Arguably one of the most pervasive and consequential ideas of our time (dubbed the fringe philosophy that predicted our future” by The Guardian), accelerationism doesn’t just mean a sheer focus on growth at all costs, with the implied assumption that positive drift will absolve self-imposed, long-term market externalities.
From Facebook’s mantra of “move fast and break things”, to Steve Bannon’s belief in the inevitability of national collapse, for me the idea took on an even more potent role, emerging as a sort of meta-concept that represents a severely under-theorized modern zeitgeist.
In fact, coming at it from a more literary vein, this notion of acceleration also seems to operate at least one cognitive register above ideas such as solipsism or neoliberalism, summoning them up alongside the simultaneously disorienting rates of exponential change.
For many, it conjures images of extreme industrialization, rapid-fire development and obsessively strategic growth — at costs both incalculable and nonetheless external to the cost of exponential movement. To some, it might stand to represent technological progress, others cultural decay. No matter the flavor of one’s interpretation, the overarching trend is one difficult to deny: We seem to going somewhere quite fast.
This brings us to an aspect I find most interesting about accelerationism — that despite our personal decisions, as a collective we are all, inadvertently and unavoidably, as homo sapiens, on this accelerationist path of our own creation.
There’s a name for it, actually: The Great Acceleration, essentially our modern human condition since WWII, whereby technological progress has liberated our species to industrialize the planet — but also ravage the majority of its inhabitants in the process.
Actualizing our species’ primal urge to grow and evolve, we’ve ended up rapaciously plundering the planet, and now we seem fated to a path almost undoubtedly characterized by global crises and ecological catastrophe. Like Prometheus’s fire or some demiurgical spirit, we seem to have unleashed something we cannot put back. In this light, the infamous exponential trajectory might just as easily represent the curving wisp of a genie’s tale, escaping some ancient treasured lamp. 1
This concept of The Great Acceleration is often proposed as a demarcator for the Anthropocene, our current geological epoch whereby the impact of humans shapes our planet’s ecosystem more than any other geological force (earthquakes, volcanos, etc.).
It may seem like just another vocab term, but this idea of the Anthropocene is significant because it changes both the nature of the time we’re living in—no longer the holocene, characterized by stable, predictable weather patterns we ironically also relied upon to industrialize the planet, but now the Anthropocene, whereby weather systems will be much less predictable and more chaotic—it also gives us a chance at configuring the nature of what the pre-fix anthro even means.
In other words, humans seem to have plundered the planet we’re now living in, and so the Anthropocene seems poised to be another tenuous, chaotic, conflict-ridden time. But it also means have a looming chance to reconfigure, with this new understanding, what it means to be humans in the first place.
To bring it all full circle, it’s my sense that this fundamental reconsideration of what it even means to be human will be key to achieving a more beneficent, more delightful Anthropocene.
I believe it’s possible — but not without our collective attainment of technological reverence, fueled by an alchemical application of accelerationist ideals.