No Speed Limit

Three Essays on Accelerationism

2015

 • 

Author: 

Steven Shaviro

Accelerationism is the bastard offspring of a furtive liaison between Marxism and science fiction. Its basic premise is that the only way out is the way through: to get beyond capitalism, we need to push its technologies to the point where they explode. This may be dubious as a political strategy, but it works as a powerful artistic program.

Other authors have debated the pros and cons of accelerationist politics; No Speed Limit makes the case for an accelerationist aesthetics. Our present moment is illuminated, both for good and for ill, in the cracked mirror of science-fictional futurity.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

$10.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-9767-0
$4.95 ISBN 978-1-4529-4508-8
86 pages, 5 x 7, 2015

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/no-speed-limit

Is Consuming Like Crazy the Best Way to End Capitalism?

A conversation with philosopher Steven Shaviro about "accelerationism," which is essentially the belief that the best way to shorten capitalism's lifespan is to push it to the extreme.

By Charlie Ambler VICE
19.3.15



Hang out on Tumblr or in a dorm lounge long enough and eventually the talk will turn to ending capitalism. These discussions are all theoretical, of course—there have been endless attempts at shifting from our market-based economy to something more egalitarian and enlightened, but nothing has stuck, and some of the larger scale efforts have turned into horrific disasters. Anti-capitalists of various stripes haven't stopped coming up with theories about how this system could finally fall, however. One of these theories is called accelerationism—the idea is that hyper-stimulation of the market on a mass scale will end with the collapse of capitalism. Consume like crazy, only drink from styrofoam, and throw handfuls of dead batteries into our oceans so the impending apocalypse can hurry up and get over with.

The spread of this idea is rooted in Marx's belief that capitalism can't sustain itself forever and will eventually fizzle out. The means by which people will bring about its end are unclear, but that's where the ideas about accelerationism come from. Accelerationism is essentially the belief that the best way to shorten capitalism's lifespan is to push it to the extreme. If normal capitalism is Mick Jagger, accelerationism is Jim Morrison.

A while back, Steven Shaviro, who teaches at Detroit's Wayne State and studies the impact of technological capitalism on culture and everyday life, wrote an essay about accelerationism, explaining what it is in language that wasn't clouded by the usual academic jargon. Accelerationism has been explored by philosophers like Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, but Shaviro has become known as an authority on the topic—probably because he can articulate these complex philosophical ideas in a simple way that we plebs can understand. Shaviro just finished up a book out on accelerationism called No Speed Limit, so I called him up to learn more about the theory and see whether my Amazon Prime addiction is actually helping society.

VICE: Accelerationism confuses me, but what I do understand is really interesting. Can you tell me a little more about it?

Steven Shaviro: Broadly defined, "accelerationism" is the idea that the only way out is the way through. If we want to get beyond the current social and economic order and reach a post-capitalist future, then we need to push through all the messy complications of capitalism, rather than revert to something supposedly older and purer.

Accelerationism rejects certain ideas currently popular on the left, like "small is beautiful," and the Luddite enmity towards new technologies. Instead, it urges us to embrace and repurpose all the most advanced technologies.

If computational technologies are eliminating millions of jobs, then the best response is not to demand the jobs back, but to spread the wealth—to give back what the 1 Percent has stolen from everybody else—so that people can afford to lead comfortable lives without always worrying about the cost of housing or the size of their credit card bills.

Fascinating. I always thought accelerationism basically said that the most impactful anti-capitalist was the captain of industry. Like, pushing the system faster and increasing inequality even more will help destroy it. But maybe that's not the case? How can the redistribution of wealth be considered an accelerationist move?

There are different varieties of accelerationism. At one extreme, accelerationism might embrace the idea that the worse things get, the better the prospect for a revolution to overthrow everything. This seems obviously foolish to me, and I don't think that it is actually advocated by many accelerationists.

Much more subtly, Marx claimed that the contradictions that beset capitalism would eventually lead to a struggle between workers and capitalists. He hoped that this struggle would end in the establishment of communism, but he warned that it could also result in "the mutual destruction of the contending parties."

Are you saying that the end is near?

Marx was saying that, due to its inherent strains and stresses, capitalism will lead to catastrophe if it isn't somehow overcome. This is an accelerationist view, to the extent that it sees the possibilities for overcoming capitalism arising out of the very development of capitalism as a world system. But this doesn't happen in any mechanistic or predetermined way.

As for how redistribution of wealth might be related to accelerationism—when somebody like Thomas Piketty argues for global taxes in order to force a redistribution of wealth, he is trying to save the capitalist system from its own self-destructive excesses. But as Slavoj Zizek has observed, the rich will never pay such a tax voluntarily; so just getting such a tax enacted would involve other changes as well, indeed radical ones that would change capitalism substantially.

This is fascinating, for someone who was spoon-fed a lot of simplified Marxism in college. What further reading would you recommend on the topic?

Read #Accelerate—The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, for important essays about accelerationism, and Malign Velocities, by Benjamin Noys, for a critique of accelerationism. My short book on the topic, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism, has just come out from the University of Minnesota Press.

Cool. Can you explain what your other book, The Universe of Things, is about?

The book is about speculative realism—a recent philosophical movement that tries to consider what it would really mean to consider the universe as it exists in and for itself, apart from us. Psychologists have shown that our perception of the world is never objective; it is molded by our own needs and interests, both on the individual level, and in general, evolutionary terms. We notice what matters immediately to us, and often fail to notice what doesn't.

Speculative realism asks how it might be possible to approach things in the world, apart from the meanings and classifications that we impose upon them. If we were truly able to do this, what would we find?

Sounds like a good humanity-wide exercise in humility. How'd you get into it?

"Speculative realism" only became a term in 2007, when a philosophy conference was held with that title. The thinkers grouped under this title are very different from one another, and often have sharp disagreements. But they all question the notion that "man is the measure of all things."

They urge us to pay more attention to nonhuman entities, even nonliving entities, and to consider how all these entities are not just tools we use, or impediments to our actions, but "actants"—as the French sociologist Bruno Latour calls them—in their own right. They have their own tendencies, desires, and needs.

That's especially important at this point in history.

Right! At a time of impending ecological catastrophe, it is important for us to recognize as fully as possible the presence of the entities that share the world with us.

SMOKERS’ CORNER: BIG TECH'S BIG RUSH

Accelerationism emerged in the 1990s from the fringes of British academia as a postmodernist take on Marxism. 

Nadeem F. Paracha 

 February 9, 2025 

EOS/DAWN

Illustration by Abro

Everyone seems to be in a hurry. This impatience is not about what was once called ‘the rat race.’ The rat race was towards a well-defined goal. Yet, it was cyclic for most. Round and round they went. The faster they ran, the stronger the system that they were a part of got. The race was organised by a well-oiled bureaucracy, and overseen by governments and corporations that provided incentives for people to stay in the race.

Increasingly, however, people are dropping out of the old rat race. It had turned them into nuts and bolts in a machine. Their goal was to survive and race up a mechanical hierarchy, even though most just kept going in circles. From the late 1920s till the early 1970s, the rat race remained to be a thing.

However, from the 1990s, when digital technology first began to expand, it introduced itself as the tool with the potential to dismantle the old machine and free the people trapped inside it. Instead of people going in circles to achieve ‘meaningless’ goals, the new technology was to ‘empower’ them to become individuals who could write their own destinies.

The creators of this technology promised that it would unleash “direct democracy”, increase “real communication” and usher in a system in which anyone willing to use their imagination, creativity and “dream big” would have the opportunity to prosper.

Technological advancements come with the notion that they are liberating people from the old, soulless forms of capitalism. But are people being duped and led towards societal collapse and an authoritarian techno-capitalist future?

But, eventually, the new technology ended up creating a whole new machine: “Techno-capitalism.” Being part of this machine is not as ‘soulless’ as it was in the old one. In fact, the new machine is addictive. It feeds illusions of freedom and power to what are still nuts and bolts. People flock inside it like sheep, but with each believing they are “different”, “unique”, and “special”.

The capitalism that was active from the 1930s till at least the early 1970s was constantly modified to co-opt various aspects from ideas that were actually opposed to capitalism. This was done to keep those in the rat race from causing any disruption.

The capitalism produced by the new machine glorifies everything digital. It glamorises artificial intelligence (AI) and popularises words such as “disruption”. It has made billionaires out of the ‘nerds’ who oversee its workings. The new machine’s nuts and bolts are unlike those of the old machine. These ones are made to believe that they are functioning of their own free will. They really aren’t.

The billionaires who oversee the workings of the new machine are not like old capitalists who were only interested in profit, but were also willing to modify their ambitions to mitigate the possibility of the nuts and bolts rebelling against the machine. Unlike the owners of the old machine, those running the new one are “incurable idealists.” Yes, you read that right. At least this is how they often portray themselves.

They position their businesses not as enterprises gunning for profit, but as conscientious projects which — through cutting-edge technology— will end environmental degradation, disease, poverty etc. This is often referred to as “techno-optimism.” To its critics, though, it’s a scam.

For example, techno-optimists have been touting electric vehicles as an effective means to mitigate greenhouse gases. But The Guardian reported in January 2023 that, in the US alone, transition to electric vehicles could require three times as much lithium as is currently produced for the entire global market.

Techno-optimists have also been hailing the potential of AI to resolve various long-standing problems. But, according to a July 2023 report in Scientific America, AI technology is likely to get worse, because the shoddy AI-generated content that is already on the internet is corrupting the training data for models to come.

The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis refuses to call tech billionaires, ‘techno-capitalists.’ According to him, capitalism is being replaced by “feudalism in a digital guise” or “techno-feudalism.” Millions of people serve big tech overlords by handing over data to access their ‘cloud space.’ To Varoufakis, the consumers of tech giants are modern-day serfs.

In January this year, at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration ceremony, heads of major American tech companies were seen posing for a photograph. This is the same event in which the billionaire Elon Musk was accused of making the Nazi salute. He is a declared Trump supporter, but the alleged Nazi salute saw some of his critics claim that he was an “accelerationist”.

‘Accelerationism’ is a philosophy that seeks to speed up the intensification of societal collapse, to create a new order. Accelerationists look to use digital technology and its social, economic and political impact to bring forward a collapse that they say is inevitable.




Accelerationism emerged in the 1990s from the fringes of British academia as a postmodernist take on Marxism. Whereas the 19th century philosopher Karl Marx’s prediction of capitalism collapsing under its own weight, followed by a communist utopia, failed to materialise, the expansion of digital technology in the 1990s excited a group of young British academics who saw the end of capitalism caused by the “liberating” potentials of digital technology.

One of the leading thinkers of accelerationism was Nick Land. Convinced that the new technology would puncture capitalism, he advocated its acceleration through various means, so that a new, “more equitable order” that he and his colleagues were anticipating would arrive much earlier.

Land eventually ended up living in China, which he claimed was “the most accelerationist state.” Interestingly, though, on his return to England, Land’s accelerationism wasn’t seeking a more equitable order anymore. It was now seeking authoritarian city-states, with each being ruled by CEOs.

Land then went on to become a guru of sorts for far-right groups. He also became popular among big tech heads. He urged his followers to bring populists such as Trump to power.

To accelerationists, right-wing populists became important because they (the populists) seek to do away with “limitations” such as economic regulations and “worn out” government and state institutions.

Apparently, this, coupled with tech giants and their technology, will bring forward a future controlled by authoritarian CEO types in charge of technologically advanced city-states. The presence of big tech folk at Trump’s presidential inauguration has sparked fears that this dystopian version of accelerationism has seeped into big tech companies.

It won’t be far-fetched to assume that people’s impatience today is being triggered by accelerated digital technology, on its way to land the world in an authoritarian techno-capitalist future. So do stop and smell the flowers every now and then. Slow down.

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 9th, 2025

#Accelerate
The Accelerationist Reader
Robin Mackay
Armen Avanessian
(Editors)

ORIGINAL EDITION
£20.00 / $24.95
Paperback
175×115mm
536pp
E-book also available
Published with Merve Verlag
Cover Design: Leaky Studio
Type: Norm

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Accelerationism
Artificial Intelligence
Capitalism
CCRU
Cyberpunk
Singularity
Technology

An engaging, eccentric anthology…it’s refreshing to encounter a ‘left’ project for the future that wants to reclaim the idea of technology, industry and planet-scale thinking.
—JJ Charlesworth, ArtReview

Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.

On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own ‘Prometheanism’, and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.

At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of ‘reasonable’ contemporary political alternatives.

CONTENTS
REVIEWS/PRESS
Introduction Robin Mackay Armen Avanessian PDF
Anticipations
Fragment on Machines Karl Marx
The Book of the Machines Samuel Butler
The Common Task Nicolai Fedorov
The Machine Process and the Natural Decay of the Business Enterprise Thorstein Veblen
Ferment
The Two Modes of Cultural History Shulamith Firestone
Decline of the Capitalist Mode of Production or Decline of Humanity? Jacques Camatte
The Civilized Capitalist Machine Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari
Energumen Capitalism Jean-François Lyotard
Every Political Economy is Libidinal Jean-François Lyotard
Power of Repetition Gilles Lipovetsky
Fictions of Every Kind J.G. Ballard
Desirevolution Jean-François Lyotard
Cyberculture
Circuitries Nick Land
LA 2019 Iain Hamilton Grant
Cyberpositive Sadie Plant Nick Land
Cybernetic Culture CCRU
Swarmachines CCRU
Acceleration
Terminator vs Avatar Mark Fisher
#Accelerate Alex Williams Nick Srnicek
Some Reflections on the #Accelerate Manifesto Antonio Negri
Red Stack Attack! Tiziana Terranova
Automated Architecture Luciana Parisi
The Labor of the Inhuman Reza Negarestani
Prometheanism and its Critics Ray Brassier
Maximum Jailbreak Benedict Singleton
Teleoplexy Nick Land
Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism Patricia Reed

Political split over Bardot funeral with Le Pen to attend but not Macron

French President Emmanuel Macron will not attend Brigitte Bardot’s funeral next week in Saint-Tropez, while far-right leader Marine Le Pen will be present, after the late actress’s family declined the idea of an official state tribute.


Issued on: 31/12/2025 - RFI

Former French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot in February 2004. © Charles Platiau / Reuters

The Élysée Palace said on Tuesday it had been in contact with Bardot’s family following the announcement of her death on Sunday, and that a national tribute had been proposed but not accepted.

The presidency said the proposal followed “republican custom”, adding that such tributes are “systematically decided by mutual agreement with the deceased’s relatives”.

No agreement was reached in this case.


Right-left divide

The question of whether France should honour one of its most famous film stars in an official capacity has nonetheless divided the political class.

Since Bardot’s death was announced, debate has largely followed right-left lines.

Eric Ciotti, president of the UDR, a right-wing party allied with the National Rally, launched a petition calling for a national tribute. Bardot had long-standing ties to the far right and was openly close to the party.

On the left, the response was more cautious. Olivier Faure, leader of the Socialist Party, described Bardot as “an iconic actress” but said national honours were reserved for those who had rendered “exceptional services to the nation”.

He also referred to her repeated convictions for racist and homophobic remarks, saying she had ultimately “turned her back on republican values”.

In any case, Macron will not attend the funeral, scheduled for 7 January in Saint-Tropez, which will be held in private.

Relations between Bardot and the president had long been strained. In 2023, she sent him an open letter accusing him of failing to act on animal welfare. “I am angry at your inaction, your cowardice, your contempt for the French people, who, it is true, treat you well in return,” she wrote.

Photos of Brigitte Bardot hang on a security barrier near her home in Saint-Tropez, southern France, 28 December 2025. © Philippe Magoni / AP

Personal ties

Relations were far warmer with Marine Le Pen, who has been invited to the funeral and will attend “in a personal and friendly capacity”, according to her entourage.

Bardot had been close to Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and was married for three decades to a former adviser to the founder of the National Front.

She shared many of the movement’s views, including her opposition to what she once described as “the terrifying rise of immigration”.

Her support was not limited to private sympathy. In 2012, she publicly urged mayors to sponsor Marine Le Pen’s first presidential bid.

After Bardot’s death was announced on Sunday, the National Rally leader responded by praising an “exceptional woman” who was “incredibly French – free, indomitable, wholehearted”.

Bardot backs far-right leader Le Pen's attempt to stand for president

Funeral arrangements

Beyond politics, the two women were also linked by a shared commitment to animal welfare. Bardot devoted herself to the cause through the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, while Marine Le Pen is known to have studied cat breeding.

The foundation said the funeral ceremony at the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption church would be broadcast on large screens outside.

This will be followed by a private burial at the marine cemetery, ahead of a “tribute open to all the residents of Saint-Tropez and her admirers”.

Speaking to the local daily Var-Matin on Tuesday, the town’s mayor Sylvie Siri said: “Come that time, everyone will talk about her and share their fondest memories of her.”

“It will be a great moment of communion – simple, just like her,” she added.

(with newswires)

Wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism

Ecofascism - Wikipedia

Ecofascism, sometimes spelled eco-fascism, is a term used to describe individuals and groups which combine environmentalism with fascism.

Earth.orgearth.org/what-is-ecofascism/

Explainer: What Is Ecofascism? - Earth.Org

Aug 17, 2021 ... A strain of eco-fascism was also found in Nazi ideology. As one of ... Ecofascism poses a real threat even today. Two mass killings ...

Uconn.edutoday.uconn.edu/2022/09/a-darker-shade-of-green/

A Darker Shade of Green: Understanding Ecofascism - UConn Today

Sep 7, 2022 ... A Darker Shade of Green: Understanding Ecofascism. A UConn expert ... fascism, which many political theorists say is less about ideology ...

Gnet-research.orggnet-research.org/2025/04/30/ecofascism-and-green-accelerationism-ghosts-of-the-past-or-a-present-danger/

EcoFascism and Green Accelerationism: Ghosts of the Past or a ...

Apr 30, 2025 ... As such, the Siege pill (accelerationism) may follow the green pill (eco-fascism).” A combination of eco-fascist ideals and accelerationism ...

Earthworks.orgearthworks.org/blog/eco-fascism-a-tangible-present-danger/

Eco-fascism: a tangible & present danger - Earthworks

Oct 28, 2022 ... As an ideology, eco-fascism promotes “authoritarian, hierarchical, and racist analyses and solutions to environmental problems.” Eco-fascists ...

Frontiersin.orgwww.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2024.1373872/full

Eco-fascism: an oxymoron? Far-right nationalism, history, and the ...

This article explores the use of the term “eco-fascism” in connection with the climate crisis and considers the political relationship between ecologism and ...

Greeneuropeanjournal.euwww.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/green-supremacy-when-far-right-politics-co-opts-environmentalism/

Green Supremacy: When Far-Right Politics Co-opts Environmentalism

May 24, 2023 ... Ecofascism creates a twisted and corrupted view of environmentalism, where authoritarianism, nationalism, and racial purity become primary tools and solutions.

Theguardian.comwww.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/30/eco-fascists-and-the-ugly-fight-for-our-way-of-life-as-the-environment-disintegrates

Eco-fascists and the ugly fight for 'our way of life' as the environment ...

Nov 29, 2019 ... Genuine fascists remain on the political margins, but we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy.

The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity

The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.


Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.
(Photo by Marco Bello/Getty Images)

João Camargo
Aug 27, 2025

Common Dreams

Sitting face to face on grey sofas, Peter Thiel and Ross Douthat continued another propaganda piece for the New York Times. Thiel is the billionaire owner and founder of Palantir, the world's largest private surveillance company, one of the biggest financiers of OpenAI and one of Silicon Valley's most influential ideologues. Douthat asked Thiel, "You would prefer the human race to endure, right?" After hesitating, Thiel replied, "I don't know." A glimpse of the impact of his response and the journalist's astonishment led him to amend his statement: "I, I would prefer, I would prefer." Would he, though?

Thiel is one of the main promoters of the archaic ideology that dominates the thinking of men such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Andreessen Horowitz, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates. Although these tech moguls are presented as neutral or technology driven, reality is different. Their adaptation to the far-right is no longer surprising. The techlords have laid some of the cornerstones of authoritarian politics and provided the means for the rise of the new ideology of a return to the past.

So what do Thiel and the other techlords stand for? Their ideological base revolves around something called the "Dark Enlightenment", also known as the "Neo-Reactionary Movement." It is a mixture of libertarian doctrines with scientific racism, an anti-historical vision of a return to feudalism and an acceleration toward social and environmental collapse. According to Curtis Yarvin, another of its ideologues, this shadowy enlightenment is the formal recognition of the realities of existing power, aligning property rights with current political power and defending that "corporate power should become the organizing force in society." They seek to assert inequality not as an accident, but as a structure. For all practical purposes, the ideology of the techlords aims to overthrow any democratic illusion and install in its place a feudal division of territories, under which the supreme lords, technological monarchs, President-CEOs, the Techlords, would rule.

We can see what they aspire to in the most banal science fiction: a Star Wars world with a Supreme Emperor who rules the entire galaxy; a Dune world where noble houses dominate technologies, planets, resources and religions; or a Hunger Games world where, after a global rebellion, production has been forcibly distributed geographically and different peoples have to kill each other to entertain the elite. The ideology is so lazy that it has not evolved beyond the books that mostly teenagers read for entertainment during the holidays. The rejection of formal education, with these men abandoning university studies, so touted in the "self-made man" propaganda they peddle about themselves, has deprived them of essential information about history, biology, chemistry, physics, and other key areas of knowledge. The markets reward their audacious ignorance by offering praise and money in exchange for each usurpation. No wonder they think they are demigods and seek ideological rationalisations for their privilege. For the techlords, the reading of these works of popular science fiction culture is contrary to the instincts of people with a basic sense of justice. In Star Wars, they defend Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader; in The Hunger Games, the Capitol and President Snow.

Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right.

In a work such as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where eugenics runs through the narrative from all sides, the techlords seem to support the most perfidious position. Palantir, the company Peter Thiel created to surveil, steal data, and hand it over to authoritarian governments or whoever pays him, is a name taken from this fiction. Palantir is a crystal ball that reveals information, but is actually being used by the main villain, Sauron, to deceive and pervert wizards and kings, turning them against their territories and peoples. It would be difficult to interpret this name in any other way.

The ideology of the techlords is directly opposed to democracy, which they see as an obstacle to the accumulation and maintenance of wealth and power by the rich. They advocate corporate monarchies and authoritarian city-states controlled by themselves, praising Singapore as a model. To destroy democracy, they advocate dismantling the institutional apparatus of nation states, not because of any oppression or inequality, but to ensure that injustices have no social opposition and that, if opposition does arise, it can be strongly repressed. They advocate the removal of almost all public officials and services, increasing the numbers of the armed forces and police, building up the capacity for repression by the powers that be, no longer public, but corporate and business. The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, combined with the expansion of a militia-style political police force such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is a trial run of this. This month, the US government announced a $10 billion contract with Palantir to create a super database that aggregates information from all federal agencies and a platform to detect migratory movements in real time.

Another cornerstone of techlord ideology is accelerationism, which advocates the removal of all restrictions on capitalist growth and technological development, even if this leads to social and environmental collapse. As Zuckerberg said, "Move fast and break things." This idea does not differ fundamentally from neoliberal ideology but, unlike the latter, it does not hide the fact that social collapse is a goal of deregulation, rather than a side effect to be ignored or concealed. The removal of restrictions in accelerationism actually serves to create social breakdowns that allow the techlords to establish themselves as the new masters. Because they are accelerationists, they describe any opposition to their ideological infrastructure—social networks, "Artificial Intelligence," trips to Mars or outer space—as attacks on progress. This is the ideological strand that is trying to create a widespread feeling that the development of Large Language Models, touted as "Artificial Intelligence," is inevitable. There is no possibility that language models will not be biased and racist. Building on these and other prejudices, accelerationism argues that we must ignore the current suffering of billions of people in order to optimize technological developments that will create the environment in which future humans will colonize space. This suffering is destined for people other than the techlords, who are constantly building bunkers to hide in.

Added to the techlords' beliefs are other segments of science fiction, all of them anti-scientific: the imminent colonization of space, the physical fusion of humans with digital technology, the Singularity (the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence), and the childish idea that "Artificial Intelligence," Large Language Models, will solve all of humanity's problems. Authors such as Yuval Noah Harari and fields of "research" such as AI Safety are attempting to consolidate these ideas in popular culture and academia.

The science fiction in the minds of these billionaires, articulated with the orphaned leaders of the new fascist movements on the rise, has concrete and material effects. They are producing, in addition to suffering on a massive scale, a catastrophic waste of time and resources in the face of the greatest crisis in human history, the climate crisis. The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens. They lead a political movement that is rising today against the future of our entire species, seeking to subjugate all societies to a technological dystopia in which CEOs rule and behave like survivors of the apocalypse (and what is Elon Musk's reproductive frenzy if not his idea that he can be the warlord after the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead, i.e., climate collapse, and repopulate the world and the galaxy as a new Adam?).

Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right. They already use "Artificial Intelligence" to impose their ideology on education, information, public services, justice, the arts, and every field they can usurp. They have set the traps, and we have been caught in them for a long time. The mainstream digital space is a straitjacket of complacency and a black hole of energy and ideas. Algorithms isolate us and deprive us of information that is useful for our collective life. The techlords and their ideology are mortal enemies of humanity and will stop at nothing to impose their dystopias in the coming years, trying to prevent us from stopping the collapse of all human civilisations. To make the digital space controlled by Meta, Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon a battlefield is to accept fighting underwater with our hands tied and weights on our feet. But it is in their arrogant ignorance that their vulnerabilities lie. These giants do indeed have feet of clay that must be knocked down, and their ideology is central to this: They despise material reality, reject the collective and the social as realities, and are submerged in fiction. Moving away from their preferred playing field, social media, may be one of the first steps toward their demise.

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João Camargo
Joao Camargo is a climate activist in grassroots movement Climaximo in Portugal and in the Climate Jobs campaign. He's an environmental engineer and climate change researcher at the University of Lisbon and the author of two books: Climate Change Combat Manual (in Portugal and Spain) and Portugal in Flames - How to rescue the forests.
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HATEWATCH

Texas Man Arrested on Charges of Terroristic Threats Ran White Power Telegram Channel

June 16, 2021
Cassie Miller and Hannah Gais


A Texas man arrested on charges related to an alleged plot to carry out a mass shooting at a Walmart ran a white supremacist Telegram channel enamored with terrorism, Hatewatch has learned.

Police arrested Coleman Thomas Blevins on May 28 in Kerrville, Texas. The Kerr County Sheriff’s Office stated in a press release that they had issued a warrant for Blevins’ arrest and charged him with making a “terroristic threat to create public fear of serious bodily injury.” Blevins’ connections to the white supremacist movement are blatant: Police published a photo displaying a number of texts associated with the white power movement, including William Luther Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” as well as a Confederate flag and another bearing a Sonnenrad, a type of sunwheel commonly used as a neo-Nazi symbol.

Blevins has a history of drug offenses. Police allege he had a stash of firearms, ammunition and concentrated THC at the time of his arrest. Authorities decided to hold Blevins in the Kerr County Jail on a $250,000 bond. Like many of the perpetrators or suspected perpetrators of some of the most recent acts of white supremacist terror, Blevins was immersed in a violent digital subculture where users can simultaneously affiliate with a variety of white power communities.


Coleman Thomas Blevins booking photo via Kerr County Sheriff's Office

The collection of extremist symbols also pointed to Blevins’ involvement with the online white power movement now flourishing on Telegram. Police showed evidence of two T-shirts, both bearing the logos of racist Telegram channels. One channel, which Hatewatch has elected not to name so as to reduce its visibility, uses a logo of a white syringe encircled by a shield. There, Blevins posted under the variations on the username “Korb.” Another T-shirt bears the logo of the National Partisan Movement (NPM), a youth-targeted neo-Nazi group with members in the U.S. and abroad, according to Hope Not Hate. While it is unclear whether Blevins was a member, he did say during a self-described “free speech” podcast recorded in March that his Telegram channel was “affiliated” with NPM, and his own channel has frequently shared their propaganda.

Blevins did not respond to a request for comment. As of the morning of June 17, Blevins' Telegram channel appeared to be banned for a violation of the platform's terms of service agreement.

Blevins’ case is indicative of a broader shift within the white power movement. Far-right extremists are increasingly congregating on decentralized online spaces such as Telegram. Dedication to white supremacy and accelerationist strategies – which presume terroristic violence to be the sole means of ushering in a white ethnostate – takes precedent over a commitment to any particular organized group.
Blevins’ footprint on Telegram

Following Blevins’ arrest, a number of channel operators on Telegram began posting in support of the arrested man, referring to him as “Korb.” Some far-right extremists – including from a channel claiming to be the Estonia-based neo-Nazi group Feuerkrieg Division – adapted Blevins’ mugshot into propaganda. In a channel belonging to a podcast associated with the white nationalist podcasting network The Right Stuff, a moderator claimed Blevins had tried to join one of their chatrooms in summer 2020 while posting under the username Kørb Seppükrieg. The post implied he was booted out for trolling.

Hatewatch identified Korb as one of the main contributors to that channel through chatter on Telegram after his arrest, the presence of a shirt bearing the channel’s logo, and the fact that his channel was set up to show the usernames of contributors whenever they posted to the channel. (Telegram allows channel moderators to show their usernames at the bottom of each post, in order to allow users to know exactly who has posted a piece of content.) Though Korb changed his display name on a number of occasions, all variations of the username included “Korb” in some capacity. Korb left other clues to his identity. In a video “Korbe” posted on the channel associated with one of the T-shirts police seized during Blevins’ arrest on April 10, a man wearing a skull mask said he was “ready to fucking die” in front of a stone wall with a cutout of the state of Texas, where Blevins lives. Another image, posted on April 30 by “Kørbe,” matched three of the books seized by authorities, including the same edition of “The Turner Diaries.”

Blevins’ Telegram channel was created on Feb. 1, after the company carried out a widespread purge of white supremacist channels on the platform in an apparent response to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. His group’s propaganda blended a variety of themes, using imagery associated with Hitler’s Germany, the “war on terror” and the Eastern Orthodox Church. In late February, Blevins began posting original content, featuring the group’s logo and name, created by a number of young female artists.

Blevins has used the “Korb” moniker outside Telegram as well. For instance, in March, he appeared on a podcast streamed live on Facebook and other platforms as a representative of the National Partisan Movement.
Accelerationism moves out of the fringes

Blevins’ views are in many ways representative of recent trends within the white power movement. His Telegram channel subscribed to the strategy of accelerationism, making several references to an impending bloody breakdown in society. “You know you want holy war now,” he posted on May 13. Accelerationism as a tactic embraces terroristic violence with the goal of sparking a revolutionary race war, and contradicts the wing of the white power movement that seeks political power through electoral politics.

While accelerationists sat at the fringes of the white power movement during the early years of Trump’s presidency, their ethos now occupies a prominent place within the movement, exemplified by the proliferation of cell-style groups and networks with explicitly revolutionary goals.

Telegram has become the preferred platform of white power accelerationists in recent years. There, administrators can create public “channels,” where they can post text, images and videos up to two gigabytes. Users can also join private and public encrypted chats with up to 200,000 members. Telegram and companies such as Apple have made some attempts to remove or quarantine violent white supremacist channels, either on the app or on specific devices. But, as SPLC research has shown, this has had minimal effect on these channels’ membership. Channel administrators have found simple workarounds, and many of the accelerationist channels that had been restricted in some way experienced triple-digit growth throughout 2020.

Blevins’ channel shared an aesthetic with a Telegram network that its followers call “Terrorgram.” That network, which started as only a few dozen channels, solidified on the platform around mid-2019. Users and channels associated with the network advocate for political terror, express reverence for past acts of white supremacist terrorism, venerate white supremacist killers such as Dylann Roof as “saints” and share information about how to construct explosives and homemade firearms through posts, PDFs, memes and videos. The platform has helped facilitate the emergence of an increasingly decentralized movement, where individuals can move fluidly between different groups and subsets of the white power movement without ever having to officially join an organization.

The diffuse nature of the movement has allowed individuals such as Blevins to claim they represent “a conglomeration of seemingly disparate creeds” – or, at the very least, seemingly disparate influences.

Eclectic religious influences with standard white power fare

Neo-Nazi paraphernalia and texts were seized during the arrest of Coleman Thomas Blevins. (Photo via Kerr County Sheriff's Office)

While he said that the group had no Muslim members, Blevins said that its “contributors” ranged from the violent white power group The Base “to the Mujahideen.” A professed “fanatic Christian,” Blevins has an online presence littered with references to jihadism, and a photo from the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office made public at the time of his arrest show officers found a Saudi flag in Blevins’ home alongside neo-Nazi paraphernalia. But right-wing extremists are opportunists who have, at times, co-opted revolutionary violence across the globe as their own, resulting in an apparent surface-level affinity for guerrilla fighters and international terrorist organizations originating in the Middle East. White power groups such as Atomwaffen Division and Feuerkrieg Division have used images of Osama bin Laden and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria propaganda videos, respectively, in propaganda of their own.

This same tendency toward eclectic influences extended to Blevins’ apparent interest in symbolism associated with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Police found a banner in the style of a calvary cross. The symbol is a variant of the Orthodox three-bar cross – which features three horizontal crossbeams instead of one – that is situated on a small platform intended meant to represent Calvary, the site where Christians believe Jesus Christ was crucified. The particular banner that police found in Blevins’ house “bears a striking resemblance to the garments worn by Russian Orthodox schema monks,” Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a postdoctoral fellow in the “Recovering Truth” project at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University, told Hatewatch in an email. However, a commentator in a chatroom associated with Blevins’ Telegram channel noted shortly after his arrest, “To be honest, he could not distinguish Russia from Ukraine either.”

Riccardi-Swartz, whose forthcoming book studies American converts to Russian Orthodoxy in the United States, saw parallels to other far-right extremists who have taken an interest in the Orthodox Church, particularly among men.

“In the U.S. we see increasing interest from radicalized males (those who consider themselves white nationalists, America First groypers, neo-Southern secessionists etc.) in Russian Orthodoxy, in the Tsar Nicholas II, and in Vladimir Putin,” she noted.

“Part of this is a desire for authoritarian strongman rule, part of this is an expression of toxic masculinity and whiteness preservation, and part of this is existential angst over social changes and progressive social politics in the United States.”

However, many of the texts police found in Blevins’ possession are standard fare within the radical right. In addition to “The Turner Diaries,” Blevins had a copy of Italian philosopher Julius Evola’s "Revolt Against the Modern World." Evola’s 1934 book argues for “traditionalism,” built on social and racial hierarchy, and insists that “total catharsis and a radical ‘housecleaning’” are necessary responses to the modern world. Admired by Benito Mussolini, Evola has gained influence within the far right in the last decade, thanks in part to praise from Steve Bannon and to white nationalist presses who have republished his work.

The same police images showed that Blevins had a copy of “Harassment Architecture,” an accelerationist fantasy self-published by former Breitbart contributor Mike Mahoney (under the pen name Mike Ma). Mahoney’s 2019 book has made him a darling of accelerationists, as “Harassment Architecture” is full of violent fantasy and exhortations. “Kill someone important! Burn something down! Cut yourself for attention! Anything! The gas pedal is waiting to be stepped on,” he writes.
‘This is a doomsday cult’

Blevins described participation in far-right extremism as a remedy for personal suffering. “It is sobriety to enact the 14 words,” he said, speaking as “Korb” on a March podcast with the National Partisan Movement. The 14 words is a phrase popularized by neo-Nazi terrorist David Lane. He continued, “Extremism and purpose is the only way to abstain from bad habits.” He attributed the group’s logo to the fact that he envisioned it as an “extremist alternative to the Twelve Step Program.”

Though Blevins did not reference his own history with substances, public records indicate he has been charged three times in the past on drug-related offenses – first in February 2014, then in October 2015, and finally in late 2016. A news report from Blevins’ 2015 arrest said that authorities had found heroin in his car after they pulled him over for a traffic violation.

Far-right extremist groups do tend to use people’s hardships as a recruitment mechanism, claiming to offer a way to alleviate loneliness through racial camaraderie, explain personal shortcomings by blaming out-groups, and boiling down large societal changes to simple, conspiratorial explanations. Blevins’ self-help-inspired recruiting technique is not new within the world of far-right extremism, but spaces like Telegram may afford him a far larger audience than was available in the past.

On Telegram, his goals were more explicitly bound up in violent accelerationism.

“I’m grooming all of you for terrorism. This is a suicide cult because I hate most of my friends, but for the ones I like this is a doomsday cult,” Korb Taran wrote on Telegram on May 24, four days prior to Blevins’ arrest.

Photo illustration by SPLC