Accelerationism. Part 2.

Neo-Nazi's, Billionaires, Tech Giants and Political Players

Morning Comrades and welcome back to the 2nd part of this story. With yesterday’s email on the history and philosophical background to this now dominant ideology among our enemies, todays essay will focus on the current implementation by various groups that are interlinked, even if that is not publicly acknowledged let alone put together for the mainstream narrative.

Most of the work I have done around this is U.S. centred for a plethora of reasons, one being that those I am writing about feel extremely secure in their positions in the U.S., more so than those in Europe and hence finding out about them was easier. Secondly, whilst their violence is global, the most prominent cases took place in the U.S. and thus serve as more approachable examples. One day this work here will allow me to spend much more time and resources to tie this together on a global scale but for the time being, I am still working in a kitchen, parenting and packing your t-shirts ( happily ).

With that, feel free to become a patreon to this work by signing up for a paid subscription. Not only does that give you a discount code for all merch, weekly free art, early bird links to said merch but my most grateful appreciation.

Ideally, today I will write about the ties of accelerationism to neo-nazi groups, murderers, tech giants and political players. I hope that on Friday I can wrap this series up with a look at the Post-Capitalist stance towards accelerationism and offer a critique. Again, this will be available to all with the patreon’s receiving their free gear after the conclusion to this series.

Neo-Nazi Accelerationism

Before I get into it, an important clarification. In regards to the U.S.: the then called “Alt-Right” of the Trumpian Era around people like Richard Spencer and the Atomwaffen Division are not the same people. On the contrary, whilst both on the far right end of anyone’s political spectrum they are entirely two different entities with two, very different ideologies.

The extreme right-wing internet is a small place. The rise of neoreaction inevitably led it to cross paths with another online fringe movement of the mid-2010s: the alt-right.

Members of the two movements didn’t agree on everything: While Land and Moldbug valorize capitalism and see democracy as the major barrier to a better future, alt-right ideologues like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor valorize whiteness and see Jews and non-whites as the problem. Nonetheless, the two shared core ideas, like an emphasis on the role of genetics in creating human hierarchies, that make them comfortable coexisting in the same online spaces.

This is the most likely means through which the racist movement became introduced to the term “accelerationism.” There’s no meaningful use of the term or attention paid to Land among American racists prior to the alt-right’s encounter with The Dark Enlightenment — and why would there have been? An abstruse techno-capitalist philosophy seems to have little in common with the herrenvolk hatred of the KKK. It wasn’t until the rise of neoreaction and the alt-right — two very online movements that shared members in common — that the encounter would have happened.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “accelerationism” has displaced the alt-right in the eyes of many internet racists. In popular usage, the “alt-right” is generally taken to refer to racists on the internet. That’s actually a bit imprecise: The alt-right is a specific subset of online racists, one that believes white nationalism can triumph by trolling journalists and staging real-life demonstrations like Charlottesville. The basic model is Hitler and the Nazi party: Win power through democratic elections, then enact your goals.

This has long been a controversial strategy in the neo-Nazi community. It had been tried before in the 1950s and 1960s by the American Nazi Party, whose charismatic leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, attempted to turn it into a legitimate force. Rockwell staged a rally on the National Mall, demonstrated against civil rights, and planned marches through Jewish neighborhoods on Jewish holidays. This amounted to very little politically and, in 1967, Rockwell was assassinated by a former member of his own party. Similar, to the American Nazi Party, the U.S. Alt-Right scene imploded after the righteous backlash by anti-fascists after Charlottesville. In come the real evil bastards, the Atomwaffen Division.

Starting in 2017, Atomwaffen members began practicing what they preached and their use of accelerationist justifications for violence have suffused online white nationalist spaces to the point where anyone can encounter it and draw their own murderous conclusions.

“There is an entire subculture of individuals who are promoting this concept, who advocate for sabotage and destruction against the system,” Mendelson, the Anti-Defamation League researcher, says. “It only takes that one individual who’s inspired by the rhetoric on that message board to act.”

The internet has allowed James Mason’s original vision, “lone wolf” violence, to become a reality, not just in the United States but globally: Accelerationism played a role in the March 2019 Christchurch shooter’s decision to gun down Muslims while they prayed, as well as a slew of other murders in Europe, especially Germany. Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s motivation was a mix of hate and fear: Like all contemporary white supremacists, he believed non-white population growth was an existential threat to his race. His manifesto is titled “The Great Replacement,” a term coined by a French writer but in context refers to the theory of “white genocide” by demography that goes back decades in the white supremacist movement. Tarrant’s plan for stopping white genocide drew liberally from accelerationist ideas; he literally titled a section of the manifesto “Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics for victory.” The list of said manifesto’s, sadly, goes on.

It’s debatable to say definitively that accelerationism “caused” acts of Atomwaffen and affiliates violence. There is almost always a complex web of personal reasons for why an individual chooses to kill; It’s possible they would have turned violent regardless of what ideas they were exposed to. The influence of accelerationism is clearer in some of the killers’ writings than in others (Crusius’s manifesto, in particular, doesn’t seem too indebted to the theory). Neo-Nazis don’t need accelerationism to be violent, but rather the doctrine’s omnipresence in online far-right spaces makes it more likely that both groups and individuals are inspired to embrace terrorism as a tactic. The frequent expressions of support for violence increase the baseline risk that someone turns to it.

Tech Accelerationism

The major proponent of this movement other than Land is software engineer Curtis Yarvin, who blogs as “Mencius Moldbug.” And while most Silicon Valley techies are unaware of and uninterested in Dark Enlightenment, there are notable figures and ideas that seem to share intellectual heritage and connections with the movement.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is a major backer of Yarvin’s start-ups and, as The Baffler reports, in 2012, Thiel gave a lecture at Stanford with distinct Dark Enlightenment themes. “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy,” he said at the time. “We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.”

Growing Silicon Valley interest in creating a small, separate state is straight out of Land’s writing. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of techies who identify with Yarvin and “neoreactionary” ideas, all based on accelerationism. Of course, both Silicon Valley and Dark Enlightenment are products of and devotees to internet culture. Again, it is absolutely crucial to understand just how powerful and influential people such as Peter Thiel are. Peter Thiel is the billionaire founder of internet payment platform Paypal. Thiel, who is quite big in some of the circles that helped organise Trump’s online campaign, has a fascination with conquering death through medical technology, among many other wildly dystopian ideas.

Elon Musk has recently announced a brain-computer interface — promising to realise a long-held dream of humans “accelerating” beyond biological limits. Elizabeth Holmes founded the Theranos corporation, which promised to do blood tests without taking blood. The company raised billions of dollars before it was revealed its promise was physically impossible. Nonetheless, it still has a staggering number of investors.

What these weird rich people have in common is a commitment to pushing capitalism beyond its limits — physical, social, biological — to pursue new forms of accumulation, and higher velocity forms of living and exploiting, and they certainly do not believe let alone adhere to any form of humanist thought, let alone democratic processes.

These two are obviously the most well-known examples from within Silicon Valley and my time doesn’t allow me to research this further at this time but you get the idea. Whilst I am still more than interested in getting to the bottom of the Endgame question, this certainly helps in understanding their motivation. None of these people believe that a democratic approach to organizing any society is worth investment, monetary, physically and emotionally. “It is a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world,” says David Golumbia, a new media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It becomes militarized, and states break down. For some reason that’s difficult to understand, they seem to think these highly weaponized feudal enclaves would be more free than the society we currently have.”

Land believes that advances in computing will enable dominant humans to merge with machines and become cybernetic super beings. He advocates for racial separation under the belief that “elites” will enhance their IQs by associating only with each other.

Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed, he argues, and corporate power should become the organizing force in society. Land is vehemently against democracy, believing it restricts accountability and freedom. The world should do away with political power, according to accelerationism, and instead, society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO. This is precisely the underlying ideology that drives many of these so-called futurist tech-giants. It is debatable which one of these two groups is more dangerous, however, when the binding agent comes into play, their relationship becomes clear and one realizes that these aren’t competing factions but inter-dependent parties adhering to the same ideologies.

The Political Religious Fanatic Accelerationists

The last group in this essay but to me the scariest of the bunch. Steve Bannon is well-known to most of us I would wager. Political Strategist to Trump he prior to that role played a very influential role in radicalizing the already radicalized U.S. Evangelists, something I didn’t think would be possible. Make no mistake, he isn’t the most central role here, but he is the most prominent. The person is driven by a radical interpretation of a version of the Bible and he understands his most important to be the accelerator for the 2nd Coming of Christ, that according to his much shared view, can only be achieved by Armageddon. In that sense his accelerationism doesn’t so much stem from Land’s idea but has deeper roots in Evangelicalism, but is without a doubt influenced by it.

Back in 2015, he laced his comments to a group of reactionary Catholics in the Vatican with references to known fascists, and spoke in apocalyptic terms. He called on "the Church militant" to "fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting that will literally eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000 and 2,500 years." He spelled out the necessity of a global far right Christian coalition against the evils of socialism, atheism and Islam: "We are at the very beginning stages of a global conflict. If we do not bind together as partners, with others in other countries...[then] this conflict is only going to metastasize." 

Bannon's "vision" requires not only attacking the democratic systems of nation-states in Europe and but also transnational power centers that show insufficient commitment to hard right values, such as shutting Europe's doors to immigration – including the Pope.

In a 2016 meeting with Italy's now deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, Bannon reportedly opined that "the pope is a sort of enemy. [Bannon] suggested for sure to attack, frontally." After that meeting Salvini was photographed holding up a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Benedict [the former arch-traditionalist pope] is my pope." For Bannon, organizing populist parties, all of which are deeply rooted in the accelerationist ideology, is "no different from Goldman Sachs" or when he started his own financial services firm - "it’s just a different conference room."

The Brink sheds light on a strategy of collaboration across the far right that, by Bannon’s own admission, openly exploits anger and resentment. While identified as "populism" for its emotive appeals, Bannon’s strategy is forged in expensive hotels, in conversations with former Goldman Sachs head John Thornton, on private jets, and in the mansions of billionaires. By his own admission, this network now runs through the entirety of Europe, from Nigel Farage, to Marine Le Pen, Orban in Hungary and prominently the Far Right in Italy.

What makes him so wildly dangerous is that he managed to bind the money from the above mentioned tech-billionaires, to the murderous thugs of the likes of the Atomwaffen Divison to the organized political far-right across North America and Europe. While we are lately seeing a semi-organized political fight against these tendencies in the Global South, their fight has only become more radicalized here in the heart of the Capitalistic Empire.

Today’s Conclusion

Whilst these alliances are mighty in their means their ideology is ultimately faulty. Dictatorships, of any kind, are inherently reactionary and short of time span. That doesn’t mean they do not have to be taken seriously, on that contrary. This ideology and their proponents are currently in charge and dominating the narrative and thus reality, especially for us here in the Global North West. Identifying them, understanding them and with said knowledge building an organized resistance is the job, and it is getting done. We have much to learn from our comrades in the Global South when it comes to building alternative care-structures outside of their narrative, and again, this is happening. I am hopeful and you should be too, even if the work that we do most likely will not come to a positive conclusion within our lifetimes.

Tomorrow, I am planing on wrapping up this series with an explanation of the Post-Capitalist Theory of Accelerationism, its pro’s and con’s and then leave you into your weekend.

Thank you for your time, attention and support.

I remain yours, without compromise,

V.