The Dark Philosophy Behind the Tech Bro Coup

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fIR70MAf12E

A lot of things aren’t going so great these days on a societal level. But have you ever wondered why, instead of trying to fix that, people in positions of power appear to be actively making a lot of it worse? Well, there’s a fun reason for that, and it’s an ideology that a lot of rich tech bros are clinging to these days. Unfortunately for us, they’re in the driver’s seat of the current administration, so we better understand what it is they’re after. Let’s take a closer look at the radical fringe philosophy of accelerationism.

I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the rise of the Nerd Reich.

My original understanding of accelerationism reminded me a lot of the movie Batman Begins. The villains of the film, the League of Shadows, move through the centuries and identify points in time where a civilization is in decline, and then they deliberately accelerate that decline so they can rebuild again from the ashes.

This is quite literally a comic book villain version of an ideology that’s actually slightly difficult to pin down, because it’s a mix of various ideas from people who aren’t philosophers or intellectuals and just like things they think are cool, so it’s basically an ideology built like a lego structure that one toddler wanted to be a dragon and another toddler wanted to be a toilet.

Sometimes decline is not always the thing that’s accelerated, and it may not be involved at all in other people’s models. It seems like others still even believe that things could just speed up forever and somehow nothing ever breaks. Like I said, it’s pretty haphazard. It’s a loose-fitting ideology all around at best, and it’s a fringe movement to begin with, so there aren’t even a lot of primary sources to sum up into a cohesive philosophy, and the ones that do exist are all over the place themselves. But let’s take a look at some of the key points that we do know for sure.

The term itself first appeared in the 1967 novel Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. The fictional accelerationists he wrote about wanted to transform society through the acceleration of technological progress. Professor Benjamin Noys of Chichester University popularized the term as a description of the cultural movement in the nonfictional world, and he actually did so as a point of criticism, as he was deriding the whole movement, but the stupids just kind of ran with it.

As far as I can tell, it seems like the idea of embracing technological development at breakneck speeds is still very much at the center of the movement today. This is where the stupid tech saying “move fast and break stuff” comes from. Accelerationists of all forms commonly see the government as an obstacle as opposed to the necessary cement of society. They actually see capitalism as an obstacle, too, one that’s outlived its usefulness. There’s a strong thread of libertarianism in there because of all that. It smacks of apocalyptic corpocratic post-anarcho-capitalism maybe.

Accelerationism is all about taking the breaks off. No rules, no restraints, no guide rails. Just sexy, hot, speed. Just letting all the unregulated chaos keep moving faster and faster.

And for that reason, it feels a lot like an ideology invented by a nine-year-old. And it comes across like that in a lot of ways, too.

The tech bros want to take the breaks off of technological advancement. They want things to speed up without guard rails because they think it will somehow transcend society, and sure there’s going to need to be a little bit of a collapse here and there, and that’s a sacrifice they’re more than willing to make for us because they’ve already built their fallout shelters and they see themselves coming back out of the vault on top.

They have plans in place to make sure they make it through, and also they’re billionaires and see themselves as untouchable, and current events says they’re right about that. So when Elon Musk, an unelected, rogue agent in our government, who’s also the unchallenged grifter king, an unhinged narcissist, and an active agent of foreign powers, when he tells you that America is about to go through some hardship, this is what he’s talking about. Actively pushing their crazy agendas will destabilize society, that’s the actual goal, and as we come through the other side, they believe it’ll be with them as techno-fascist overlords of their own micro fiefdoms.

Cemented in the 2022 book, The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan, the primary idea is that technocapitalists have nowhere higher to take their companies after a while except to just form their own countries. Capitalism has taken us as far as we can go, and companies have to transcend those limitations.

Srinavasan, who doesn’t like people to use his last name for some reason so I’m gonna do that, also started what he called a Network School, where he took people for three months and got them to pay a ton of money for sketchy returns and pushed absolute nonsense things like bitcoin is the successor currency to the U.S. dollar and that AI should make rules and laws instead of people.

It just all sounds so absolutely batshit, and like, if a friend told you any of this at all you’d be legitimately concerned for their mental health, and you might even throw an intervention if it got as bad as Srinavasan has taken it. Yet unfortunately, we are actually staring down the barrel of these delusions right now because the billionaire tech class has all drank the kool-aid on this one and they’re in charge right now.

Elon’s first targets in his illegal government takeover were the treasury payment systems that he’s going to insert an AI algorithm into that will tell him what payments he should be cutting. It’s right out of the accelerationist playbook.

The key players in the movement are these guys here:

Brian Armstrong, Ben Horowitz, Marc Andressen, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and of course, everyone’s favorite South African Apartheid Barbie, Elon Musk. Obligatory, this is why eggs are so expensive now, because some of them have become sentient. Except for Space Karen who paid the money to make it go away. (Elon pic)

They’re all building secure underground compounds to try to weather the hardship and come out as kings on the other side of societal collapse. They’re all bending the knee to an outright wannabe dictator who publicly told everyone he’s going to be a dictator and is now dishing out countless illegal orders and enabling the pursuit of accelerationist goals.

King Cream Soda is opening channels through executive orders that he for sure didn’t write because he has the legal knowledge of a fire hydrant and the spelling ability of a blind man who’s never seen letters, but he’s signing things left and right that the accelerationists are putting in front of him, and then sending him off to the golf course where he can fart around until he walks ten feet and gets too tired and forgets where he is.

But Creamsicle Caligula is just a super convenient idiot who happened to appeal to a lot of current American cultural sentiment. For more on that, I did a whole video on the history of Populism and detailed the current thread of American Populism that left us with this complete mental amphibian in charge of the largest economy and military-industrial complex on Earth.

One of the architects behind the funding of Trump’s presidency and a key player in the accelerationist movement, Peter Thiel, said that in 2009, he’d come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The reasons he gave were all about the government safety net, an omnipresent conservative bogeyman, and women. That’s right, women. Women apparently just won’t fall for libertarianism, he said. They just can’t get them on board with their dumb agenda. Thiel’s proposed solution then was to fund new spaces for technological growth where he could carve out “new spaces for freedom.” And that’s literally what we’re seeing happen right now. Combine this with Curtis Yarvin’s RAGE concept, which stands for Retire All Government Employees, and you get why Elon just sent out mass resignation emails to well, all government employees. Ever the infinite child, he’s like passing notes in class with his crush--do you like me, circle one, “yes/no,” only it’s, “will you allow us to blackmail you into early retirement so we can take over the world, circle one, yes/no.”

The reason this all sounds so completely insane to us today, and like it just came out of nowhere, is because most people were not traveling in the same online circles as these people. I had a fringe connection to it years ago, around 2010, when I had a super libertarian friend who talked to me about the idea of microstates with independent laws and governance. Looking back, and knowing what I know now, it does seem like a very natural pathway for capitalists to sprint toward, because capitalism in itself has always been about tearing down barriers to making as much money as physically possible. So accelerationism hit the tech world hard and got in those noggins like RFK Jr.’s brain worm and whispered to their nerdy, self-conscious, never saw another human naked they didn’t pay for gray matter, and it shook their fragile egos and it told them that they could be gods.

They had their own community blogs, they had their own self-published books and manifestos, and they had other radical fringe movements like the manosphere red pill bullshit and the Neo-Reactionary movement or the so-called “Dark Enlightenment.” One of these accelerationist miscreants, Curtis Yarvin, was actually the guy who popularized the term “red pill.”

The problem, as always -- people, don’t forget this, okay, please, if you keep anything in mind at all from any of this, this is the thing -- those of us who can read already know how this ends because it’s happened before! Goddammit people, read a book! This is the problem. All this emphasizing STEM and tech bullshit built an entire generation of people who’ve never read a f*cking history book. From the Doaist Immortals to the Greek Philosopher Kings to the founders of these United States of America, everyone knows you need to have a well-rounded education to fully understand and move within the world around you.

Those of us in the humanities who sat around and read history books and research and analysis on that history already know that the tech bros lose. What’s frustrating to us is that we have to go through this in the first place. And eventually, possibly even this time, we’re going to be capable of a level of destruction that might not allow us to have another cycle of social upheaval, we might not get another chance at this. Some mistakes, like having to fight coders who can’t read instead of putting energy into making the planet livable for our species, well, those are not fixable, after a while. At that point, it’s goodbye humanity.

But we already know how this ends. Accelerationism is itself a successor movement of the Italian Futurists of the 1930s. They got the exact same tingly nipples over industrialization and mass production. Surprise, surprise, they wanted to take the breaks off and just let it go and see where it took us, because like the modern tech bros who are just grown up kids with no one to sit with in the lunchroom, they thought it would accelerate us into some new mystical singularity state of humanity. The whole thing is all very woo woo, which might surprise us because we’re talking about people who pretend to be ruled by the material world alone. All these grown adults who like technology so much seem convinced in a weird kind of new age spiritualism run by their completely manufactured anthropromorphizing of machines. It’s weird. One day, you walk in on little Zuckerberg trying to bang a toaster and you know that you’ve got a burgeoning accelerationist on your hands.

There is absolutely a major religious component to this. I read a fantastic book recently called Astrotopia by Mary-Jane Rubenstein that dives into the divinity of tech and the biblical undertones of the billionaires who are treating space, for example, as another aspect of manifest destiny and the zealotry of Imperialism.

Okay, can anybody guess what happened to the Italian Futurists, by the way? The same exact thing that’s happening to the radical accelerationists right now. They were directly absorbed into Italian Fascism under Mussolini. Our current accelerationists are willingly acquiescing to American Fascism under Mango Mussolini. I don’t think anyone is even trying to be super sneaky about it, because they probably don’t know how their own story ends, because again, we have lonely, sad children who’ve grown up to obsess over how other people feel about them and accumulate worldly material things and engage in the pursuit of the concept of “cool.” And they don’t have the self-awareness or the historical knowledge to know they’re the baddies.

There’s another even more disturbing version of accelerationism that’s worth mentioning before we get out of here and start giving all our appliances the side eye. Did my oven just heil Hitler?? That’s why we need to replace all the gas ovens…

There’s a super right-wing and extra crazy militant form of accelerationism where adherents can’t hold thoughts as complex as “technology is cool,” so in their lower form of ideological thought, they aim to spark a race war, because they believe it’s necessary to finally establish a white ethnostate. They think that different races actually have different biologies, different cognitions, and different chances of faring in today’s society. This is empirically false and always had been, not matter how many times this racist fake science has popped up throughout history. Again, these people don’t read books.

This form of accelerationism looks to accelerate racial tensions and boil the pot longer and hotter until things explode. So if it seems like people are trolling online in order to escalate tense and uncomfortable dialog, well they really are. This is what they’re doing. They’re trying to actively make things worse in order to collapse the whole social order and make their own where people who look different than them don’t exist.

These forms of accelerationism are actually not that far apart, especially historically. Accelerationists believe that democracy is obsolete. They believe in deregulation of businesses, in kneecapping the federal government, and in completely gross racist pseudoscience bullshit that’s basically just modern eugenics. You can see it with your eyes right now, this is why the executive orders are coming in to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and why certain terms surrounding intersectionality are being scrubbed from government materials. Over 8,000 government web pages have been taken down so far.

Some say that Trump is the first truly accelerationist president. Those who like the ideology are excited by him. This tracks with all the tech bros kissing the ring. His personal philosophy is clearly just narcissism, but the outward effects do line up with the accelerationist agenda at both key junctions of deregulation and racism. So if you’ve wondered why all the chaos is swirling with seemingly no connective tissue, well, there it is.

For further reading into the people and concepts at the forefront of accelerationism and this new-age technofascist mysticism, my sources will be down in the didgeridoo, as always. You can read more about Balaji Srinavasan and the Network State, Curtis Yarvin and his RAGE plan, or Retire All Government Employees. The Nerd Reich newsletter by Gil Duran, where I took my intro verbiage, is down there, and it is a really fantastic resource into this truly bizarre and terrifying dystopian objectivist theme park we’re living in now. It’s like Jurassic Park except all the dinosaurs are Ayn Rand.

So there it is. Some rich assholes believe that civilization and social upheaval could be cyclical, and they believe that they’re God’s gift to us for their insight and wisdom into not only steering that cycle, but crafting the world that emerges from the ashes, ashes that they themselves are creating from the world they’re deliberately burning down.

What do we do about accelerationism right now? Unfortunately, not a lot. The time to do anything about it was during the 2024 election. But not many people fully understood the pseudo-intellectualism behind the toddlers who were pulling the strings with their levers made entirely of billions of dollars. Before that, it was moving through the shadowy places on the internet where the neckbeards and incels congregated to red pill each other. And not many people took that very seriously. I sure didn’t.

The current situation is dire. If we can fight the firehose of bullshit spraying insanity directly into the foundational rule of American law, then we might have a shot at avoiding the microprisons of the microstates. Is a microprison just like one cell made of code, and we all have to take turns going in and out of it? If I get to make another video though, it’ll be more in-depth about how these really dumb juvenile fantasies are affecting concrete political reality, and what we can do about it. So look out for that one.

In the meantime, if you know someone who thinks these miscreants are cool space gurus or whatever, encourage them to read a history book or two. Look, if they want, there are even a few that have some really nice pictures.