Accelerate!
NrX and ACC part 1: Introduction; Terminal Condition; Acceleration; Deterritorialize
This is part 1 of a 3 part series on Nrx and ACC. Part two will be The Clear Pill; The New Sincerity, Neoreaction, and part 3 will be The Dark Enlightenment
INTRODUCTION: Movement
Neoreaction and Accelerationism (NrX and ACC) are concepts whose heyday may seem to have come and gone. Nick Land is not putting out much content anymore, certainly nothing as novel and definitive as his work even into the late 2010’s, and while Moldbug is still writing (at the same level) as Yarvin, his followers -at least, those who overtly employ his ideas and promote his name – have become just another niche internet subculture. In addition to that, enough time has passed since Moldbug revealed his true identity that his ideas have been thoroughly raked over the coals by each and every opposing faction in the online melting pot of right wing or anti-liberal communities. You’ve heard all the arguments before, but what they mostly boil down to is that he blames progressivism on the wrong people and that he is too secular. In fact, I even criticized him on these grounds once, based on a perfunctory read of his work. But a deep dive onto his old blog Unqualified Reservations (and remaining current with Grey Mirror) has revealed to me that these criticisms don’t hold up, though they’re not exactly unfounded either. Any ideology or philosophy needs to be subjected to all sorts of intellectual stress tests. If they pass, as his does, you have to consider them as viable perspectives to incorporate into your own critique of the present, lest you become privy to the most embarrassing of copes (rEaL cOmMuNism hAs nEvEr bEeN tRiEd).
Because so much time has passed since UR first came out, and because Trump is no longer in office, it may seem that these “movements” are “dead.” At least, there doesn’t seem to be a true “movement” of these people anymore, if there ever was, and the current state of politics in America serves as proof to many that they didn’t exactly pan out as viable programs. The online right is many different things at the same time: generator and incubator of ideas, meeting grounds for like-minded individuals, intellectual vanguard for a political zeitgeist that wants to change the landscape of American politics. These things are more or less uncontroversial to claim. But one thing it certainly is not is a political faction wrestling for control of one party or one “side,” with a firm set of ideas, foot soldiers, and leaders who the whole edifice will someday hoist into place in the wake of some revolution, coup, or election. And if it ever *was* that, it was with Donald Trump, and we see what happened to him.
No, the online right is not an edifice of anything. Its better thought of as an undulating vector for ideas to flit about in like giant worms perpetually moving beneath the sands of Arakkis, always menacing but rarely rearing its head. Gamergate was when the sandworm grew to its full size, and Trump was the one time it emerged and unleashed the power of its cavernous maw. But its back underground now, ever moving. The online right doesn’t talk of Moldbug or Lands ideas anymore like they were some panacea or exciting new philosophy. Instead, they’ve become incorporated into the vernacular of people online, which is impressive and noteworthy in itself, but as animating principles guiding a movement or even a faction, they’ve basically receded into the background, calmed into a smoldering brush fire that burns year-round but doesn’t really threaten the nearby farmland. Hell, there hasn’t even been a mainstream hit piece on either thinker or their followers since before 2020 (the good enough, seemingly friendly Vanity Fair piece came out as I was writing this).
As a result, many online have declared NrX “dead,” though in our hyper-modern times, this declaration first appeared while the proverbial ink was still drying on Unqualified Reservations. Regardless, NrX is “dead” according to many, or spoken of in the past tense, and the only people I see talking about ACC in a positive way (or really, at all) are post-left theorycel memers. As “movements,” perhaps these ideas were short lived, enjoying the fleeting internet spotlight for a few years, then tossed into the ever-accumulating dross heap of crazy internet philosophies. But as intellectual reservoirs, these two perspectives still harbor vast reserves of conceptual energy. As a formula for understanding the hypermodern world as it unfolds, these two ideas are becoming more relevant as time goes on, more true now than they were then, even as more and more people grow impatient for the world they desire to come into being. In 2022, calling yourself a neoreactionary or an accelerationist would probably be met with a fair amount of eye rolling or even sneering, someone might counter you with a different vision of monarchism, like traditional or Catholic, and you might be scolded for accelerations ideological impurity. But if we hold these two perspectives over the recent past and the ongoing present like a sketch drawn on tracing paper, we would see that the form of 21st century political culture follows this model quite nicely.
These concepts should not be thought of as political agendas, action plans, utopian visions, or programs that need to be implemented somehow. Many, if not all other political agendas are exactly those things, and that is what makes them inert. Most alternative political ideologies, like libertarianism and anarchism, can hope for little more than to have some of their ideas taken up by the mainstream or, less ideal but too often the case, cynically used by a larger ideology to forward its own agenda. Many of these alternatives meet their fate in the same way a pathogen might as its phagocytized into the established cells of the body politic, broken down and excreted as detritus. Pathogenic true believers are still endemic to the broader political host, but rarely cause problems anymore, and are even exposed by this process to antigens for future recognition and disposal.
Whatever you think the best form of government or social organization is, there are plenty of exhaustive arguments as to why you aren’t going to get it. And even if your claims couldn’t be dismantled, no one in the 21st century has yet proposed an alternative theory of politics that has captivated enough people – or enough of the right *kinds* of people – to effectuate any lasting political change. This is mostly because of the way digital technology reorganizes society, and Yarvin (and at times Land too) addresses this frequently in his work even now. Mobilizing masses of people to implement a new form of government and replace the existing one is probably a thing of the past. One should not hold NrX or Acc to this standard to begin with. Society is too atomized, political camps too multiplicitous, for a mass-mobilizing political ideology to emerge (the Trump phenomenon makes me wonder if the digital age isn’t actually better suited for populism than the previous era, but that’s for another time).
No, NrX and ACC aren’t alternative political ideologies or movements that threaten the current political order. They never will be and they were never meant to be. They must be understood as descriptions of emerging cultural and political states of affairs, detailing the long slow process of social rearrangement. They are precisely worded, minutely enunciated apprehensions of shifts in society that have been taking place over decades, elaborations on the viability of certain perspectives and the poverty of others. They are also predictions, of a sort, for where things are going, at least in broad strokes, and while Yarvin famously crafted a replacement for the current political order with what he feels is a better form of government, what’s more important than his solution for the problem is his diagnosis. Noticing a patient is sick very early on in the disease process is far more effective than prescribing a powerful medication during a late stage. In fact, if certain illness are caught early enough and a different lifestyle adapted, the patient may be able to avoid drastic medical intervention altogether. The patient who reduces their carbohydrate intake in their 30’s and loses weight may never manifest diabetes in their 50’s – but if they do, Yarvin has a promising new treatment.
Terminal Condition
Let’s be honest; this is America. Obesity is behind many of the leading health problems, including diabetes and heart disease, which is still the number one cause of death in America. The patient isn’t going to lose weight, the patient is already terminal, and anyone who doesn’t make their peace with this now will find themselves emotionally unable to cope with their inevitable death. What’s worse, their denial will protract the long descent into ruin, and the patient will lose a few limbs, probably go on dialysis, and suffer a few heart attacks before finally expiring in an intensive care unit somewhere. By that time, the financial costs will be astronomical, and the families will be saddled with medical debt they’ll probably never get out from under. Meanwhile, insurance premiums for healthy people continue to skyrocket.
What I’m saying, and honestly what I think Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin are saying, is that this is *going* to happen. It’s not a possibility, it’s not a “prediction,” it’s our fate. Millions of Americans die this way, and millions more will. But they aren’t talking about people, they’re talking about nations, they’re talking about Western Civilization, and this disease process and the overall life cycle of civilizations is known as the cycles of history. The cycles of history are one of the most important concepts to keep in mind when reading Yarvin and Land. The ancient Greeks first apprehended this phenomenon, and Michael Anton once said (in conversation with Yarvin, actually) that he believes the cycles of history are inescapable. Land also mentions them in the Dark Enlightenment, though rather than characterizing the process as a terminally obese patient in the ICU, he calls it a “zombie apocalypse,” his term for the walking corpse of democracy, a phase in the cycle on life support whose plug needs pulling.
The cycles of history are themselves merely an apprehension, a conceptualization, of a phenomenon beyond the control of individuals or institutions. Monarchy gives way to aristocracy which gives way to democracy which gives way to oligarchy which gives way to tyranny which gives way to anarchy, and the cycle ends (this is an oversimplification, of course, and some have a different model, but for our purposes it gets the job done). Nick Land says democracy is a “zombie apocalypse” because it has already given way to oligarchy but the powers that be – the Cathedral – still prop its body up and give it ideological sustenance like Norman Bates keeping his dead mother at the dinner table.
Yarvins prescription for democracy then is palliative care. Let it die. Just let it die. Rather than pour our resources into a doomed geriatric patient with multiple comorbidities, he suggests we foster creative development in the next generation for when the time finally comes to replace the dying one. If that’s what Nick Land meant about “zombie apocalypse” then we are in the oligarchy phase and the next step is tyranny. American Democracy right now is like the Texas Chainsaw massacre scene at the dinner table, in which the vibrant healthy young woman has her blood fed to the living mummy of the decomposing grandfather. “Letting the patient die” in the real world would mean the transition from this crypto-oligarchy into open tyranny. “Tyranny” is quite different than monarchy, and don’t think Yarvin doesn’t know this.
Sure he calls his “CEO president” a monarch, but when he describes the type of power he has it sounds much closer to that of an imperial emperor than a hereditary king. Perhaps that’s why he uses the term “absolute monarch,” however I think the historical precedent for a figure with the type of power Yarvin describes is much more like a Roman or Chinese emperor than any monarch during the Medieval or early modern period. Kings (and Queens) always had the nobles to offset and limit their power and capabilities, and later monarchs had to contend with entities like the Dutch East India Company. The Roman and Chinese Emperors did not have this problem (though of course they had others of a wholly distinct variety). Yarvin does have the added check on power of the board of trustees who can remove and replace this monarch, and this brings to mind the Greek concept of a dictator, who was brought in to solve difficult problems and then removed by the “board” or assembly. In Rome the analogous body would be the army, though this was an informal check on power whereas the Greeks, and Yarvin’s, are institutional. Still, remember the dying words of Septimius Severus: “…pay the army.” The key here though, is that these men had unquestioned authority during their time of rule, while medieval monarchs often had to beggar themselves to the nobles or the Pope.
In this way, they were tyrants and not monarchs as we think of them (insert pointless debate about bloodlines and mandate from God here). This distinction is important not only to understand NrX in the context of historical cycles, but also distinguishes it as a niche internet right wing subculture, for the tradcath monarchists are adamant that what they want is a traditional monarchy in the mold of medieval Catholic Europe – something totally different than what Yarvin advocates. What’s incontestable however, is that democracy is on its last legs if it’s not already a walking corpse, and Yarvin and Land have what I would argue are the best, most realistic solutions and predictions for what may come to replace it. By this logic, the NrX or ACC perspective on a leader should have less to do with his political agenda or ideological purity and more to do with how he got there and his style of rule. Was he democratically elected? Or installed? If elected, does he refuse to abdicate or reinstall himself after the agreed upon time, like Caesar did? And when he rules, does he take decisive action despite the protestations of other facets of government, or are they strong enough to check his power? Trump tried these things and failed, and perhaps this is why Yarvin declared his vote for Biden. The institutions were still too strong for a tyrant to override, so we’ll need more decrepit and incompetent people to further degrade them. And many immediately recognized this, whether they supported Yarvin or not, as the true Accelerationist position on 2020.
Acceleration
Because the traditional monarchists want to revert to an earlier phase, they deny or contend the cycles of history and wish to spin the wheel of time backwards which, of course, isn’t possible. Traditionalists and reactionaries look to retard or reverse the tides of progress and undo many of the things that have been done: immigration, divorce rates, racial integration, gay marriage, and any combination of any other progressive agenda you can name. Some want to revert to a time before the civil rights act, or the new deal, or the civil war, or the industrial revolution, or the protestant reformation, ad infinitum. At some point this mash of competing movements looks like a contest to out-LARP each other, to see who can “RETVRN” the hardest, and its these sorts of people who drown out NrX and ACC online. All of these traditionalists are reactionaries, and reaction is nothing new and it has never really been a viable action plan. If it was, it would’ve worked by now. Historical precedent does not shine favorably on reaction, for Julian the Apostate and the Puritans in England were reactionary regimes, and they were both short-lived and ineffectual (yes, the Puritans founded America, but they left England in exile to move somewhere where no one would oppose them).
In order to differentiate Yarvin and Land from these traditionalist groups, a neologism had to be coined: Neoreaction. This is really not “reaction” in its traditional sense at all, though there is a reactionary element to it. NrX does not want to go backwards, or “back out” of modernity as Land puts it, which he says is impossible anyway (it is). NrX wants to be realistic about what is happening, why it’s happening, and how we can prepare for its conclusion. Cthulu swims left, progressivism is inevitable, and decline is intractable. Yarvin says we need to construct parallel institutions that will be standing here when these others fall. This is simply pragmatic planning for the long term future, something antithetical both to democracy and capitalist oligarchy, who are concerned only with the next election or the next quarter. In a way one could argue it makes NrX a political agenda. Except for one small thing: there is no NrX candidate running for office on strictly NrX principles I.E. no one has “make me CEO monarch” as part of their platform.
NrX doesn’t want to go backwards at all, it knows we’re going forwards no matter what one side wants. Yarvin creates what is intended to be a framework for culture as it moves into the future or, put another way, progresses through the cycles of history. This is where ACC comes in, and why the two are so intricately linked. We’re not accelerating *toward* so much as into and through, like the present is some long, unfinished mountain tunnel. We entered it in the 90’s from the world of analog, electronic modernity and when we emerge we will be in some digital cyber-future, but we don’t know what that looks like yet because we’re still boring through the mountain. Land is explicit about this. We are accelerating through the cycles of history into the next phase, and both thinkers recognize that technology is going to make this process novel and distinct from every time in history it has happened before. Land envisioned some techno-futurist, cyberpunk styled transhuman AI future and speculated that crypto currency is the way forward. Herein lies the lynchpin that resolves the seeming paradox of what we can call “futurist reactionary” thought.
Liberals characterize their vision for society as one whose institutions maximize freedom and opportunity in a repudiation of the past, and they’ve named this now global construct as “progressivism.” The people who want to make a more egalitarian world believe this is the ideal way to take us into the future. Land believes these people have it exactly backwards, and he refers to things like liberalism and egalitarianism as “fetters.” He believes that if history were allowed to follow its natural trajectory, it would create a world that is not at all egalitarian or inclusive, because that world would be run by disinterested technology which has no use for these things. The thing he speculated that may be able to break these fetters and set us on the true trajectory towards the future is bitcoin and crypto, for it would take us off the dollar and thereby eradicate the reliance on any singular national government or international alliance that maintains the primacy of the dollar. No one would need to push a progressive agenda on foreign countries in the interest of maintaining a global, cloud-based crypto-currency.
In its simplest terms, this is what accelerationism is: accelerating beyond democracy and the current global order so that crypto and AI can initiate the next cycle and shed the skin of the old world. And it is in this sense that accelerationism is reactionary, reacting against progressivism and the liberal world order not because it’s getting us farther away from the past, but because it’s preventing us from moving into the future. He has said not that he is for or against accelerationism, but that it’s happening whether we like it or not. And he is of course correct. Technology is moving ahead at a faster and faster rate and culture is lagging further and further behind every decade. However, one must understand ACC in stoic, almost Taoist terms, for history shows that any attempt to act upon this cycle can go wrong in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Land and Yarvin know this, which is why Land enunciates the dangers of “destratifying” too fast, and why Yarvin wants us to take the “clearpill.”
Deterritorialize
Deleuze and Guattari, also coiners of neologisms, came up with the concept of “deterritorialization,” whereby an entity extracts itself from a separate entity through which it was previously defined. One example they use is that monkeys evolved paws with opposable thumbs to grip and swing from tree limbs, but when they came down from the trees and to live on the ground, they went on to use those paws to grip and eventually wield tools. They deterritorialized from the limb and reterritorialized onto the stick which, eventually, became the tool. Swinging from limbs to move through the trees was so efficient they became “stratified” into this way of life, but their way of life was destratified when they had to change to living on the ground. Some catastrophe or major outside event must have come in and interfered with their ability to live this way and force them to seek out a new mode of being. We can call this outside force an accelerant; something that hastens a process of change. In the past this may have played out over centuries or even longer, like the thinning of forests in the face of global cooling, currently the accepted theory for why our distant ancestors abandoned the trees. This “long slow” process is key. People want and expect things to happen overnight, to happen now, and the reason many ideologues reject NrX and ACC is that one of the fundamental tenets of these ideas is that things don’t, and *shouldn’t* happen overnight – though they certainly *are* speeding up.
Land says, in no uncertain terms, that “deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about.” Deterritorialization, as I’ve just mentioned, leads to destratification, and in Fanged Noumena, Land warns that if you destratify too fast you get something like National Socialism, an ideology that he deems suicidal. The concepts of Deleuze and Guattari can be applied to any number of things, including politics. One way to use these concepts is to say that Europe had become stratified into the Christian, aristocratic, and imperial ways of life, and one strata in that model were the peasantry. The peasants were “stratified” into their station and couldn’t get out, “territorialized” onto the land as serfs and farmers. Over several centuries, the entire strata collapsed in the West and in Russia, deterritorializing entire populations of people, setting them adrift like free radicals in a biological organism. This collapse was initiated by several accelerants like industrialization, the American Civil War and both World Wars, as well as the French Revolution and ensuing political ideologies, socialism in particular. These peasants were often restratified into industrial capitalism and democracy– two massive “apparatuses of capture” - into a new enfranchised middle class. Socialism, while also an accelerant in places like late 19th /early 20th Century Russia and early 20thcentury America, also served, once established, as a competing apparatus of capture. In other words, these new technologies and ideas destabilized the existing order but also create a new order of stability – they destratify and restratify ways of life.
This is why deteritorrialization can often be a problem. Consider that the very concept of “acceleration” comes from Marx, who wanted to accelerate through capitalism to the end of history, which he believed would be communism. This only served to exacerbate the process of cultural disintegration and deterritorialization, for communists sought to act upon history as an artificial accelerant to usher in their preferred system. An ideology antithetical to reaction, Communism wishes to spin the cycle forwards. For example, the Eastern Front in Russia collapsed during World War 1 in part because of Lenins agitation, causing many soldiers to desert, and some of these soldiers ushered in the Red Terror as they robbed and killed on their path home. Here we see one strata being deterritorialized, acting as harmful free radicals, and then being reterritorialized into what eventually became the Soviet Union and the Red Army. Lenin did not come out of a vacuum however, for this process of deterritorialization and disruption began 50 years earlier with the freeing of the serfs, whose progeny went on to become the industrial proletariat mobilized by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were an accelerant acting upon the process of Russian modernization that started decades earlier to take them on a crash course from feudalism to communism, speeding through capitalism as fast as possible.
Technology, economics, and political ideologies are all tied up in the reordering of society and the contingent displacements and bloodshed this causes. We can thereby understand the entire cycle of modernity as a negative feedback loop as the system attempts to reestablish equilibrium, and as each strata is deterritorialized, entropy increases. While the age of exploration and its vast new riches, coupled with the liberal ideals of the enlightenment began the process of modernization, industrialization was the first accelerant whose sparks ignited the major wars of the ensuing centuries. Land says this will continue to happen until the system meets its inevitable heat death, and acceleration amounts to increasing disruptions closer and closer together as more technology is poured on the flames. Perhaps we are at an end stage now, and that while the current cycle finally burns out, crypto will be the next accelerant, the ultimate technology that deterritorializes the money system and launches escape pods from the careening star destroyer and sends some of us into the next cycle which, hopefully, inaugurates a period of stability.
While deterritorialization happened in Russia as an active process, it happened inadvertently in Weimar Germany. The soldiers were rapidly deterritorialized by the end of the war and set adrift in Weimer Germany, where they and most of their fellow Germans were disenfranchised under the withering Treaty of Versailles. As Yarvin points out, National Socialism arose because this trained and formally organized group of veterans were already present in Weimar. His argument is that 20th century fascism was a phenomenon specific to that somewhat peculiar set of circumstances, and Land characterizes this transformation from soldiers to disenfranchised proletariat more or less overnight as “rapid destratification.” When society undergoes this sort of dramatic reorientation it takes a powerful and novel “signifier” (yet another Deleuze and Guattarian term) to “capture” vast numbers of these deterritorialized individuals and orient them all toward the same leader and direct them toward the same ends. In these two opposing cases, the signifiers were Hitler and Stalin.
In broad terms, the reason these two movements wrought so much devastation and death was because they acted upon the cycles of history, grafting an ideology onto an existing framework and attempting to force the world into their ideological mold. Socialism brought one world down while National Socialism rose from the ashes of another – one group acted and the other reacted. Either way, both involved rapid de- and re-territorialization, which both Land and Deleuze and Guattari warn against. Yarvin says this cant and won’t happen again in this way, because these circumstances are not being recreated. This is his argument for the poverty of a nostalgic, backwards looking reactionary movement. Thus we understand that ACC is not advocating to speed things up, it’s simply the recognition that history continues to move faster as modernity bleeds onto the pages of time. When one cycle ends, it does not repeat.
In these cases the accelerant was the Great War, however this is only one scenario into which we can plug these concepts to understand what we can call the Landian Theory of Accleration. As time gathers momentum, these examples pile up. Technology is the primary accelerant of human civilization, hastening the oncoming future. Historical events accumulate. We are undergoing a process of deterritorizliation right now, first as the world media shifts from analog and electronic to digital and cloud computing, and second -as we’ve already mentioned – from democracy to oligarchy or tyranny, depending on where you believe we are in the cycle. Perhaps, as we’ve said, the deterritorialization will continue as more of the world shifts to crypto. This shift into the digital threatens to leave humans behind, in fact Land seemed certain it will. Marshall Mcluhan says technology is an extension of our nervous system; the phone is extension of our hearing, live television an extension of our sight, etc. This outsources our senses and leaves us in a sort of suspended animation as the world speeds up around us. As digital information flies at us in greater quantity and faster speed, our consciousness cant keep up and we get the sensation of cultural lag. Land considers our institutions and our sense of liberal morality an attempt at putting the breaks on history, which will go ever faster regardless. We, the human, are completely deterritorialized in this hypermodern world, and according to Land and Yarvin, we can’t look to the past for a way to stop or fix the problems we’re experiencing because we have totally different social conditions to contend with and, besides, those supposed solutions were disasters anyway.
Here is part 2: