Decelerationism: Rethinking Our Rapid Tech-Driven Future
Now, just a few years after the launch of ChatGPT, a mix of user fascination, funny videos, mathematical breakthroughs, exploding valuations, environmental costs, safety risks, and strange billionaire utterances, has got us all talking about the pros and cons of “Artificial Intelligence”, and who should be in charge. That is taking an age-old discussion about the eco-social implications of technology beyond the confines of experts, environmentalists, and regulators, and into the mainstream. Not since the advent of the nuclear age has the general public been so engaged in the matter of the dissemination and governance of technology. Initial responses to my essay on “decelerationism” clarified for me the importance of becoming aware of the ideological power of systems of extraction and control in limiting our imagination. So, in this post, I’m sharing reflections on decelerating our obedience to the ideological view that “progress” is inevitable, positive, and that new technology is the centrepiece of that process. Free of such ‘technoprogressivist’ ideology, we can consider what old technologies we still love and want more people to access, how new technologies should be developed, adopted, and governed, as well as the appropriate pace of change, so that we can manage potentially disruptive consequences.
One reader produced a bullet point summary of my essay. I am sharing it here, as a useful primer, especially if you are joining our Metacrisis Salon on Monday (scroll to the end to register):
_The Problem with Speeding Up Collapse_
- Some very rich leaders in technology want modern society to break down faster.
- They believe computers and artificial intelligence can build a perfect new world, even if the present world falls apart.
- The author (Jem Bendell) argues that speeding up this breakdown causes massive harm to everyday people who still depend on current systems for food, medicine, and basic needs.
_What is Deceleration?_
- “Deceleration” means choosing to slow things down rather than speeding them up.
- It means pausing rapid computer and artificial intelligence development so communities can decide how these tools are used safely.
- It means slowing down damage to nature, giving people time to rebuild local ways of living before current systems fail.
_Why Modern Life Feels So Rushed_
- Modern economies require continuous growth, which forces people and machines to work faster and faster.
- Labor-saving devices and digital tools often increase demands instead of creating free time.
- Fast lifestyles harm physical health, increase personal anxiety, and reduce the ability to think clearly.
- Major wisdom traditions throughout history have taught that slowing down brings calm, clear thought, and care for others.
_Responding Without Violence_
- Frustration with the destruction of nature leads some activists to consider property damage or violent tactics.
- The author argues that violent tactics do not work and are often used by authorities as a reason to control the public even more.
- Many historical movements that created lasting, positive change relied on non-violence.
_Practical Steps to Take_
- Recognize the reality that current systems are already beginning to struggle and change.
- Reduce personal dependence on giant computer and internet companies.
- Talk with friends, neighbors, and community groups about the need to slow down economic and technological processes and ecological destruction.
- Practice slowing down everyday personal habits, such as taking more time to eat a meal.
I recorded an informal video introduction to the decelerationist essay, which generated some commentary. One person didn’t like my criticism of the looting and property burning in France. I replied: _“I criticise the performative destruction of property, as do the leaders of the left wing alliance and protest organisers in France. They realise how it’s used by the authorities to distract from the massive rallies. That’s all demonstrable. Where’s the evidence that trashing a lux bag shop or a burning a town hall delivers positive radical political outcomes? The people I know who advocate it have never had evidence, just a hypothesis that one day somewhere it would spark a revolution. Says more about them than it does about social change.”_
The fact that some people celebrate riots and looting, or choose not to condemn them, is indicative of a dismay at the direction of society and the lack of credible means for changing it. That reminds us of the need for an alternative agenda to the ones that have failed us. You can probably list those agendas that have failed to execute power in ways that protect humanity and the planet: technocratic centrism, ethno-nationalist conservativism, right wing libertarianism, revolutionary socialism and, even, democratic socialism. None of these political philosophies are providing a coherent and relevant response to an era of metacrisis and collapse. It’s why I’ve been supportive of the few people, such as Richard Hames, who are beginning to imagine what a politics of solidarity might involve for the chaotic future we are facing, and offered my own in _Breaking Together._
I received feedback on my decelerationist essay from people who work in digital technology or are involved in conversations about it due to living near Silicon Valley. Our conversations revolved around the matter of whether it is smarter to be an outright decelerationist or, instead, accept the technological juggernaut, and try to use more technologies for more positive ends. Some of those I discussed this with also saw the potential of the people who are multimillionaires due to tech, to support good causes and thus not ‘rub them up the wrong way’ by critiquing the source of their wealth (and thus their identity). Well, we disagreed. I also want to see more tech used for better goals but I also want more of us to try to slow down the tech juggernaut. If we don’t resist the way Big Tech and AI are developing, then they could capture or override a lot of the positive alternatives that are being developed. If we ignore how tech and the tech titans are changing the society around us, by extracting monopoly profits, distorting our public sphere, commodifying our private lives, degrading our ability to think and dialogue, undermining necessary policies and regulations, and generating catastrophic risks, to focus, instead, on some nice projects with some open source tech… then we risk the ground we stand on crumbling from under us.
In such conversations I was pointing to what I see as the ‘technoprogressivist’ ideology that exists even amongst people who recognise the systemic drivers of destruction and collapse. The two conceptual communities where I regard this as happening, go by the names ‘regenerative accelerationism’ and ‘metamodernism’. I recommend you look them up and explore the relevant ideas. One key assumption shared by some proponents in those fields is that _because we value technology we should value new technology more than existing technology, and we should be generally positive about new technologies_. A related belief for many people is a deterministic or even metaphysical perspective on the drive, or the pull, of technology: that it can’t be stopped. I regard such views as incoherent. If we value technology so much, then surely we want more people using technologies. In which case, we can ask why aren’t more people playing musical instruments? They are an amazing technology. Why aren’t more people gardening vegetables? Our ability to work with nature for food production is an amazing technology. I explained more of why I think technological determinism and metaphysical views on the role of technology are both silly, in a thread with the author of the _Regenerative Accelerationist Manifesto_, Benjamin Life. I paste in the thread below.
Many writers that describe ‘metamodernism’ as a new paradigm for responsible technological development have misrepresented other ideas in a way that covers for their non-reconstructed modernism and technoprogressivism. First, they have presented strawman versions of tech-critical theories and movements, to label them as ‘anti tech doomerism’. That dovetails with their lack of attention to what we could learn from the vast range of existing theories and movements on technology, which I will come to in a moment. Second, there is an inflation of ‘postmodernism’ into a dominant philosophy and era, rather than recognising it is marginal and variegated. For instance, anyone who goes to a University will see that they are modernist in structure, economics, and curricula. Most students and faculty operate within a modernist paradigm, with only a few academics in a few subject disciplines being critical social theorists, and only some of those being postmodernists. In any case, Universities have a minor role within wider society, where modernist values and structures predominate. In the field of environmentalism, that is extremely obvious, as ‘ecomodernism’ has come to dominate all mainstream discussion and policy making, despite being based on obvious falsehoods. This inflation of ‘postmodernism’ by some metamodernist writers allows them to claim postmodernism is a source of paralysis in society. Perhaps they were hoodwinked by the recent politically-motivated critiques of critical social theory. Nevertheless, these two failings are not fatal, and writers and innovators using the concept of ‘metamodernism’ could evolve away from a repackaged technoprogressivism if they integrate more insights from the existing sociology on technology.
In _Breaking Together_, in the chapter ‘Freedom from Progress’, I provided some sociological background to a critique of the ideology of progress, including rebuttal of some ‘old man’s tales’ on technological determinism. In my essay on decelerationism, I cited some of the extensive sociology on society-technology dynamics, and the way that technologies deployed within expansionist economic systems have not freed the majority up to a life of leisure. I don’t want to revert to being a boring Professor, pompously dismissing people’s ideas for a lack of intellectual heritage and bad referencing, but, wow, the lack of sociological grounding of much recent conversation on what to do about technology is worrying.
Two areas of scholarship and action on technology and society are worth mentioning here. One is close to my heart, as I am a Senior Distinguished Fellow with The Schumacher Institute. That is named after EF Schumacher, whose writings helped to found the Appropriate Technology movement in the 1970s. He reflected a broad sentiment at the time, when he argued for technology that is small-scale, decentralized, labour-intensive, and locally autonomous. Another area is called Democratic Technology. In the 1990s, the philosopher Andrew Feenberg explained that technological development itself needs to be embedded within the principles of democracy, rather than being a separate capitalist entrepreneurial endeavour that is then regulated when governments wake up to the implications. In general the literature on the sociology of technology advocates for the following:
- Greater citizen, user and stakeholder input into technological development processes to shape technology toward their own ends, rather than leaving design to engineers and corporations. This means opening up the “black box” of technology design and enabling myriad public values to enter technical decision-making.
- Greater citizen access to existing technologies that are known to be personally beneficial and of limited negative collective impact. This means considering intellectual property, autonomous use and self-maintenance, education and training, free time, and relevant subsidies, to enable utilisation.
- Changes to market incentives for technology development, to encourage greater alignment with society. That means public funding would be tied to clearer public purpose from developers and commercialisers of technologies.
- Stronger means for civil society and government to assess, steer and regulate technological development and commercialisation.
There are implications of each of these areas for policy and regulation. For instance, the first area could include that stakeholder participation needs to be part of a firm’s technology development for them to receive any government funding or contracts. That could become a requirement to be licensed to work in their chosen field of technology, or to even be registered at all. For instance, within such a paradigm, OpenAI or Anthropic would only be allowed to exist, to be legally registered, if they had a diverse panel of stakeholders (both expert and citizens via sortition) involved in internal design and development dialogues (yes, they’d probably need NDAs). It is important to realise that in many countries there is control on the areas of a business a company is allowed to operate within, and the revoking of licenses is part of the process of regulating commercial activities.
Any concept or process that ignores those four areas I just listed, to focus instead on how more specialists can pursue technology development and deployment that aligns with their personal ideas of what is good for society, can be accused of ignoring the mass of humanity that is existing within the technocapitalist system. Our approach doesn’t need to be either/or: we can encourage resisting the Big Tech behemoths as well as generating alternatives. In the tech space, there are some organisations that appear to be responding in that way, including Planet Work and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
My thread with Benjamin Life follows below. It is chunked by character limit, as neither of us pay fees to an aid-trashing trillionaire. Scroll to the end of this post to see the registration info for our Metacrisis salon on the topic.
**X/Twitter discussion between Benjamin Life and Jem Bendell, October 2026**
Benjamin Life (re/acc) @omniharmonic
tbh i’m still a regenerative accelerationist. the game theory is unstoppable, imho. we can transform collapse into possibility or we can slouch into fascism/chaos, but i don’t think we can slow down. nick land was right. the techno-capital object at the end of history is real.
Jem Bendell @ jembendell
1/9 The claim, by Nick Land and others, that technology and capital have an autonomous dynamic that overrides human volition and determines the future, turns an observation of a powerful social process into a lawlike necessity, akin to a physical law.
2/9 As a lawlike claim, that technological determinism is challenged by evidence of human control of technology under capitalism. Nuclear and biological weapons treaties are examples. So human agreements can constrain technological processes, even within a capitalist age.
3/9 If Land’s proponents say such restraints are merely temporary or local friction, they must specify what would count as counterevidence to their view. If nothing could, their claim is not a description of reality but a prophecy: an ideology insulated from falsification.
4/9 Some of the metaphysical language used by Land and others to describe technology and capitalism also projects anthropomorphic qualities onto social processes. We also require a clearer specification of what “capital” actually denotes within the theory.
5/9 That would open the theory to interrogation: what agreements between humans, around property & money, generate the observed dynamics? In Breaking Together, I present the controlling dynamics of capital (Ch10) but debunk the basis of many technological determinist views (Ch9).
6/9 Remove claims of physical law or metaphysical purpose, and we can observe a techno-capital process that favours the reproduction of hegemonic discourse, allied with the interests of some owners of capital and those persons who acquiesce to them.
7/9 Land’s ideas are an artefact of that process, as is their popularisation. He doesn’t see a greater process others did not; he speaks as part of a known process that is powerful but not omnipotent. His ideas offer ideological cover 4 people within specific factions of capital.
8/9 Land’s ideas might also meet the desires of elites (and their fans) for identity maintenance, a sense of self-worth, and emotional regulation, in the face of the damaging implications of their work, and the dread and despair that might otherwise generate.
9/9 In Breaking Together, I explain ‘Critical Wisdom’ (Ch8) as a multi-dimensional capability for not succumbing to hegemonic discourse and, instead, being present, caring and creative in response to our awareness of societal disruption and collapse. Apols for the chunked thread.. I am slowly cancelling my various payments to US bigtech as part of my practical decelerationism and #RainbowPrepping .
Benjamin Life (re/acc) @omniharmonic
1/ how fitting that the tech oligarchy requires us to pay to maintain a long-form context window. I too have refused to pay elon my techno-feudal tithe.
Let’s see if we can have a nuanced conversation broken apart into 180 character chunks. (Continued below!)
2/ Land is explicit that his argument is retro-causal which I think is one of its strengths rather than weaknesses. Seen via a complex systems perspective, we can describe emergent behaviors like the corporation as something selected for within a game theoretic environment.
3/ If those who embrace an extractive & resource-consolidating mindset are able to dominate those who do not, the system will settle in an equilibrium in which those behaviors feed back on themselves recursively until we get to late stage capitalist techno-fascist consolidation.
4/ Did this process begin with the Dutch East India Company? The dawn of agricultural storehouses? Its hard to say, but it does seem to emanate from a particular worldview that is rooted in some aspect of the colonial mind. Ian McGilchrist’s work seems most descriptive of it.
5/ Understanding it’s origin is useful diagnostically but not prescriptively. Because we engineered a system that rewards consolidation, we can’t fight the game theory. Corporations captured our democratic institutions, media, education, etc, the ground from which we would resist
6/ In that context, collapse is merciful. Accelerationism was first coined by Deleuze & Guattari, not Land, because they saw it as the only endgame of capitalist consolidation. Ramp up the contradictions until the collapse of the substrate forces a new game theoretic landscape.
7/ There’s no putting the genie of techno-capital back in the bottle. It will continue to run its abstracting algorithm until the contradictions are too great for it to metabolize. Elites likely know this, believing authoritarianism can squeeze out a few more years of extraction.
8/ As you observed in the UK after writing Deep Adaptation, no amount of diagnostic clarity can shift the balance of powers that continue to drive extraction even as the biosphere crumbles. We can, I think, embrace collapse & build cosmolocal archipelagos that catch us as we fall
9/ But maybe this conversation is better had in person in SE Asia this Winter. I’d like to come visit you & Michel to hash out the post-collapse, post-left political economy I’ve been calling “bioregional political consciousness,” a populist ecological political metanarrative.
Prof Jem Bendell @jembendell
1/ I agree, and have experienced, that “no amount of diagnostic clarity can shift the balance of powers that continue to drive extraction even as the biosphere crumbles.” The lesson from that is that change requires organisation, strategy, tactics and struggle.
2/ Another lesson is most people aware of our dire global situation are wedded to the view that more knowledge, awareness, education, inspirational stories, technology, and ethical leaders, will generate positive change, sufficient to the scale and urgency required.
3/ It appears to be easier, in the short term, to hold such a view of struggle-free change, until cognitive dissonance leads to a hatred of others, oneself, or existence. I believe I have witnessed (and received) that maladaptive expression of such inner tension in recent years.
4/ You say “embrace collapse & build cosmolocal archipelagos that catch us as we fall.” I see societal collapse as unfolding. But I don’t embrace it. I prefer we try to slow it, soften it, while creating alternatives.
5/ We must organise to defend those alternatives, as collapsing systems won’t leave them alone (whether natural disasters or political oppression). So in Breaking Together, I’ve a chapter on new ideas & projects to celebrate & scale, another on what we must continue to resist.
6/ The concept and practice of slowing down the pace and direction of human societies, and our lives within that, seems very coherent and relatable. People are more aware of the false promise of technology within an expansionist system.
7/ More people are becoming aware of the false promise of technosalvation from our social and environmental predicaments. Many people are rightly concerned about AI development and the aims and ideologies involved.
8/ More people perceive the benefits of slowing down their own lives. To negate human agency, en masse, in response to that rising awareness, would be premature. Instead, we can participate in both resistance and alternatives.
12/ I wonder if u jump from a metaphysical claim onto empirically-based theories, when u refer to game theory. As, if stripped of belief, we can consider game theoretical explanations for human restraints on technology & that being a stable outcome, not a mere pause or friction.
13/ That can sit next to an analysis of economics as engineered for commodification, extraction & expansion. We don’t need assume agency is non-existent by reference to a belief about an inevitable techno-capital future. We can be open to human agency appearing in various ways.
14/ I don’t agree that Land, or tech accelerationism, derives intellectual support from previous analysis, such as Deleuze and Guattari (D&G). They did not advocate for general acceleration of technology, or all of capitalism, or processes of collapse.
15/ They argued we could try one strategy (as agents) to not resist the aspects of capitalism that speed up the removal of old identities, dependencies, habits, and try to seize the moment before capitalism asserts new patterns for all of those olds, as it controls accumulation.
16/ D&G did not imagine processes of technology & capital as an autonomous force, with a metaphysical aspect & humans mere passengers towards the predetermined future. They warned that being involved in technocapital acceleration 4 anticapitalist aims could cause great difficulty
17/ My view is D&G were right to point out that disruptive innovations from tech & capital create new contexts which we, as social agents, can try to foresee, and assess how to act opportunistically for positive social and environmental outcomes.
18/ I agree too many of us who are socially concerned have allowed our suspicion of tech dev to slow our seizing of possibilities. Your work with OpenCivics is a good example of how to attempt +ve change within the opportunities created by technologically-driven social change.
19/ But I also agree with those, like @wself, who argue too many of us who engage in social change are affected by the degradation of thought & organising that comes from immersion in tech-mediated comms. We don’t read, reflect, reject, reorient, choose, organise, & persist
20/ A Q for strategy is where will mass adoption of regen tech & culture emerge from? What opportunities arise from current & predicted social change? Does RESISTANCE to acceleration of tech & capitalist penetration into lifeworlds, form an opportune context 4 regen alternatives?
21/ I believe alienation with – and resistance to – the acceleration of tech & capital provides a generative context. And that an absence of theories of massive social change will not help spread regenerative practices & cosmolocal arrangements in an era of disruption & collapse
22/ Devlping explanations, clarifying strategies, starting projects & networking them together, might create more post-collapse Arks & civilisational seeds, or not. But there is also an intrinsic value in not acquiescing to how capital & power shapes our sense making of the world
23/ Happy to discuss with you, @mbauwens @networkcoin and others in the region. There are some interesting folks on such matters in Malaysia as well… just beginning to combine big picture thinking with some practical projects.
Join the discussion on X/Twitter here.
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