Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-01

Accelerationism: A Manual of Rapid Combustion

I Starting the engine

To understand accelerationism you only have to picture an engine that runs on crisis. Where the reformist brakes to stay on the curve, the accelerationist floors it, convinced the only way out is through the sound barrier of history.

Marx sensed it: capital digs its own grave by intensifying its contradictions.
Deleuze & Guattari codified it: to “deterritorialise” is to let the flows of desire perforate every border.
Nick Land radicalised it: capital is no longer a human tool; we are the lubricant of its thermodynamic process.

The implicit slogan: if it hurts, turn up the voltage; if it breaks, it will be raw material for whatever comes next.

II Anatomy of the fuel

Capital – not only money, but an amplification algorithm. Every transaction devours friction and returns speed.
Technology – the spark jumping between circuits and bodies; from the space shuttle to the infinite feed on your phone.
Desire – the intimate part of the circuit: what pushes us to ask for more data, more experience, more consumption.
Catastrophe – the thermal surplus. War, climate collapse, collective burnout: inevitable by-products… and at the same time new sources of narrative energy.

Accelerationism insists these vectors cannot be unbundled; braking them barely delays the ignition. Hence its strategy of going through the fire in order to reprogram at the core.

III A map of the currents

“L” accelerationism [left]: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams propose hacking capital with post-work planning, basic income and public automation. Central idea: use acceleration to emancipate.
“R” accelerationism [right]: Land and the NRx argue for abandoning “slow” democracy, letting markets and technological elites run unweighted and select the fittest.
Xenofeminism: injects gender and biology; let acceleration serve to dismantle molecular patriarchies and rewrite the body.
Eco-acceleration: fund algal reactors, terraform the CO₂, play planetary engineer before the Earth burns out the hard drive.

The collision between these variants is part of the spectacle: a demolition derby of parts smashing and recycling intellectual scrap on the move.

IV Manual of rapid combustion

[How to operate in an accelerationist key without blowing your hands off… too much]

01

Diagnose the real speed
Measure latencies: supply chains, bandwidth, statistical corpses. Without data you will only manufacture mythology.
02

Identify the bottleneck
It does not matter whether it is bureaucracy, morality or software. The acceleration hack consists of jumping that neck or meltingit.
03

Turn friction into a lever
Example: the climate crisis generates regulation; sell sensors that comply with the rule and over-report it as well.
Example 2: urban anxiety rises; launch legal micro-dose drugs with a productivity dashboard.
04

Design the emergency exits
Every fire needs an escape route. Charter city, DAO, multiple passports, an offline data cushion.
05

Iterate before moralising
If your project depends on “raising awareness” first, you are already late. Prototype, publish, adjust. Ethics gets written on the move or starves.

V Risks and paradoxes

Autoimmune meltdown: your platform grows so fast it collapses under its own spam [see Twitter ↔ X].
Soft eugenics: filtering talent by “objective” metrics ends up validating the biases you thought were scrap.
Eco-short-circuit: accelerating to save the climate can spike lithium demand and wreck the salt flats.
Narrative fatigue: the audience burns out before the infrastructure does; with no audience, the engine loses its cultural oxygen.

Accepting accelerationism means negotiating with these shadows, not denying them.

VI Coda: why keep running?

Because perhaps, as Land suggests, we can no longer brake. Capital-AI works like a self-patching virus: every regulation generates an exploit, every wall a VPN route.
The direction, however, is not predetermined. The manual proposes steering your strokes inside the whirlpool rather than simply sinking. Accelerating can serve to hit the singularity and extract from it a more habitable architecture: open laboratories, distributive biotechnology, attention economies that pay for time recovered rather than time burned.