Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-08

Decoloniality vs. Acceleration: oxymoron or hybrid engine?

I Two cries that look like opposites

Accelerationism: “Floor the pedal, let capital/technology burn the old limits, refound reality after the crash.”
Decoloniality: “Stop the machinery that devastated bodies and territories; dismantle modernity/coloniality, heal the land and the memory.”

At first glance, one calls for turbo speed; the other, a reparative brake. But history does not behave like a car with two pedals; it is a mutant organism that devours the energy of the crash and the energy of the cure. Could there be, then, a decolonial accelerationism?

II Equation of the wound

Colonialism 1.0 — Steam, cotton, rubber: stealing the South's energy gradients to lubricate the North's industrial revolution.
Colonialism 2.0 — Data, lithium, microchips: extractivism turns digital-mineral, but the pattern repeats (servers in Dublin, wells in Atacama).
Epistemic scar — Whoever controls the laboratories controls the truth; indigenous languages are “dialects”, peasant knowledge is “folklore”.

Decoloniality answers: restore territory, voice and cosmovision. But if the technological vector stays wired to the global financial board, slowing down without redirecting merely buys time for the next extractive assault.

III Incendiary fusion: the hybrid engine hypothesis

Accelerate autonomy, not plunder
Solar micro-reactors in Amazonian communities to cut the cord to predatory hydroelectrics; communal optical fibre to leap over the telco oligopoly.
Ancestral technologies + high voltage
Vertical hydroponics inspired by Mexica chinampas; drones sowing native maize on Andean terraces; AI modelling tidal cycles for Mapuche fishing.
Crypto-reparation
Smart contracts that redirect lithium royalties to collective Wichí trusts; verifiable tokens of historical compensation tied to real trade flows, not to marketing philanthropy.
Rhizomatic legal hacking
Charter-forests: ecosystems declared “subjects of law” that issue “temporary visas” to companies—if they extract, they pay in biodividends and gems of open data.

IV Tectonic obstacles

Bureaucratic latency: Colonial states take years to recognise indigenous legal personhood; the mines open in 18 months.
Financial censorship: Banks class community DAOs as “high risk” and choke their liquidity.
Cosmetic capture: Corporations paint the logo green and sell “shaman offsets” that never reach the community.
Ontological clash: Software demands clear ownership; communality defends shared use with no individual title.

V Double-helix strategy

Selective speed — Accelerate the infrastructure that multiplies autonomy (sun, fibre, open science), slow down the infrastructure that perpetuates coloniality (fossil megaprojects, data monoculture).
Forge mediators — Coder-translators able to write smart contracts in Quechua and legal Spanish; scientists who can decode soils and rituals.
Radical auditability — A blockchain is only useful if the community can read it; make talking dashboards, not cryptic PDFs.
A poetics of return — Narrate the advance in the key of myth and of the periodic table; without re-enchanting speed, acceleration becomes enslaving noise.

VI Coda: crash, yes; but into the colonial centre of gravity

“To decolonise is not to hit the brake: it is to change the direction of the wind that fans the fire.”

The global South will not win by crushing the engine; it will win by making it turn on a different axis. Where Land sees fuel for the melt-down, James proposes tactical torque: using the torque of acceleration to rip out toxic roots and sow sovereign networks.

One hand on the wheel, the other on the seed. The engine roars. The question is no longer whether we run, but towards which constellation of futures we want to throw the sparks.