dominated by a religious structure called the ‘Cathedral’ — a secular liberal ideology based on the idea humans are blank slates, and all differences in outcome are caused by social forces, especially systemic racism. But we’re not all the same, Land now insisted. This is the ‘big lie’. He’d clearly spent a lot of time on far-right ‘human biodiversity’ sites, which is the modern name for scientific racism, and was now utterly convinced that (a) there are such things as ‘races’, (b) these races have different IQs,(c) this is the reason for different outcomes in society, and (d) the more the Cathedral denies this, the quicker it will collapse.

He says the denial of this truth leads to a panicked siege mentality among the diminishing white populations in western societies, and an acceleration into far-right white supremacist racism:

white identity politics considers itself besieged. Moderate or measured concern offers no equilibrium for those who cross the line, and begin to self-identify in these terms. Instead, the path of involvement demands rapid acceleration to a state of extreme alarm, or racial panic, conforming to an analysis focused upon malicious population replacement at the hands of a government which, in the oft-cited words of Bertolt Brecht, “has decided to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one.”

What political programme suggests itself, if you passionately believe in ‘human biodiversity’? You could support a slow-down or cessation of immigration, or targeted immigration of ‘good types’. Land seems in this essay to see two more likely alternatives for the US — white secession, or race war. That appears to be the event horizon the west is accelerating towards, in his Dark Enlightenment essay.

But, as with National Socialism, these atavistic dreams of global race war also have a utopian science-fiction bent to them, in the idea of genetic modification, techno-eugenics and space exploration (Hitler in Mein Kampf said the Aryan master-race would dominate not just Earth but beyond Earth as well). Land wrote: ‘Approaching the bionic horizon, secessionism takes on an altogether wilder and more monstrous bearing — towards speciation.’

Land quotes a website called euvolution on the engineering of superbeings:

Reasoning that the majority of humankind will not voluntarily accept qualitative population-management policies….any attempt to raise the IQ of the whole human race would be tediously slow. Instead [we should pursue] elite eugenics — whose achievements would so quickly and radically outdistance the usual tempo of evolution that within ten generation the new groups will have advanced beyond our current form to the same degree that we transcend apes.

As William Gibson put it, the rich will become a whole other species.

Have a look at the euvolution website, by the way. At first glace it looks like a sort of New Age transhumanist website, dedicated to ‘conscious evolution’ and so forth.

But on closer inspection, it promotes a white supremacist version of transhumanism called Prometheism, or sometimes Cosmotheism, invented by physics professor turned far-right preacher William Luther Pierce. Pierce is famous, or notorious, for writing The Turner Diaries — a far-right novel in which a group of white secessionists called The Organization rebel against a Jewish-dominated United States, and finally overthrow it through nuclear war and the ‘Day of the Rope’, in which all ‘race traitors’ are executed. This book — which inspired the people who bought a noose to the January 6 riot — makes Hitler look moderate.

Day of the Rope

There is a mystical side to William Luther Pierce’s homicidal race-hate. He created his own church, Prometheism or Cosmotheism, dedicated to worshipping divine evolution and helping it to evolve higher beings (ie super-Aryans), through one-world government and eugenics. Pierce writes that there is a spiritual-biological hierarchy in nature, ascending through the animals and the human races, up to the Awakened Ones. This stock requires pruning:

those living things which weaken the stock from which the Awakened Ones arise, or deny it necessary sustenance, or pull down its potential for divine consciousness, are evil, and measures must be taken against them…The Community must judge all of these qualities, throughout the life of each member…It must judge the infant, and decide whether or not its future lies in the community…

This might seem a long way from where Land was in the 1990s, but its common root is ‘spiritual eugenics’ and Theosophy. German occult Theosophists like Rudolf Steiner and Guido von List also predicted a global race war between higher Aryans and subhuman non-whites, and also called for ‘cosmic eugenics’ to create superior beings.

Land projects this far-right transhumanism into space — he calls it ‘hyper-racism’. He says ‘space colonization will inevitably function as a highly selective genetic filter’. The tech elite will fly into space and become a different species.

This vision of space eugenics was first proposed by Timothy Leary, when he was in Folsom Prison in the early 1970s. As I explored here, Leary proposed that 5000 of the smartest, most attractive humans jet off into space and create a smarter, longer-living and more blissful species. Today, everyone from Freeman Dyson to Martin Rees to psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer believe new genetically-modified hominid species will emerge off-world. And sometimes this idea has a racist twist — white supremacist ecologist Garrett Hardin insisted any future space colony would need to be ethnically homogenous to avoid any racial bickering. Vikings on Mars, basically.

Silicon Valley’s embrace of (Effective) Accelerationism: Move Fast and Break Things

You might think Nick Land’s philosophy is too obscure and extreme to have much impact beyond the darker corners of the internet, but you’d be wrong. It’s been taken up by many influential figures in the US tech industry, and is now influencing Trump 2.0 policy, especially its embrace of breakneck AI development.