Technofascist Accelerationism = Mass Death
There’s a word that’s been floating around a lot in VC land: accelerationism. It even appears in the bio of Silicon Valley’s king (emperor?), Marc Andreessen. “AI accelerationist.” Great.
Now, it must be conceded, despite being my nemesis, that Marc Andreessen is the #1 influencer in the tech industry, he is a celebrity level of figure, with a widespread and deeply devoted following, and that his influence spreads all the way from heads of states to the MRA/incel crowd (MRAs love venture capitalists), into weird crypto and to the entire startup community from top to bottom. So to have the top venture capitalist in the world, from the biggest and by far best venture capital firm, have this in his bio, that’s a really big deal and it means that any messaging about accelerationism we are getting out of the technofascist leadership, is cascading through the entire industry, so everything we are going to talk about today, is being made ubiquitous within the industry. And everyone will be inculcated and inured to this; it is almost impossible to overstate the cultural force that venture capital is capable of raising IN the industry, even as it becomes apparent around us, as in the manufactured celebrity of Elon Musk.
And as in every community, there will be those who go even further than what their leaders have specified, producing ever more extremist versions; this is counted on, as it has been how they fermented technofascist gangs on 4/8chan, Hacker News, Reddit, etc., where there was a radical edge that did a lot of the blunt force attacks on women in the industry, which was supported by this broader general technofascist misogyny. We will see this with accelerationist mentality within the tech industry and we can expect to see some scary futures, such as in the field of unregulated medical experimentation, something top venture capitalists have been openly setting up in countries like Honduras and in the Caribbean, while lobbying against the FDA, featuring anti-medical regulation positioning from a16z’s Balaji Srinivasan. During the Trump administration — under Peter Thiel’s personal advisement — Srinivasan was considered for head of the FDA, particularly frightening because he both advocates for, and is investing in, offshore unregulated medical testing. While Marc cleverly specifies “AI accelerationism” specifically, which is materially possible, this is obviously a more fundamental issue and we can see these same arguments being made throughout the conspiracy. I wrote more about venture capital medical experimentation here but for our purposes, we will note that accelerationism is a problem in the area of medical development; particularly because the chief resource to bring to bear on the acceleration of medical technology, is cheap human bodies for cheap human testing.
From a recent article about the unregulated, sovereign, VC-backed medical zones in the global south, focusing on Prospera in Honduras, backed by Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan thru their venture Promonos Capital:
“Minicircle… which is registered in Delaware, aims to fuse elements of the traditional drug testing path with the ethos of “biohackers”—medical mavericks who proudly dabble in self-experimentation and have long hailed the promise of DIY gene therapies.
The eccentricities don’t end there. Minicircle’s trials are going ahead in Próspera, an aspiring libertarian paradise born from controversial legislation that has allowed international businesses to carve off bits of Honduras and establish their own micronations. It’s a radical experiment that is allowing a private company to take on the role of the state. While much attention has been paid to the charter city’s use of Bitcoin as legal tender, the partnership with Minicircle is an important milestone toward another goal—becoming a hotbed of medical innovation and a future hub of medical tourism.”
This is very obviously the venture colonialism that we have spoken of throughout this blog. That legislation — allowing the establishment and operations of these zones — was recently repealed on the demands of local residents, but now venture capitalists behind this are suing the fucking country for most of its yearly budget, showing the disgusting wealth discrepency between VC and communities, allowing this type of brunt-force colonial takeover:
“In Honduras, communities are fighting back against privatization and foreign exploitation after Honduran President Xiomara Castro and Congress repealed a law that established so-called Economic Development and Employment Zones, where private companies have “functional and administrative autonomy” from the national government. Now a Delaware-based company called Próspera has launched a case to challenge the repeal of the law under the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement and is seeking almost $11 billion, which amounts to nearly two-thirds of the country’s entire 2022 budget.
This is an example of the “extreme investor rights” of this international trade agreement directly opposing Honduran sovereignty, says Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. We also speak with local leader Venessa Cárdenas of Crawfish Rock, the area directly impacted by the Próspera ZEDE on the island of Roatán, about the stress of losing control over their community. “We don’t know when our home will be taken from us,” says Cárdenas. “We, of course, have the rights to be free and previously consulted on any type of project that is being done in our community.”
Residents in El Salvador have already been displaced to make room for its VC-installed “Bitcoin City”, where venture capitalists have gained control of the government and are backing the dictator Bukele while a hunger crisis strikes, human rights abuses are condemned internationally, and they are pushing tens of thousands of actual people from there into jails (ideal for medical testing) to “clean up” for “Bitcoin tourism” with a side of … surfing. The country plunging into hell provides the rise of the technofascist settlement.
Accelerationism is a big topic, a viewpoint that has been examined and sometimes adopted by people on all sides of the political aisle. For example, on the left there is an accelerationist gestalt related to the inevitability of the revolution: if the revolution will come, then everything from here to the revolution is just human suffering, and so is it humanitarian to accelerate the revolution, which costs lives, in order to achieve the overthrow of capitalism, which will save lives.
In theory, you are betting from a place of certainty, of directly foreseeable death, for a future that even with our best analysis, is merely speculative; this is significantly altered in the case of the leftist accelerationist gesalt, because we know, scientifically, that the economic system we are trying to implement, provides an objectively better, saner, healthier, faster, more organized, and more peaceful financial system, on which a better society is built, and we can materially establish, scientifically, how the state of humankind is fundamentally improved, via the SPECIFIC goal of changing the underlying economic system.
You will note that the technofascists have proposed absolutely nothing that holds weight as far as fundamental and scientific guarantees of these tradeoffs, but rather, simply to throw gas on things and light them on fire as we will see in this piece; the eventual result of accelerationism under technofascism is very obviously mass death unlike anything we have see in the past, especially with increasing VC chatter about building a better nuclear bomb to deter China. Accelerationism is in no way incompatible with capitalism and for technofascists, it is NOT a change in the underlying economic system, but rather, an intense concentration of it and the “evolution” of it into fascism.
One of the reasons that accelerationism is considered — whether it falls to fascists or communists — is because it implicates a discontinuous change in the possibilities for all life on earth, known or unknown, good or bad, world peace or nuclear annihilation. Accelerationism is viewed and happens within these contexts; it is on these issues of the future of mankind, do we approach a reality where bloodshed now is tradable for later prosperity or saved lives. This is the issue on which accelerationism hinges: bodies. Accelerationism in itself, inherently encompasses death, and that is the plane on which this argument plays out.
On our side — the good guys — accelerationism in my experience of it, during my generation of leftists in America, has consisted of primarily a thought exercise and a tool for reasoning about major fundamental issues in the revolutionary politic and strategy. I have never seen a material application of accelerationism on the left outside of lone terrorist attacks from some of our martyrs, like Ted Kacinzsky, RIP king, who did these acts when I was just a kid. So as far as actually affecting the leftist politic in America, in this generation, accelerationism has simply not been a material factor. It is not part of the leftist politic in America, it has not even encroached upon our more militant moments.
The accelerationism is being engaged exclusively by the other side, the fascists, who have not been abstaining whatsoever from this very fraught and sensitive discourse, but in typical fashion, heaving around like a bull in a china shop. While we can talk hypothetically about what accelerationism means more broadly, there are material dimensions in this moment and time, so for the purposes of this post, we will discuss what accelerationism materially means in the technofascist ideology. After all, it is the fascists who are talking about accelerationism, not us, so the examination of accelerationism on the left, will be in different article, and far briefer.
How does accelerationism actually function, even putting aside the ideological detailing, but simply looking at its provable manifestation in the economy, and the messages about the industry and about our mission and velocity, that are being openly stated by venture capitals? When they talk about “accelerationism”, to what *specifically* do they refer?
The thing about accelerationism, is that there is a decision made, inevitability, of WHAT to accelerate. So even from an extremely broad economic view — like all else, accelerationism is a financial system or part of one — accelerationism has to ACT on something. There must be something that is BEING accelerated. Thus accelerationism is ideology but also the material practice of accelerating things, and getting into place the capital and labor needed to do so. It is not specious philosophy but a material choice.
What accelerationism under technofascism materially produces is a concentration of stolen capital and exploited labor around the instruments of production in order to whip them into ever quicker revolutions of those instruments. This is perfectly described by Marx, confronting the VC contention that its technological development proves Marx WRONG, when in fact, it clearly holds to the scientific model which Marx developed. Direct from the Communist Manifesto, as a primary part of this mathematical model and a first-order pillar of Marxist science:
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
This obviously indicates that technofascist accelerationism deviates not in the slightest, not one iota, from just general fucking capitalism; thus, they have no justification at all for even calling this accelerationism, much less pretending that this is a different material arc for either them or anyone else.
Where we understand accelerationism materially in technofascism, this is how it breaks down: AI represents, at the core unit, a massive concentration, volume and density of compute, obtained via wealth hoarding, and uniting that with exploited labor — the generations of human work that it has stolen without permission, consent, compensation or contract to power it, along with the AI trainers in Kenya paid $1-$2 / hour to train the OpenAI models while OpenAI itself raked in over 10 billion dollars in venture funding.
The materialist description of accelerationism is simply: the venture capitalists want to orchestrate capital and labor to make their core portfolio technologies, more powerful, more ubiquitous, more profitable, and faster — even speedier in the destabilizing revolutions of the instruments of production. Wealth remains the thing on the table which is the true material of the conversation.
They just want to use stolen money and exploited people and lands and resources to make more money. But is sounds cooler and edgier when you say “accelerationist”, even coming from a 50-year old venture capitalist trying to look hip on the internet for clout.
This all fits very cleanly into Marx’s descriptions of how capitalism functions. Despite doing backflips to avoid the math on all this, and despite the deployment of fancy new words to cover it up, this is all the same old shit. And the kindof splashy allure and thought experiment of accelerationism falls down very quickly as an ideology when you see in all cases that SOMETHING is being accelerated by SOMEONE for SOME REASON, and that there is no need to even use the word accelerationism; or rather, accelerationism doesn’t even exist. It’s just capitalists coming up with a fancy word for pouring more money and exploited labor on something, something that is going to make them even more money and even further destabilize workers and the economy in general.
Things that venture capital wants to accelerate? Actually pretty narrow and highly specific areas, especially compared to the total surface area of possible technology innovation, which is to our knowledge infinite. While tech does have a diversified portfolio, we see the accelerationism in WHERE they focus, something that we can see in the money: AI, weapons, medical testing and cryptocurrency itself, where people openly discuss the fall of other people’s countries as a impetus for bitcoin adoption in a form of crypto accelerationalism, where again there is a violent disruption with the cost of human life on the line: catastrophic collapse carries the toll… yet, it is justified, because we get the new technofascist run currency in there! And the destabilized country makes great grounds for medical experimentation, the installation of dictatorships and right-wing regimes, labor for building the new VC settlements, etc.
Materially, economically, we can understand accelerationism as an economic strategy. At the base, what is being accelerated is THE REVOLUTIONS IN THE INSTRUMENTS OF PRODUCTION. That is at the heart of the technofascist accelerationism, just at is at the root of all capitalism, is the quest for one party to extract enough from the other, under “productivity” and many other names, as much as possible; to coerce, to bribe, to lie, to force, to invent, to trick, to enslave, as much as possible the other; the outcomes of the capitalist is related to their ability to accomplish this. What is being accelerated is more than a specific technology — though that is one piece of it — but the speed, efficacy and broadness of productivity and exploitation of labor serving capital: through displacement, extortion, tyranny, and outright stealing — OpenAI is using century’s worth of human production they haven’t paid for, gotten consent for, or are held to any account for, which I believe will go down in history as one of the greatest thefts of all time; accelerationism in this case emerges very clearly from widespread exploitation of human labor; the argument that we should accelerate on top of this is as much to justify future crimes and it is to cover up this one.
We see that the motivation here is to “accelerate” by destabilizing labor, economies, indigenous populations, and land, and then hooking it up to a venture capital platform, which become its administrator. I wrote recently about how AI exists to create massive pools of destabilized and exploitable labor:
“The venture capitalist consistent MO is to replace stable, living wage jobs with insecure, low paid jobs; these new, worse jobs are administered by tech monopolies and platforms that automate and supervise human labor and steal most of its earnings. For example, the Minnesota governor just veto-ed a bill requiring ride share companies to pay everyone a minimum wage. This is the type of thing that tech companies are doing all over the world so that they can continue to maintain power, control, leverage and financial exploitation over large, destabilized pools of workers with no protections.”
The labor impact of AI has only just begun, even though it has already been used to justify the elimination of jobs and the displacement of jobs into gig work supervised by a tech company. Or its AI.
What happens with accelerationism is you have the fascists concentrating massive amounts of hoarded and controlled capital, natural resources and labor, around technology they are building to perform certain functions, out of the vast scope of potential functions. That’s it.
They’re literally just asshole fascists. They aren’t trying to get anywhere better. They are just mindlessly and desperately cranking the wheel to avoid the collapse of capitalism, which closes in on them everyday, and with every speedy move they make.
To move around a little…. a lot of this goes back to the idea of discontinuous innovation. Discontinuous innovation is a huge theme that we’ve talked about in this blog but is a focus of the entire tech industry. Discontinuous innovation is things like, the internet, computers, breakthrough medical treatments, new understandings of physics, going to the moon, world war; things that basically provide a platform for a new age of human growth, new things that wipe away previous understandings and practices. The “humanitarian” fake argument for accelerationism provided by technofascists is that if we push as fast as we can, as hard as we can, one of the areas that we know produces discontinuous innovation — medical experiments, spaceflight, war — , we might arrive at a discontinuous innovation that demarcates that theoretical point in accelerationist progression when the unknowable yet discoverable innovation is attainted, and prosperity of magnitudes well and beyond any sacrifice, are realized.
The problem is that, for one, accelerationism under technofascism is fundamentally and irrevocably nialistic, there are no SPECIFICS they are trying to arrive at, because there is only one goal: subjugation and extraction and profit. There is no directionality towards human vitality, just money and power.
Via Conway’s Law, we understand that the venture capital vehicle is not CAPABLE of producing another result; they are a machine for wealth extraction and consolidation and that is the only thing they are looking for; they are inherently economically orthogonal to any kind of mass betterment of human society; they literally don’t care about that. None of their technologies are designed in any way to achieve things that broadly benefit humanity as opposed to a very small group of bloated constantly feeding parasites. They need us on our knees for them to get their crowns.
They have made no promises, no guarantees, have laid out no real goals, no plans for a society other than their own (in which we don’t exist except as lab rats, and perhaps don’t exist at all - - Marx worried that they would eventually kill all of us when we had given them what they needed to do that very thing), yet promise that someday they will just happen to stumble upon something that fixes everything.
LMFAO.
We literally know what venture capital is going to do with this because we have been watching them do the same exact shit for three decades: hoarded wealth and capital, hoarded the benefits of “innovation”, always hoarded living conditions, stolen land, colonized vital regions, super-powered intelligence agencies and cops, always consolidated and concentrated the energy within themselves, their model is to gather it ever back to themselves, they have always built weapons, lied, destroyed cities for their personal financial gains, allowed predators to feast on their platforms, etc. Etc. Etc. This is like arguing they are going to magically hit the “save humanity” button without ever aiming for it and without it existing in their world. Which is in fact what they are arguing.
Let’s be smart this time lol.
We are supposed to take their word that this NEXT time that we let them monopolize all of the technology infrastructure (a form of accelerationism), let them revolutionize the instruments of production yet a few more times, that our circumstances are to actually be improved, that our rights made more inviolate than what was already violated, that we share freely in benefits that have not even been proffered a single time? Whatever the gains of this, they will not be distributed back and in fact, have no WAY of being distributed back, to the people that all of this is built off.
Accelerationism, canonically, relates to the idea of the amount of computing, technology, in our lifetimes and their role in the human experience, and specifically, accelerating that role. This is a capital argument as well but from the venture capital viewpoint, this is a great fundamental justification for technology dominance, which in material turns, means VC and tech elite dominance. Basically: let us in. Give us more.
This reduces to, again, just give us everything we want so we can do whatever we want.
So now that we have dismantled the overall notion of technofascist accelerationism: what is left after we have defined the accelerationism as the revolution in the instruments of production, that we have defined its material parameters, and debunked notions around technofascist discontinuous innovation, as well as any point in which we reach some imaginary delta of technofascism where we are all saved?
What remains?
All that remains is the part about mass death.