Fascinating. You have to wonder if they are cognizant of the associations of the term "accelrationism" with the extremes of the political spectrum and signalling a dog-whistle for one or the other, or if they just think it sounds cool?
> Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
> Land is also known for later developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment, which he named.
It’s all neo-fascism.
Personally, it feels like a reaction to the failure of crypto (and not the recent failure; the decade-long fits and starts that keep handing them what look like wins, but that haven't actually amounted to their preferred world yet). All of those crypto bros that feel, deep in their bones, that crypto SHOULD work, if not for all of the 'luddites' holding it back, channel their energy into a more generalizeable set of principles that otherize anyone who would tell them to not chase progress, even if the only restriction is "don't do it AT ALL COSTS. Balance it with humanity."
And if your whole philosophy is "let the fire consume because fire is pure energy and how can producing pure energy be bad, in the long run?", then I imagine "accelerationism" is still a lot more marketable than "execution engine-ism", or "harvestism", or most other terms that could accurately describe the disposition.
Care to elaborate? I am completely unaware of these associations.
Though it has left-wing and right-wing variants, accelerationism argues that one should double down on capitalisim in order to destroy it.
It is obviously a niche ideology you rarely run into offline, and when you do it's generally young, mentally ill, or simply very damaged people who can't imagine life ever getting better without the world burning first.
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/uniting-for-total-collapse-the-jan...
They want to accelerate towards civil racial war in US.
It's also not technology that's suspect. It's the choice of the word "accelerationism" which tends to be associated with people who wish to accelerate what they see as the inevitable collapse of the current social-economic-political system. There are people who believe doing so would usher in Communisim. There seem to be much more who believe doing so would usher in an era without "globo-homo" as they seem to like to use as short hand at the moment. You might enjoy this wikipedia section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Fascist_accele...
Then again, it could all be a massive coincidence that this is term they have chosen to use. I would expect they will certainly attract people who don't believe in coincidence, whether they want that to be the case or not.