accelerationism

English

Etymology

acceleration +‎ -ism. Usage as “support for accelerating capitalism” attributed to Benjamin Noys, 2010s.[1][2]

Pronunciation
  • IPA(key): /ək.ˌsɛl.ə.ˈɹeɪ.ʃə.nɪ.zm̩/, /æk.ˌsɛl.ə.ˈɹeɪ.ʃə.nɪ.zm̩/, /ɪk.ˌsɛl.ə.ˈɹeɪ.ʃə.nɪ.zm̩/
  • Audio (GA)(file)

Noun

accelerationism (countable and uncountable, plural accelerationisms)

  1. The idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that historically characterised it, should be expanded and accelerated in order to generate radical social change.
    • 2013, Jonas Andersson Schwarz, Online File Sharing: Innovations in Media Consumption, Routledge, →ISBN, page 20:
      Land (2011) has brought forward the notion of accelerationism: Rather than halting the onslaught of capital (such as by defending a welfare state or defending the right to work), accelerationism is a philosophical and political strategy that strives to exacerbate its processes to bring forth its inner contradictions and thereby hasten its destruction, […]
    • 2014, Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, “Introduction”, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader:
      The new accelerationisms instead concentrate primarily on constructing a conceptual space in which we can once again ask what to do with the tendencies and machines identified by the analysis […]
  2. (economics) The theory that excessively low unemployment accelerates inflation.
    • 1975, Arthur Melvin Okun, “Inflation: Its Mechanics and Welfare Costs”, in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, volume 6, number 2:
      Accelerationism was the most fundamental transformation of the Phillips approach into an expectational format. It hypothesized that inflation will become increasingly rapid in any maintained situation in which unemployment lies below some critical, or “natural,” rate.
    • 1998, James K. Galbraith, “Comments”, in Inflation, Unemployment, and Monetary Policy, page 66:
      For the period through 1984, there is weak support for accelerationism, though the linear fit is mainly due to the disinflationary impact of high unemployment, which no one disputes, not the inflationary effects of prosperity.

Derived terms

Translations

References
  1. Andy Beckett (2017 May 11) “Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in”, in The Guardian: “The label has only been in regular use since 2010, when it was borrowed from Zelazny’s novel by Benjamin Noys, a strong critic of the movement.”
  2. Benjamin Noys (2013) “Preface”, in Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism, Zero Books, →ISBN:
    It was the resurgence of these ideas in the ’00s, including the republication of Land's essays, that made me return to these questions and offer a more precise critical description by using the term ‘accelerationism’. It turns out that the term occurs in Roger Zelazny's sci-fi novel Lord of Light (1967), which I'd read.

Further reading
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