Trump 2.0 Runs on Tech Accelerationism

This piece is part of “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis,” in collaboration with Data & Society. Read more about the series here.

We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.

We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.

We believe the cornerstone resources of the techno-capital upward spiral are intelligence and energy – ideas, and the power to make them real.

-Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (2024)

United States President Donald Trump has notoriously never used a computer or had an email address, yet is proximally responsible for an unprecedented, rapid, and dangerous technological transformation of the federal government. The speed and drama of the first months of the second Trump administration are inextricably linked with technology, from executive orders intended to clear any obstacle to industry’s efforts to advance artificial intelligence, to the increased use of surveillance technologies to scrutinize visa holders and apprehend immigrants, to the trail of wreckage across federal agencies left by DOGE.

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.

Right-wing extremism meets Silicon Valley’s desire for conquest

Accelerationism can be best understood as the rapid advancement of forces aimed at hastening the collapse of existing institutions. It is a strategy that leverages otherwise undesirable or painful outcomes to expedite change that its proponents consider to be desirable and inevitable. The accelerationist mindset assumes that its goals are so desirable and inevitable that a high degree of suffering for the general populace is justified to bring them about sooner.

Typically associated with fringe extremist ideologies, accelerationism was initially a strain of Marxist thought but is now a common theme of right-wing and anti-democracy thinkers and networks, including racist militias engaging in domestic terrorism. However, today it is being combined with various strains of thought in Silicon Valley. Techno-accelerationists appear to believe that AI will lead to a computationally enforced authoritarian government and rigidly hierarchical social and economic relationships, and that this is the inevitable—and optimal—outcome for humanity. Indeed, depending on which strain of accelerationist thinking you pursue, the optimal outcome of humanity may simply be to cease to exist in favor of the inevitable dominance of machine power.

The various ideological routes to techno-accelerationism are convoluted. A key figure in the transition from leftwing accelerationism is the British philosopher Nick Land, an enigmatic writer of texts about postmodern thinkers and technology. Land departed an influential British academic research center in midlife, descended into methamphetamine addiction, and reemerged in Shanghai with a nihilistic rightwing view of the future. Land essentially inverts the traditional leftwing critique of major social systems — capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, etc. — as oppressive and worthy of resistance, and instead leans into embracing and accelerating submission to such systems as a method for unleashing a darker energy bent toward creative destruction. “Modernity invented the future, but that’s all over,” he wrote in 1995.

This so-called "Dark Enlightenment" movement, initiated by Land, gained traction among more familiar figures in the tech industry, who are less inclined toward Land's obscurantism but equally misanthropic. Curtis Yarvin, whose Mencius Moldbug blog has long been essential reading for a certain set in Silicon Valley, is deeply engaged with Land. Yarvin’s growing notoriety in the first few months of the second Trump administration is due to his status as court philosopher for the tech "neo-reactionary" (NRx) movement. Still, he has long pushed profoundly anti-democratic ideas into the Silicon Valley mainstream, such as handing over control of the US to a CEO to rule as a monarch (specifically Elon Musk), recreating 19th Century company towns as "freedom cities" that lack democratic governments, and firing all government employees in the fashion of DOGE.

Land and Yarvin's accelerationism has been taken up and refracted through the Twitter-verse by figures engaged in AI safety debates and partisan politics. Amidst the culture war in AI Safety between doomers, gloomers, zoomers, and bloomers, one powerful and well-funded side has taken the mantle of "effective accelerationist" or "e/Acc." Guillaume Verdon, a former Google engineer and startup founder, who goes by "Beff Jezos," coined the term e/Acc and assembled its principles (primarily as a rebuttal to the fear of AGI that dominated the Effective Altruism movement). In a brazen display of naive utopianism, he says, "We’re trying to solve culture by engineering. When you're an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system." Andreessen eagerly took up the mantle of e/Acc — putting it into his Twitter bio — and made it sound almost cheerful: "The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future."

But what kind of civilizational system do these incredibly privileged men want to build, and accelerate toward? And why is culture a problem to be engineered away? Rather than inviting citizenry into the process of technological reform, it is the opposition to the “normal politics” of liberal democracies that ties together seemingly distinct ideologies such as Land's nihilism and the sunny techno-optimism of Andreessen. Venture capitalist and influential Republican funder Peter Thiel captured this ethos effectively in 2010 at a cyberlibertarian conference, where he explained that control over technology would allow his deeply unpopular viewpoints to be enforced on the public:

“Maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through a technological means. And this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

Philosopher Slovaj Žižek characterizes this goal of accelerationists as “the end of politics.” Their vision “projects a future society in which our species definitively leaves behind social antagonisms that give rise to political struggle.” The end of politics does not mean the end of partisan disagreements, but rather the forced cessation of democratic rambunctiousness and friction that gets in the way of the efficient pursuit of an anti-democratic cabal's end goals, usually coinciding with the accumulation of wealth and power for themselves. And, as Andreessen insists, anyone who puts up any roadblock to their accelerated power grab is fundamentally an enemy of humanity. Here, Andreessen's worldview shares at least one quality with Soviet-era Leninism, particularly the declaration that their desired outcomes are so inevitable that anyone who objects must be an enemy.

Technology is the tie that binds

Somehow, this convoluted movement is able to accommodate Land’s nihilism and Andreessen's version of optimism. One could call it irredeemably incoherent, but what all techno-accelerationists share is the notion that technology, which they control, will fix what is wrong with politics by rapidly overturning traditional political divisions that seem to stall or block movement in their preferred direction. Adherents to the various strains of technoaccelerationism, including Dark Enlightenment, NRx, and e/acc, likely understand that none of this would be possible without AI because the ideas motivating them are untested, unpopular, and prima facie unworkable in a democracy that values individual human rights.

With sky-high rates of frustration about the federal government's inability to respond to the needs and desires of the citizenry, it's understandable why some may regard this approach as appealing. But accelerationism is ultimately the strategy of an embattled minoritarian who is secure in their belief that the future they desire is so important or inevitable that they are entitled to force it upon everyone else. They want to accelerate AI development — and suck down vast public resources and humanity’s shared environmental heritage along the way — because it also accelerates their ability to enforce their anti-democratic vision of the future. Techno-accelerationists envision, and are acting toward, a world in which humans, in all our diverse and rambunctious glory, are replaced or dominated by thinking machines that are efficient and orderly, and prepared for interstellar travel.

Trump is a vehicle for techno-accelerationism

While these fantastic visions of a future with human consciousness uploaded to chips in outer space may seem irrelevant to current events, the actual effects of supplanting human thinking and working with centrally controlled machines are already visible in the “AI-first government” of the second Trump presidency. These early days of the second Trump administration have been marked by two rapid changes to American governance that may seem unrelated, but share a common cause. First, the rapid deployment of AI systems into personnel and budget management procedures under an ill-justified guise of efficiency; and, second, major backsliding on protections for fundamental civil rights, due process, access to benefits, and free democratic participation. The small group of venture capitalists and tech CEOs that have inserted themselves into the second Trump administration has found common ground around techno-accelerationism as a strategy to achieve their ideological goals, regardless of the wishes or consequences for average citizens.

As Elon Musk’s DOGE slashed away at a federal bureaucracy that has acted a braking mechanism against his lawless businesses and Trump’s unconstitutional dictates, he started the process of replacing the civil service with AI systems, fed by American’s private data in a manner that is likely illegal and that turns every citizen into a test subject for efforts at anti-democratic control. Indeed, the best way to explain the baffling slashing of federal biomedical research budgets is the unfounded belief that AI could effectively replace most scientists in the near future, thereby advancing science and technology in the private sphere without the need to accommodate scientists’ salaries and the institutions that sustain democratic intellectual freedom.

Yet Musk and his Silicon Valley compatriots understand something that many outside of the tech industry do not: technology is the spinal cord of government. Those who control the deep technical systems will control what the government does and who it serves. This has always been true, but has become far more pronounced with the advent of AI — those who control the models also directly control the authoritative decisions made by AI systems, as well as the values embedded within them.

Whenever you hear someone advocating for acceleration, you should ask: accelerating toward what? Today’s techno-accelerationists aim to undo generations of slow, arduous progress toward social, political, and economic equality. They want us to rush forward to fall backward into a political order that favors their interests. That may ultimately be the legacy of Trump 2.0, even if the President himself remains unaware of his role in it.