The ABC of Accelerationist Blockchain Critique | www.furtherfield.org | Peer2Politics | Scoop.it

Accelerationism came to prominence in 2013 with Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams's hashtag-titled manifesto. A cloud computing-era spin on the old Marxist argument that we first need to perfect capitalism in order to transcend it, its lineage is fleshed out in a new book fromUrbanomic. Urbanomic claim (among others) Nick Land's skynet midwifery, J.G. Ballard's science fictionalization of culture, and Marx himself as precursors to Accelerationism, establishing it as a serious anti-humanistic response to the challenges that humanity faces if it is to avoid extinction. Similar to Christine Harold's strategy of "intensification", Accelerationism calls for us to appropriate the value of capital's developments and transform them materially into something else rather than attempt to resist them head-on or refuse them in our hearts.