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In May 2013 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published a bold and provocative essay '# ACCELERATE Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics', which aimed to push 'towards a future that is more modern, an alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate' (2013). Philosopher Benjamin Noys first coined the term 'accelerationism' as a disparaging way to describe a strand of post-'68 French theory, and its reinterpretation and development in the '90s by English scholar and current political figure of the far-right Nick Land (Noys, 2010). In their small, ambitious manifesto, Srnicek and Williams claim the term for left political practice, using it to signify a willingness to 'take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society' (2013) and push them even further, towards a post-capitalist future. The essay was divisive, received by some as right wing heresy and others as merely following orthodox Marxism's compulsion to amplify the contradictions of capital. Regardless of its reception, it was an influential work, spawning an edited collection of responses and extensions (Avanessian and Mackay, 2014), academic conferences, and countless internet comments.
Despite this surge of interest from esoteric academic enclaves, the authors make no mention of the term accelerationism in their first book length work Inventing the Future (Srnicek and Williams, 2015). Whether this implies a rejection of the label, given where the politics of accelerationism have ended up, with a substantial far-right current embracing technological acceleration to advance the dominance of capital and the coming of the singularity, or a simple wish to broaden their appeal beyond the far corners of leftist theoretical circles, is unclear. This is understandable, given that in just over 200 pages the authors manage to explain the reasons for the essential weakness of the contemporary left, the trajectory of neoliberalism's rise from extremist niche to economic and political orthodoxy, the economics of automation and surplus populations, and propose a strategy out of the current situation that moves resolutely into the future rather than backwards to an idealised past.
The book begins with a critique of the current beliefs and practices of much of the left. Chapters one and two introduce the idea of 'folk politics' as a broad category to cover many of these practices of resistance that...