Text page
The Corpse of Accelerationism - Notes - e-flux
A later critique that treats accelerationism as a worn-out or compromised public term, useful precisely because it diagnoses the label's exhaustion.
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 show what happens when accelerationism becomes a public object of alarm, critique, or exhaustion. The label is no longer just disputed internally; it becomes something attached to danger, incoherence, or political failure.
Critique works here by diagnosing slippage. The page asks what happens when a branch label becomes a generalized media object and is pulled toward backlash, moral panic, or retrospective denunciation.
That matters because the site cannot explain accelerationism responsibly without showing how its public afterlife exceeds philosophy. These pages keep visible the costs of treating the keyword as frictionless shorthand.
How to read this text
Read first for which branch or public image of accelerationism is being criticized before deciding whether the page is rejecting the whole field.
Track where critique turns into genealogy or warning. That movement usually reveals the page's deeper model of what accelerationism became.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
Appearances do, of course, count. Accelerationism is less and less claimed as a position in debates. Its rarer appearances now seem to arise among those on the very far right undertaking violent actions.
Definition · paragraph 1
Still from Tron, dir. Steven Lisberger, 1982 Why kick the corpse of accelerationism?
Stakes · paragraph 1
Steven Lisberger, 1982 Why kick the corpse of accelerationism? Over ten years since I first coined the term, it now seems to have disappeared or been eclipsed by more urgent debates. If accelerationism can be defined as the cultural movement which argues for the embrace of technology and abstract thinking to punch through to a postcapitalist future, we might seem to be left with very few accelerationists standing.
Stakes · paragraph 1
Still from Tron, dir. Steven Lisberger, 1982 Why kick the corpse of accelerationism? Over ten years since I first coined the term, it now seems to have disappeared or been eclipsed by more urgent debates.
Stakes · paragraph 1
Over ten years since I first coined the term, it now seems to have disappeared or been eclipsed by more urgent debates. If accelerationism can be defined as the cultural movement which argues for the embrace of technology and abstract thinking to punch through to a postcapitalist future, we might seem to be left with very few accelerationists standing. Isn’t there a risk, especially for a critic of accelerationism like me, of keeping alive something that should rightly by now be a dead dog?
Appears in sections
Accelerationism Branches and Debates Primary section
Left, right, unconditional, and popularized accelerationisms sorted into a cleaner research map.