Accelerationist Society and its Future

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Concerns about the rapid pace of technological progress have a history longer than the transistor. Yet while the questions of the political outcomes of acceleration – that is the wilful embrace of capitalism’s technologically aided expansion – which preoccupied thinkers in the 2010s have given way to today’s politics of material struggle, technologists wasted no time in advancing their proposals. Last year, Open AI’s Sam Altman suggested that the technologies he is developing will force a profound change in the social contract. The White House, meanwhile, has unquestioningly embraced Elon Musk’s rule-by-algorithm principles.

When Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future finds an afterlife in the cult veneration of the pharma CEO-shooter Luigi Mangione, are we doomed by the Unabomber’s predictions? When even Musk suggested that Kaczynski “might not be wrong”, can the track of acceleration be redirected?

In Ewan Morrison’s latest transhumanist novel For Emma, the threads of dystopian fiction, theory, and history coalesce in a fraught question: if we don’t control our present, is it too late to shape our future? For the characters in the novel – a Silicon Valley genius sacrificed at the altar of artificial intelligence and her grieving father driven to terror – the point of singularity is emotional rather than merely technical. 

Accelerationist Society and its Future brings together writers Ewan Morrison and Nicholas Blincoe whose practices have been shaped by confrontations with accelerationist ideologies.