ACCELERATIONISM

 “The damage wrought to American democracy—the severity of which has taken even experts who study the rise of authoritarianism by surprise—has been sponsored and facilitated by tech oligarchs with bizarre ideas about the future and their role in bringing it about. They appear to be bound together by a common assumption most Americans almost certainly don't share and would never endorse: that the ultimate fate of humanity is to be ruled by AI overlords without the pesky friction that human values, community, and individual freedom generate.

How is it possible that a man who doesn't have an email address has found common cause with techno-authoritarians who seem to think the optimal outcome for humanity is to be replaced by computational models? What is the glue that holds together this unlikely alliance? A key, underappreciated component of these alliances between the American far right and the tech oligarchy is the shared commitment to a strategy of "accelerationism," specifically the assumption that by controlling and combining the levers of consumer and government AI systems, they can rapidly restructure society to achieve their own anti-democratic objectives.”