Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism

We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, /Malign Velocities/ tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.

• Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts
• #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader
• K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
• Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
• The Weird and the Eerie
• Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
• Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
• Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007
• No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Dark Deleuze (Forerunners: Ideas First)