Even I’m kinda amazed at the amount of discussion ‘accelerationism’ has gotten in recent years, especially since 2016 on Reddit and various blogs [1] despite the brevity of content about it by the philosophy’s originator, Nick Land. Most philosophies are top-down: the philosopher writes a long treatise, and then readers pick it apart. But accelerationism is the opposite in that Nick Land has only scarcely written about it, totaling maybe maybe three brief posts about accelerationism , including a now-famous and viral article on Jacobitemag magazine in which he explains the philosophy. But aside from that article and a few short blog posts on his blog, Xenosystems, there isn’t a a whole lot else. This means readers have to fill the gaps as to Land’s intent, and in some instances try to define the meaning of accelerationism in and of itself. Incomplete philosophies are little more than hunches and are often dismissed as such, but accelerationism has definitely taken on a life of its own, much like an evolving lifeform, but applied to a philosophy whose definitions change [2], and yet in spite of the iterations bears some resemblance to its common ancestor–that is a shared distrust and critique of technological process. Like opensource software or a git hub repository, it evolves through edits and modifications, and the work is never completely finished. But it’s amazing how many people are aware of accelerationism, and is evidence of the great influence of the philosophy despite the difficulty of defining it or the absence of any sort of consensus. Even on non-philosophical subs such as /r/economics and /r/investing, mentions of accelerationism are not unnoticed, as if there is a sort of tacit and shared understanding between the author and the reader as to what it means even if cannot be defined or articulated explicitly.
As for myself, I’m going to wait until experts (besides Nick Land) weigh in on it.
[1] Once again, I turn to Reddit to gauge interest. A Google search reveals over 9,000 results for ‘accelerationism’ when restricted to the domain reddit.com, much of these results from 2016 and later.
[2] It has now splintered into left-accelerationism and right-accelerationism.