Has the world accelerated into an inevitable collapse? Did globalisation, the frenzy of hyper-consumerism and hyper-production contain the seeds of its own demise? These questions seemed mildly absurd even six months ago; today they seem urgent, and either utopian or dystopian. Using Nick Land’s outlandish theories about accelarationism as a starting point, this short book essentially refracts notions of progress as mapped out in the twentieth century, ranging from the machine-love ideas of the Italian futurists through Leninist revolutionary ideals to a more nuanced vision of Stalinism than you might normally expect. (Indeed it wouldn’t be hard to present this current epoch as the most Stalinist since Stalin, one which blithely accepts surplus deaths in the tens of thousands as a price that society needs to be prepared to pay for the greater good of the whole.) The book traces a path from these highly ideological worldviews through to the development of neo-liberalism and Chinese commune-capitalism. The political map is redrawn: it’s not so much a case of left against right, as a vision of technological materialist advancement measured against a more pantheistic, anti-progressive agenda, a qualified reclamation of the Luddites. It’s not an easy book to read and at times it feels to the lay reader as though it ties itself in knots as it wrestles with the jargon of post-modernist philosophy, (much as the work of Nick Land himself often verges on the impenetrable), but there’s enough in Malign Velocities to make you rethink the whole course of 20th century history if you’re so inclined, and who knows, as we witness the full, terrifying complexity of 21st history unfold, that might not be such a daft thing to be doing right now. The past has constructed a honey trap, we felt as though we were racing towards a glorious technological future when, right this very minute, it looks as though the only place we were really headed was back towards the pre-globalised future.
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