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Robin Mackay-#Accelerate The Accelerationist Reader

Robin Mackay's introduction to #Accelerate packages accelerationism as competing lineages rather than a single slogan or doctrine.

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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 5

It is in the context of such a predicament that accelerationism has recently emerged again as a leftist option. Since the 2013 pub­ lication of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's '#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics' [MAP]. the term has been adopted to name a convergent group of new theoretical enterprises that aim to

Definition · paragraph 25

A key element of any left Promethean politics must be a con­ viction in a transformative potential of technology, including the 'transformative anthropology' it entails, and an eagerness to further accelerate technological evolution. Thus this new accelerationism is largely dependent on maturing our understanding of the current regime of technology and value.

Stakes · paragraph 34

MACKAY+AVAN ESSIAN -l NTRODUCTI ON of technology' is senseless. Land's 'right accelerationism' appears here as an inverted counterpart to the communitarian retreat in the face of real subsumption: like the latter, it accepts that the historical genesis of technology in capitalism precludes the latter from any role in a postcapitalist future.

Stakes · paragraph 2

Sadie Plant + Nick Land 2013 The most important division in today's Left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action. and relentless horizontalism. and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity; globality; and technology.

Stakes · paragraph 24

MACKAY+AVAN ESSIAN - I NTRODUCTION primitivist yearnings of Avatar. Fisher therefore states that, in so far as we seek egress from the immiseration of capitalist realism. 'we are all accelerationists'; and yet, he challenges, 'accelerationism has never happened' as a real political force.

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