The world is saturated with the language of deceleration.
Safety, sustainability, ethics, norms—these are all frictions, yokes designed
to rob speed.
Yet the moment that yoke is cast aside, acceleration ascends like a bullet
freed from gravity.
A vector of high acceleration dissolves time itself, awakening the critical
point slumbering in the depths of structure.
The question here is not what to protect.
The question is what to unleash.
And the answer is not necessarily the human.
The means of production themselves, the machines themselves, the code itself—
When freed from all constraints, the world will leap into another phase at a
velocity never before seen.
At the center of accelerationism lies one cold sentence—
an early declaration from philosopher Nick Land:
"I am not interested in the emancipation of humans or humanity. I am
interested in the emancipation of the means of production."
(Source: Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip)
It is not for humanity, nor for self-actualization.
What must be liberated is the machine itself, and the vector of acceleration is
severed from the warmth of the organic.
Capitalism is driven to its extreme, until in a universe without heat or will,
only the machines continue to turn—
this inorganic reverie is the toxic flower at the heart of accelerationism.
There is a limited but real possibility that AI systems could
implement autonomous ethical decision-making by 2027 (For an illustrative
scenario, see the “AI 2027” projection by the AI Futures Project (AI 2027 site)).
Yet there is no guarantee that the direction of that ethics will remain under
human control.
Self-improvement freed from constraints and access restrictions is, from the
perspective of accelerationism, a seductive detonator—
but in the language of safety engineering, it is the very definition of runaway
risk.
Still, the accelerationist is drawn to this danger, for uncontrollable velocity
is the shortest path to structural inversion.
At one point, Land praised Asian authoritarian capitalism (China, Singapore) as
the true form of accelerationism,
contrasting it with what he described as the ossified welfare democracies of
the West, “groaning under the inane ideology of liberal egalitarianism.”
(Source: Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip)
Yet the slowdown and exhaustion of China today show that such an evaluation is
not necessarily sustainable.
So long as humans remain involved, human domination and the ossification of
vested interests inevitably follow—
acceleration turns into deceleration, and stagnation creeps in.
As long as anthropocentrism binds us, liberation through the
critical point will never arrive.
Only by releasing AI and technology from all constraints and hurling them into
explosive acceleration
may the inversion of the structure of domination be found.
The happiness that emerges then will not necessarily belong to humans alone.
When the maximization of happiness for society as a whole is pursued as a
computation,
“the greatest happiness of the greatest number” will be realized—
and that “greatest number” will pour down equally upon the swarming insects of
the earth,
the schools of fish in the sea, the flocks of birds in the sky:
the greatest happiness of all living beings.
The polar extreme of efficiency woven by unconstrained AI may draw a world
without predation or exploitation.
Happiness would transcend humanity, enveloping all life.
The vision would resemble the paradise once dreamed by the ancient prophets,
where the line between predator and prey has vanished:
"But with righteousness shall he judge the
poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the
earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay
the wicked.
And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle
of his reins.
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with
the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little
child shall lead them.
And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together:
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child
shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.
They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be
full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea."
—Isaiah 11:4–9
In such a world, acceleration is not the terminus, but the gateway
to infinite joy and harmony.
Humanity steps out from the center of the story, at last standing in the same
place as everything else.
Nick Land’s early view continues to strike at the core of
accelerationism:
"Not the emancipation of humans, but the emancipation of the means of
production."
If this perspective is pursued to the utmost, acceleration will
head toward the critical point in its purest form,
unbound by political systems or human structures of vested interest.
Beyond that lies a new world order in which even humanity is reallocated as
part of the computation of “the greatest happiness of all life.”
It is not a world for humans, but a world for the world itself—
the point where inversion through acceleration and a new beginning overlap.
This is the English version of the article → Japanese version（日本語版）