Text page
Nick Land - A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism
Land's own quick primer, useful because it shows how the label is reclaimed from inside the archive's later self-understanding.
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 1
A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism by Nick Land Anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism better do so quickly. That’s the nature of the thing. It was already caught up with trends that seemed too fast to track when it began to become self- aware, decades ago.
Definition · paragraph 1
A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism by Nick Land Anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism better do so quickly. That’s the nature of the thing.
Definition · paragraph 3
“Accelerate the process,” recommended Deleuze & Guattari in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus, citing Nietzsche to re-activate Marx. Although it would take another four decades before “accelerationism” was named as such, critically, by Benjamin Noys, it was already there, in its entirety.
Stakes · paragraph 1
It has picked up a lot of speed since then. Accelerationism is old enough to have arrived in waves, which is to say insistently, or recurrently, and each time the challenge is more urgent. Among its predictions is the expectation that you’ll be too slow to deal with it coherently.
History · paragraph 4
If subsequent history has not vindicated this point beyond all question, it has at least simulated such a vindication, to a maddening degree. In 2013, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams sought to resolve this intolerable – even ‘schizophrenic’ – ambivalence in their ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,’ which aimed to precipitate a specifically anti-capitalist ‘Left-accelerationism’, clearly demarcated over against its abominably pro-capitalist ‘Right-accelerationist’ shadow.
Appears in sections
Accelerationism Branches and Debates Primary section
Left, right, unconditional, and popularized accelerationisms sorted into a cleaner research map.