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Accelerationism
Article

Accelerationism

How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live In

Andy Beckett
The Guardian, 2017
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Editorial Rating

8

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Recommendation

While many people find today’s pace of change dizzying, “accelerationists” would like to pull out all the stops. Journalist Andy Beckett writes about a set of loosely related ideas and movements that either claim or have been categorized as “accelerationism.” What started out as a fringe ideology has come to attract thinkers from the left and right looking for an alternative to mainstream political thought. getAbstract recommends Beckett’s short history of an increasingly powerful set of ideas to political professionals and the general interest reader. 

Summary

In his 1967 science fiction novel Lord of Light, American author Roger Zelazny wrote about a group of people who sought to bring about a social revolution by changing people’s attitude toward technology. He named the group the “Accelerationists.” In the early 1970s, a fringe group of French Marxists picked up on the idea of accelerating social change by arguing that the left should allow the self-destructive forces of capitalism to run their course.

A group of philosophers at Warwick University, among them Nick Land, discovered...

About the Author

Andy Beckett is an author and feature writer for the Guardian. 

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