Sunday Pages: "Manifesto of Futurism"

A declaration by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Dear Reader,

There is a sequence in action movies where the hero, driving an unfamiliar vehicle at breakneck speed with bad guys in hot pursuit, careens around a corner and suddenly finds himself—in films of this sort, it’s usually a him—at a dead end. Sometimes it’s a brick wall. Sometimes it’s a tanker truck blocking the entire road, or a gaggle of nuns crossing the street. Sometimes it’s a cliff. The point is, what the driver should clearly do, when confronted by this seemingly insurmountable obstacle, is pump the brakes.

But he doesn’t pump the brakes. Instead, against all logic and every survival instinct pulsing through his veins, he shifts into another gear and speeds up. (There is almost always a passenger in the car with him—a woman, usually, but invariably someone with better sense than he has—and as he floors it, she shouts something to the effect of, “Are you crazy?” Or she just screams.) And just when it seems like the two of them are toast, at the last possible nick-of-time moment, a trick of movie magic compels the car to swerve, or spin, or hit a ramp and go airborne; something “improbable but not impossible” happens, and our hero makes it out alive.

This is how I think about accelerationism, the underlying social, economic, material, and political philosophy that is said to animate tech-bro billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen (as well as three of the four über-rich “Brewsters” in Mountainhead, the new film by Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong). The underlying principle can be distilled to one simple maxim:

All gas, no brakes.

I fell into the accelerationist rabbit-hole a few weeks ago, and I’m still down here, fumbling around. It’s fascinating stuff, and whatever your feelings about the philosophy, the people who have written about it—Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Iain Hamilton Grant—are freakishly brilliant. From what I can gather, there are a lot of different strands of accelerationism, not all of them as misanthropic as the Musk variety. “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics,” for example, published by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek in 2013, had me nodding my head in agreement more often than not, and occasionally shouting “fuck yeah” into the air.

Back in 2017, Andy Beckett wrote a fantastic “Long Read” for The Guardian called “Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in,” in which he delves into the origins of accelerationism, its evolution and spread, its splinter groups, its sacred texts, and its thought leaders. This is how he defines it:

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified—either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.

What does this mean in 2025, in layman’s terms?

With regard to technology, if we’re hard-core accelerationists, what we want is to accelerate the development and the implementation of AI, in its myriad of forms—including generative AI, where we will soon be consuming AI-scripted TV series based on AI-written books, featuring AI actors, AI art designers, and AI directors, with AI soundtracks. Reuse, recycle, reduce. We need to fast-forward to the point where—as was the premise of an unfinished sci-fi novel I wrote 22 years ago—anything you can do on your phone today you’ll be able to do in the not-too-distant future, via a chip in your brain: send texts and DMs, tweet, listen to music, navigate the streets of New York, measure time, doomscroll. This is why the Silicon Valley titans have their panties in a twist about the spiking of the “no regulation on AI for ten years” codicil of the Big Beautiful Bill.

As Andreessen, the software engineer and Web 1.0 pioneer turned venture capitalist, writes in his “Techno-Optimism Manifesto,” “A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true, yet more than offset by the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.” Technology, he worshipfully proclaims, “has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth,” arguing that

this is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us.

We believe this is why our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.

We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.

We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.

We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.

We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.

We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.

We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.

We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.

We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.

Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.

Andreessen’s manifesto makes for rousing reading, as all successful manifestos must. I agree with him that technology has been a boon to humankind. (Pace RFK, Jr., vaccines are the single best thing about being alive at this moment in history.) And I’m an optimistic guy by nature. But—don’t we have to make a honest assessment of where we are right now before skipping to the next big thing? I’m not sure we’re ready to zoom ahead, since, despite Andreessen’s cocksure proclamations, we haven’t actually “solved” the problem of poverty, or pandemics, or isolation, or affordable housing, or—as the friends and families of the many thousands of people who have already died of malnourishment because Musk cut funding for USAID can sadly attest—starvation. What’s the use of developing a technological “solution” if we can’t, or refuse to, utilize it?

To wit, and to borrow Andreessen’s rhetorical flourish with something more prosaic: We had a problem of spelling words incorrectly, so we invented spellcheck. As he was the co-founder of Netscape, one presumes he is aware of a technology first developed in the early 80s. And yet his manifesto has been up since October of 2023 and “descendants” is still misspelled:

(It’s not like I’m impervious to typos, misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and, lord knows, simple arithmetical errors—I spell descendants wrong all the time; I just did so typing this sentence and had to go back and fix it!—but I’m not the gajillionaire author of a manifesto claiming that technology can fix all our problems.)

The sunny, glass-half-full view of human ingenuity—which, incidentally, I tend to vibe with more often than not—is rebutted in the earlier and more famous cri de cœur, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” by Ted Kaczynski—what is commonly known as the “Unabomber Manifesto” but would more accurately be called the “Techno-Pessimist Manifesto”:

A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. . . .

The kernel of his entire argument is this:

Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back, but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.

Kaczynski believed that the acceleration of technology was rapidly approaching the point of no return, and that if we didn’t act fast and pump the brakes, the Titanic of technological advancement was going to smash into the iceberg of individual freedom—and there would be no Carpathia steaming nearby to rescue the survivors. He published his manifesto in 1995. From June through December of that year, right after college graduation, I was working in the video library at Young & Rubicam—where, to enter the building, I had to walk through heightened security, as one of the advertising executives associated with the company, Thomas Mosser, had been killed in a Unabomber attack six months earlier—and one of my duties was to open the Netscape browser on my PC and show bewildered visitors to the video library what the World Wide Web was.

That was exactly 30 years ago. Kaczynski was freaked out enough back then to mail bombs to complete strangers. The three decades since have seen the biggest leap in technological advancement since the Sumerians started writing stuff down on clay tablets, if not ever.

In 2025, we are almost certainly “Right of Boom.”

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What is the accelerationist attitude toward climate change? In the words of Lady Macbeth, “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.” Since humans are going to eventually destroy the earth’s habitability regardless, we might as well get a move on. Only when we’ve extracted all the fossil fuels from the ground, and all the “raw earth” minerals we need for our technological devices, will we understand what to do next. Therefore, accelerate the melting of the icecaps so we can drill baby drill in the Arctic Ocean! (To understand why Trump and Vance are so fixated on Greenland, just look at a map.) And if a lot of peasants and serfs and hoi polloi bite the dust in the process, so be it; we can always make more.

Capitalism, meanwhile, depends on a constantly expanding workforce, on an unlimited supply of resources, and on markets perpetually growing. But the awful truth is that none of those things are limitless. And when we run out of easily-exploitable labor, natural resources, and new markets, capitalism will have to be replaced by…uh…no one really knows, but something else. Let’s get to that point as fast as humanly (and cyborg-ly) possible, accelerationists believe, so we can figure the next part out.

The economic strand of accelerationism is what resonates most with me. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek express it succinctly:

Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

Late-stage capitalism brings about what Corey Doctorow calls “enshittification”:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Doctorow is speaking here only of tech platforms, but enshittification is ubiquitous in late-stage capitalism. It’s “they don’t build ‘em like they used to” writ large. Williams and Srnicek recognize this:

We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.

To me, that’s more hopeful that Andreessen’s misspelled optimism.

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What gives me pause are the political aspects of accelerationism. Historically, this sort of thinking goes hand in hand with tyranny. As Beckett writes in his Guardian piece, “Celebrating speed and technology has its risks. A century ago, the writers and artists of the Italian futurist movement fell in love with the machines of the industrial era and their apparent ability to invigorate society. Many futurists followed this fascination into war-mongering and fascism. While some futurist works are still admired, the movement’s reputation has never recovered.”

As it turns out, the Futurists also had a manifesto. It was written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. In it, we find the seeds of the “manosphere” movement and the war on “wokeness,” inchoate accelerationism, and the inherent cruelty of a cult that values technology more than individual human life:

Manifesto of Futurism

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy, and the strength of daring.

2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolution.

3. Until now, literature has glorified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber. We want to exalt aggressive action, fever-dream sleeplessness, the double-time march, the perilous leap off the cliff, the slap, and the punch in the face.

4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A race-car adorned with great tail-pipes like serpents with explosive breath, a roaring sports car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

5. We shall honor the man behind the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the entire earth, hurled along its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour, and prodigality to enhance the fervent urgency of the primordial elements.

7. There is no beauty except in struggle, no passive masterpiece. Poetry should be a violent assault on forces of the unknown forces, commanding them to kneel at the foot of man.

8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking back at what came before when now is the time to break down the doors of Impossibility? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the Absolute, for we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We glorify war—the only true antidote for the world—and with it, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, and oppose morality, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure, and uprising; the multicolored and polyphonic surf of revolution in modern capitals; the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons; the gluttonous subway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges leaping with the grace of gymnasts across rivers gleaming like diabolical forks and knives in the bright sun; restless steamships sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle; and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propellers sound like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

As an artistic movement, Futurism did not long endure. For all of Marinetti’s bluster and bravado, all of that alpha-male machismo and misogyny, the most enduring Futurist work of art is Giacomo Balla’s “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash”—a painting of a poodle running:

Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

As a poet and playwright, Marinetti left behind little of consequence. One of his Futurist plays was so terrible that audiences openly mocked it, which he spun by saying that “the desire to be heckled” is a tenet of Futurism. Perhaps Elon Musk can find some comfort in that.

The rest of his career was a slow descent into despotism. Reading the writing on the Italian wall, Marinetti sucked up to Benito Mussolini big time. By 1919, he was not just a Fascist, but a co-author of the “Fascist Manifesto” (which, to be fair, is less fascistic in the modern sense than it sounds, but still). As the war dragged on, he renounced his previous avant-garde positions on art, and, like his friend Ezra Pound, wound up being an apologist for autocracy and a tool of the totalitarian state.

Small wonder the titans of Silicon Valley lined up behind Trump at the inauguration.

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All this rabbit-hole exploration leaves me with more questions than answers: Is authoritarianism the inevitable result of the unbridled worship of technology? Do the most fervent tech zealots always wind up dabbling in eugenics, to justify doing harm to other people? Can capitalism be tweaked to better help humanity? Can the acceleration of technology be stopped? Should it be stopped? Will we ever fully utilize the technology that was designed to solve certain problems to actually, like, solve those problems? Will new technology emerge that smoothes over all of the unforeseen (except by sci-fi writers) consequences of the AI explosion? Should we put these questions to Grok, or Gemini, or Siri, or ChatGPT? Or should we just assume that our descendents descendants—the ones who manage to survive whatever grim surprises Mother Nature has in store for us—will figure it out?

“All gas, no brakes” was the mantra of the New York Jets from 2021-24, when Robert Saleh was the team’s head coach. He lost 36 of his 56 games as HC, for a winning percentage of .357, and never even sniffed the playoffs.

Life is not an action movie. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are not action-movie heroes.

Here, in the real world, when you’re barrel-assing towards the edge of a cliff in your Cybertruck, what you need to do is slow down.

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ICYMI

Fun show on Friday: LB breaks down what the term “Epstein files” actually means, I discuss my meeting with the Ukrainian journalist in NYC, Lisa Graves and CHUNK stop by to talk about the Musk-Trump feud, and Dana Glazer talks about the Visibility Brigade:

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Photo credit: Marinetti, sometime in the 1910s.