Text page
Alex Williams - Escape Velocities
An important left-accelerationist page that makes abstraction, planning, and modernity into explicit political commitments.
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 state the Promethean and left-accelerationist branch in its most coherent public form. Accelerationism here is not raw intensification but a dispute about modernity, abstraction, planning, and what to do with the future.
Reader introductions and polemical essays do the sorting. They separate Promethean argument from both anti-modern localism and the darker Landian or reactionary trajectories that later came to dominate public shorthand.
That matters because without this cluster the section collapses into public caricature. These pages preserve the internal claims of the branch that most explicitly tried to reclaim abstraction for emancipatory politics.
How to read this text
Read first for how the page defines the future, abstraction, or planning before following the argument's immediate polemical targets.
Track where Prometheanism is contrasted with either folk politics, anti-modern retreat, or fatalist acceleration. That contrast is the page's conceptual hinge.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 6
continuous nature of reality escapes the quantized grasp of our present computational paradigm, and that paradigm rests at the core of Land’s machinery of acceleration: a unidirectional accumulative process of algorithmic amplification. đđđđđđđđđđOne final line of problematization for the Landian program of accelerationism concerns its presumptions relating to the meaning of freedom.
Stakes · paragraph 1
For whereas in Land’s schema of acceleration the aesthetic is both omnipresent and yet denied autonomy, in this newly imagined envisioning of the idea, the aesthetic may come to take on a more independent and causally significant role. The Heresies of Nick Land Nick Land was amongst the most prescient thinkers of the capitalism emerging in the mid- 1990s. His work combined the cybernetics of e-flux journal #46 — june 2013 đ Alex Williams Escape Velocities 01/11 11.13.13 / 11:05:20 EST
History · paragraph 1
Alex Williams Escape Velocities In the early years of the twenty-first century there emerged a renewed interest in theoretical ideas of acceleration. The key figure in these discussions has been the British philosopher Nick Land. The term “accelerationism,” itself coined by Benjamin Noys (in a characteristically critical register), bares some explanation.
History · paragraph 1
Alex Williams Escape Velocities In the early years of the twenty-first century there emerged a renewed interest in theoretical ideas of acceleration.
History · paragraph 11
3 (London: Imperial College Press, 2009), 43–70. đđđđđđ9 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “On Cunning Automata,”Collapse VIII (2013). đđđđđđ10 Nick Srnicek, “Accelerationism: Epistemic, Economic, Political” (presented at the Weaponising Speculation Event, Dublin, March 2013). đđđđđđ11 Fernando Zalamea,đSynthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (Falmouth: Sequence Press, 2012). đđđđđđ12 Reza Negarestani, “A Vertiginous View Of Enlightenment.”đSavage Obj
Appears in sections
Accelerationism Branches and Debates Primary section
Left, right, unconditional, and popularized accelerationisms sorted into a cleaner research map.