Text page
A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism - Jacobite
A primer that makes the term usable by sorting its branches, references, and public confusions into a compact map.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they explain why accelerationism became the archive's main public keyword. They do not merely define a philosophy; they narrate how a contested term spread into journalism, primers, and broad explanatory history.
The mechanism is mapping and periodization. These pages build branch diagrams, origin stories, and public heuristics that make accelerationism legible to non-specialist readers while often smuggling in their own judgments.
That matters because most readers arrive through these public maps rather than through primary CCRU texts. The site needs them in order to show where clarity begins and where flattening starts.
How to read this text
Read first for the map or genealogy the page is constructing, then note which branches or figures are emphasized or collapsed together.
Track where explanatory convenience starts to blur important differences between Land, Prometheanism, and later reactionary receptions. That tension is usually the point.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 4
Since anything able to consistently feed socio-historical acceleration will necessarily, or by essence, be capital, the prospect of any unambiguously ‘Left-accelerationism’ gaining serious momentum can be confidently dismissed.
Stakes · paragraph 2
Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already. No contemporary dilemma is being entertained realistically until it is also acknowledged that the opportunity for doing so is fast collapsing. The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late.
Stakes · paragraph 4
Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”) At the time of writing, Left-accelerationism appears to have deconstructed itself back into traditional socialist politics, and the accelerationist torch has passed to a new generation of brilliant young thinkers advancing an ‘Unconditional Accelerationism’ (neither R/Acc., or L/Acc., but U/Acc.).
Stakes · paragraph 3
A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism – Jacobite https://web.archive.org/web/20220517110327/https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/[3/26/2023 11:02:15 AM] In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism.
History · paragraph 1
A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism – Jacobite https://web.archive.org/web/20220517110327/https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/[3/26/2023 11:02:15 AM] Steve Salmon / Tumblr A QUICK-AND-DIRTY INTRODUCTION TO ACCELERATIONISM Nick Land - May 25, 2017 - Anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism better do so quickly.
Appears in sections
Accelerationism Branches and Debates Primary section
Left, right, unconditional, and popularized accelerationisms sorted into a cleaner research map.