I want everything and everyone to slow down, including myself. Although I’m appalled at the damage to people and planet from industrial consumer societies, I don’t want to accelerate their demise. Like you, I depend on society as it is right now. Therefore, it was surprising to learn that some people who recognise the mess we are in want to accelerate collapse and establish new societies, according to their own priorities. Many such people are insanely rich from investments in technology businesses. As author Naomi Klein writes “the oligarch class… aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to create the flood.” Her book End Times Fascism, with co-author Astra Taylor, is bringing wider attention to the extreme ideologies of some billionaires. What can come from that awareness is not just negativity about those strange rich men appearing, too often, on our media feeds, but a dialogue on how to respond positively to metacrisis and collapse. In this longform essay, I will explain something called ‘accelerationism’, why it’s a bad idea, and how the deceleration of technology, economic activity, ecological destruction, and even our personal lives, is an important agenda.
After I drafted this essay, I saw it would be useful to double back and start here with a summary of what I mean in the title: I am a decelerationist and you are too. For I want to slow down the destruction of the environment, despite it being too late to prevent a lot of damage. I want to slow down the collapse of societies, despite them being less ethical and beautiful than I imagine is possible. I want to slow down the pace of development and deployment of many technologies so that novel risks can be assessed and managed, despite recognising the many benefits that can come from technology. I want to slow down the system of economic expansion, which is driving the risky approaches to technology, as well as badly centralising wealth in ways that degrade society. I want to slow down the pace of life in general, so that we can be gentler with ourselves, each other, all sentient creatures, and wider nature. Amongst those of us who care for people and planet, I want to slow down the counter-productive compulsion to do more within the same ideology that caused our era’s scary metacrisis. And I want to slow down the misuse of this concept of deceleration, either by the tactics of tech elites, or by some emotionally tired environmentalists. After years of researching this, and talking with people, I realise that everyone, once freed to analyse and introspect, is a decelerationist too. Yes, I know that’s a bold claim, but if you read to the end, you will know the evidence for it.
To get started, let’s look at the forms of collapse ‘accelerationism’. For some technophiles, it comes with the belief that technology can achieve a wonderful future where all problems are resolved. In particular, they believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will achieve some form of general or ‘super intelligence’ that will transform human capabilities. Some believers regard those computational systems as intrinsically valuable, or even potentially more so than sentient creatures, including us humans. The mistakes and psychoses involved in such views are something we will return to. But what is key here is that believers in the possibility of a technological utopia can regard the messiness of our current societies, comprising populations with different ideas, as an impediment to their vision. Consequently, they want to speed up the breakdown of such societies, or find new ways to exit them, such as within so-called ‘special enterprise zones.’
Before continuing, I should state I consider myself a ‘technophile’, as I have always been interested in the possibilities of new inventions. In 2007, years ahead of its popularity, I included Tesla as a ‘future maker’ in a high-profile report for the environmental group WWF-UK. In 2011, I mentioned Bitcoin in my TEDx talk on the need to change society’s relationship with money. In both cases, my views have since evolved on what problems those innovations can solve, or what problems they can make worse, and how they should be regulated. Being impressed with a technology, and open to its applications, does not necessarily blind anyone to the problems caused by how it is deployed.
Recognising the threats to the environment and humanity from hyper-financed and underregulated development of AI in particular, ‘decelerationism’ includes a belief in the need for restraint, so that civil society can better understand the smart policies to guide future AI development. Fortunately, earlier this year, Pope Leo made some clear calls for restraints on AI development. Now many surveys report a widespread belief that AI needs to be better regulated, along with Big Tech more generally. The recent rise of protests against data centres, due to their massive ecological footprints and limited local social benefit, is an expression of this trend. That does not mean that people want the banning of the more efficient opensource forms of AI, which use far less water and power by design, and which are the still-monitorable forms of Large Language Models. Rather, it means people prefer a pause on the development of self-authoring and autonomous forms of AI, as well as wanting international agreements to restrict their use in policing and warfare. Such a pause would enable assessment of what kind of incentives we want to guide AI development in future, informed by a reasonable scepticism that neither geopolitical strength nor profit maximisation are the best drivers of this tech for humanity (issues I reflected on earlier this year). With this in mind, we can question whether the recent concerns of some executives within US Big Tech reflect their wish to restrict competition from cheaper opensource models (when they call for new regulations to reduce risk).
It is the logic, reasonableness, and widespread nature of concern about the pace and direction of tech development that means I am guessing that you might already be a bit decelerationist. That does not mean you are technophobic, or that you don’t see a useful role for the deployment of well-governed AI. It means you are in touch with the obvious truth that technology is a subset of material reality, that it depends on the environment, and should be guided to serve humanity in general. Intellectually lazy people might dismiss us as luddites, but a more accurate term might be ‘post-Luddite’, due to the belief in maintaining a balanced approach to the pros and cons of technologies.
Let’s move onto another good reason for decelerating the process of societal collapse. It is the simple fact that, despite its flaws and destructiveness, billions of us rely on industrial consumer societies for all sorts of things that we don’t produce ourselves. As supply chains have stretched, and mass production increased, there are far fewer means of providing our basic needs from local sources than before. Medicines, spectacles, light bulbs — there is so much that we benefit from and rely upon. Like most people I chat to about this, I prefer that we get more time to re-localise what we can of production, give up what we can, and restore the systems that we can, before we are forced to change through disruptions to our economies. Although I recognise that some peoples might benefit from less destruction of their natural environment if the industrialised world collapsed, that is not a clear enough outcome for me to not want to slow the demise of the systems that I, and everyone I know, rely upon.
Phobic responses to reality
Some technocentric accelerationists are aware of the evidence that human societies are hitting ecological limits and suffering as a consequence. My book Breaking Together compiled the evidence for such a view on the unfolding processes of societal collapse. In their economic privilege, most accelerationists can avoid being badly affected in the near term as humanity crosses planetary boundaries. However, like all of us, they assume stories of the way the world is, including the place of humanity, and what is good about themselves – all of which are challenged when recognising the ecological redundancy of existing models of social organisation. Two years ago, I jokingly described the emergence of ‘collapsis’ as “the novel psychological condition of believing illogical ideas to explain the unfolding breakdown of modern societies.” I listed many. But back then I didn’t realise that one delusional way of responding to the creeping collapse of society would be to want to speed it up! But now I see that response can be explained by a psychological ‘pay off’ for people who try to avoid the pain of questioning their values and identity. Allow me to explain…
If someone experiences fear and anger at the demise of the story of human domination of nature and, along with that, their role and value in that conquest, then they could change the frame within which they see any data on social and environmental degradation. They could choose to regard it all as a necessary bottleneck for humanity, and perhaps nature, before entering an era of more human domination of nature and outer space. Then, to make this novel perspective feel more real to them, and to reassert their illusion of human domination over nature, they could adopt the view that accelerating the disruptions would help speed up what comes after a collapse. Such a perspective additionally offers such believers some ‘narrative cover’ for being increasingly numb to the massive suffering to humans and other beings that is caused by the systems they disproportionately benefit from, and which some of them shape, or even impose on the rest of us.
People afflicted by this diseased form of thinking can then adopt sociopathic theories like some variants of tech ‘longtermism’, where they pretend that consciousness-mimicking machines are somehow intrinsically valuable in comparison to the living world and human consciousness. Such people are also attracted to theories that human consciousness is nothing more than an illusion formed by our ‘fleshy machinery’. The promotion of the scientifically weak claims against relative free will, which I documented previously, is also a way of seeking some ideological cover for the idea that AI ‘agents’ should be regarded to have equivalent personhood to humans (and thus reduce the legal liability of their developers).
One of the clearest signs of an ideology and identity being under pressure from the reality of a living world that is being damaged by globalised capitalism, is that some of the tech oligarchs have turned to promoting bizarre theories on morality. Which brings us to the billionaire Peter Theil. He has been giving speeches where he claims that those of us who condemn unregulated profit maximising approaches to technology are either anti-society, anti-human, or even, wait-for-it, comprising a collective Anti-Christ. Obviously, there is nothing in any Christian teaching that destroying the natural world and impoverishing people to make faster computer chips and more powerful software is God’s will. Indeed, all religious traditions and spiritual philosophies point to an opposite view — that a fear of death and of personal insignificance drives the human desire to control others and nature, rather than us living in divine grace and gratitude. Although there might be some deep psychological issues within people trying to imagine an evil entity outside of themselves and dress that in religious terminology, in this case, Theil’s claim might merely be a cover story for justifying global domination.
In wise and free societies, people with obviously illogical, and possibly paranoid, ideas would be ignored or ostracised. Sadly, power has been given over to a network of international capitalists and computer geeks who fund prestigious university departments and scholars, and who wield incredible powers of mass manipulation through social media. If you are interested in looking deeper on this bizarre quirk in the metacrisis, philosopher Emile Torres has done some crucial reporting on the development and promotion of these ideas, and how they are providing self-justifications amongst the tech titans (and those tempted by their power and money).
This ‘collapse accelerationism’ of elites was foretold in science fiction writing by Hugh Howey, which has now become the successful TV series Silo. In that story, a cabal of billionaires, politicians, and scholars, concluded that civilisation was going to be destroyed by a technological catastrophe, so they should destroy it on their own timetable, to preserve a population underground, which they would shape to then repopulate the planet with a different form of society. (If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it — just forget this slight plot spoiler!).
Unlike Hugh, the accelerationism of elites is something I did not foresee. However, it is in the same psychological ballpark of the reckless responses to collapse awareness that I noticed and commented on years ago. Specifically, the realisation amongst some epidemiologists that we are entering an age of regular pandemics, led them to fund highly dangerous research on pathogens. That is something I explained when looking at the extent of lab leaks of dangerous human-influenced viruses. The same rationale is now growing for taking major planetary risks with some ‘solar radiation management’ techniques. In all these situations, the same wish to avoid experiencing dread and despair, and the same clinging to old stories of human supremacy and personal power, is involved in the reckless agendas. It is also the root cause of the proto-authoritarianism I am hearing amongst some environmentalists as they become exasperated at the direction of humanity, but don’t look at their own role in perpetuating the systems of capitalism and imperialism which produced the tragedy. That’s a topic I’ve discussed in depth before.
Rich accelerationists aren’t yet the main reason for the accelerating mess in societies around the world, but they aren’t helping. That is not only through their reckless approach to AI, including their lobbying for lax regulations and more massive datacentres. Additionally, the Tech Bros and their investor friends are funding ethno-nationalisms around the world, so that more of us turn on each other, rather than turn against them and their puppets in government. Some of them justify their approach, by choosing to believe that because humanity needs to triage declining world resources, Judaeo-Christian cultures should club together in a mean-spirited death match of civilisations. They are finding some odd bedfellows for such views, amongst Christian congregations who are misled to think that regarding these as the ‘End Times’ means we forget Jesus’ teachings that we care for the oppressed and we seek peace. Another example of the damage being done by rich accelerationists is their recent shaping of new currency orders, including those ‘stable coins’ which game the markets and enrich the corrupt. On that agenda, Jeffrey Epstein and Howard Lutnick weren’t just physical neighbours — they were ideological ones. The political project they appear to share with the accelerationist billionaires is to replace nation states altogether with corporate monarchies. That also works as a handy cover story for avoiding more taxes in luxury gated communities (dubbed ‘network states’ by their fans).
It must be embarrassing to some of the guys who took pride in being free thinkers and ‘sovereign individuals’ that they now champion the views of elites who try to control everyone, enrich themselves, and remake the world in their own image. Their sycophancy sometimes turns aggressive, with calls for hurting the lives of people who disagree with their accelerationism. This ‘vibe’ is illustrated by the popular posts of someone presenting as ‘Beff Jezus,’ who regards calls for reasonable restraint and guidance on AI as evil and wants people to hack ‘opponents’ rather than just make their arguments. The comments on such posts also show how simplistic nationalism is being used to justify reckless unregulated AI development.
Accelerating your life isn’t good for you
By now you might agree with me that there are some weird people out there, sometimes with masses of power, and a reckless agenda. But there is a broader ideology, of which most of us are a part, that is worthy of some rethinking. When a new technology appears, it is normal to be impressed by the new capacities it gives us and to assume it will unlock more free time in our lives. I once thought that. However, research on the dissemination of technology in society tells a different story. Consider the washing machine, which was thought to liberate women, in particular, from hours of domestic labour. Initially, it began to do just that, but then expectations changed, so we now wash clothes far more frequently than a century ago. Some of the time saved was consumed by doing more laundry, some by earning the money to buy and run the machine, and some by the changing need for homeworkers to be active in the job market. Another example of lost expectations is the introduction of email. Initially, it seemed like a fast substitute for writing and sending letters. Then it vastly expanded written communication, so that inboxes are perpetually full and every moment saved from letter writing has been colonised by new demands. Just as writing this, I suddenly remembered the peace of my undergraduate days before emails. And I broke into “oh I believe in Yesterday…”
But nostalgia isn’t analysis. So, let’s look more closely at why this process of lost expectations is typical. The researchers on this topic conclude that it is not inherent in a technology, such as a washing machine, that social norms naturally change to use it to do much more of an activity, or that any time saved is then deployed on non-leisurely activities. Rather, an economic system that demands constant growth and productivity, takes advantage of new efficiencies to generate new demands on us. The social commentator Brett Scott explains this well in a short video. He echoes the work of sociologists, such as Judy Wajcman and Hartmut Rosa, who argue that technological innovations did not deliver lots of free time because they are embedded within a capitalist logic of unending escalation, rather than serving human freedom. This embeddedness within economic systems is why new technologies that provided leaps in the efficient use of resources have not led to a decoupling of economic growth from resource consumption. One institution in this process are the stock markets, where traded companies are assessed against each other for their future returns on investment. A deeper causal process is the issuing of the money supply by private banks, as debt, with interest. That means additional money is required for servicing existing debts, which comes from new loans, which are only issued when there is new economic activity. Understanding these dynamics is quite a chore, and I recommend Chapter 2 in my book for further explanation. Put simply, the expansionist economic system produces a society that must continuously accelerate its activities. If you feel like life is speeding up, then that is because it is designed that way. And if you also notice that the destruction of planet Earth is speeding up, then please know that is because it is designed that way.
My personal experience with eating (yep, the simple act of eating) illustrates how deeply these economic systems shape our inner worlds. I tend to finish my meals faster than my dining companions. Over the years, I have tried to slow down, but I soon forget, and go back to eating in a hurry. Eventually, I realised I developed this habit because I had wanted to get back to more productive activity – such as my work, domestic chores, or self-improvement. So, I had a deep compulsion toward ceaseless productivity. Then I noticed my cat would only eat rapidly if another cat was around and might take some of his meal. Could my own compulsion to productivity relate to a similar sense of scarcity and competition? Unlike my brother, I’ve never had my lunch eaten by a cat, but a constant state of vigilance could have manifested in me as my habit of rapid eating.
With these ‘hunches’ on my inner mess, I looked up the psychological research. I found that anxiety correlates with over-eating. And as eating rapidly means one has less time for a satiated feeling to help one stop, so rapid eating is related to over-eating. Correlations have also been observed between worse mental health and rapid eating, with evidence the influence is in both directions. Moreover, rapid eating, with limited chewing, doesn’t support one’s health. Then I found that rapid eating is subtly encouraged by social pressures, with ‘fast food’ culture being an obvious expression of that. I was reading all about this research while in a café. I was there as I had decided not to cook, so I could focus on finishing a first draft of this essay. All that healthy organic veg was in the fridge, neglected as I focused on being productive. Feeling a bit small, I remembered that at least awareness is the first step towards change. But it was then that I noticed I had cleared my plate, without being aware of my speed eating, as I’d been so busy thinking about social acceleration. Clearly, it’ll take some time for me to liberate myself from this one.
The word ‘impatience’ seems relevant here. It is something that US Big Tech has promoted amongst so many of us. They have focused on how to get us addicted to our screens, so that they collect more data and show us more adverts. The habit of constant scrolling and watching short videos has been rotting our capabilities for proper thought. Before that, it was normal to sit with information, compare it to other information, and reflect on our stories of the world, before deciding whether or not to do anything about it. That process is where the possibility exists for formulating intentional action. Instead, with social media, we react and move to the next content, wrongly assuming that we have been better informed and have actually acted on the information via a simple like, comment, share, or subscribe.
Modern psychology tells us a lot about the benefits of mindfulness and escaping automatic patterns. There is also ancient insight, spanning millennia and tradition, that it is deeply helpful to wilfully slow down our process of cognition, choice, and action. The most well-known teaching on that is from Buddhism, which focuses on the cultivation of our ability to witness sensations, thoughts, and emotions, so that we can perceive and choose from a calmer state of mind, which is more curious and compassionate. Similar teachings are found in Hinduism, where the sage Patanjali advised in Yoga Sutra 1.2 on how we can stop the habitual reactions in our minds. Taoism puts the slowing down of our thinking and striving at the centre of its teachings. Its concept of wu-wei invites a general non-forcing towards life. It also teaches that the ultimate source and flow of life can’t be fully known through those concepts, words, and stories, with which we divide it. Therefore, stillness is regarded as a way for us to make room for the ultimate reality, or source, to be felt directly.
Although more widely regarded as systems of belief than intentional calming, both Christianity and Islam include teachings on the moral virtue of not rushing or being driven to act by momentary emotions. Traditionally regarded as being closer to a mystic experience of Jesus Christ, the book of James (1:19) reports him saying “let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” In Hadith 25, Prophet Mohammed is reported to tell a companion: “you possess two qualities which are beloved to Allah: calm and lack of haste.” With all these religious teachings in mind, we can regard the agendas and effects of the tech oligarchs as an empowered evil (the opposite of the strange claims of Peter Theil that we covered earlier).
Looking back on moments when I have been unkind or unwise, the one common factor has been that I’ve felt rushed and overwhelmed. In my personal life, that rush meant I responded from the wounded part of myself. In my professional life, rushing my work meant I did not take time to assess the full implications of some of my communications (e.g. emails and calls with Jeffrey Epstein). The research on when people don’t live up to their espoused values, and their normal ethical behaviour, due to rushing or being hurried, points to my own experience being common. Personal experience, modern psychology and religious teachings are all pointing to a clear conclusion: social acceleration is harmful for ourselves and all our relations. That’s why, on this issue, I am comfortable being one of those theorists who claims to know your “real interests” … that the truly free you wants to be allowed to slow down. Only manipulated, hurt, or traumatised, people feel a need to think and act ever faster. That’s why I am a decelerationist, and you are too.
If that is so, then I guess you aren’t such a fan of capitalism either, even if you don’t feel comfortable talking about that in public. To avoid any doubt, let’s recap. The two examples I gave, of rushed eating and online scrolling, can be traced back to the dynamics and influences of capitalism. It is that expansionist economic system which shaped the productivist ideologies and sense of scarcity that then encouraged my habit of rapid eating. The demands of shareholders are what propelled the Big Tech firms to devise ways to get us constantly online, rather than giving us tools to experience more time offline. One could also explain my moments of less-than-perfect behaviour in personal and professional life as an outcome of the pressures from capitalist dynamics. But that would sound like making excuses, so I’ll just leave it there…
I don’t want to make you feel guilty now, but the general acceleration of our lives is why most of us have valued convenience about living our values or protecting ourselves. Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIN, WhatsApp and Microsoft software … all of these services have been the quickest and easiest ways to connect. Because of the way they are owned, directed, and geopolitically allied, our prioritising of convenience has enabled the construction of a global ‘technofeudalism’, where our societies are being damaged by the reckless developments and perverted ideologies of oligarchs.
Implications for social action
The acceleration of capital accumulation is why more of us are losing our original wealth of clean air, some nature nearby, a patch of land nearby with some time to grow our own, and some spaciousness in life to contemplate it all. But it doesn’t have to be this way. “Imagine days divine, no longer in a race with time. Every day we wake up is a day to shine.” Those are lines from the musician Common, rapping on his latest album. He is one of the actors in the sci-fi series that I mentioned earlier, Silo. His line resonated with me, as one of our freedoms to reclaim is from the ideology of progress. In my book chapter on that, I explain how that ideology hampers us from being honest about the tragic situation that humanity has entered, and from seeing the lies that technology will save us from further mess.
Whenever I attend a gathering of economically-advantaged professionals discussing environmental and social problems, I hear a version of the ideology of progress and lack of attention to how to slow the acceleration of society due to economic systems. The latest example was the ‘Global Tipping Points’ conference in Malaysia. The conversations were about replicating, scaling, and speeding up examples of positive activities, not how to slow down the capitalist juggernaut of destruction and oppression. Such a focus requires an amnesia about what has been tried, and what has failed, over the past decades. But it also rehearses progressivist ideology, where we are invited to focus on what’s new and how to do more of that. The scholarly field of ‘degrowth’ gets closer to abandoning the mental straightjacket of progressivism, but often avoids the need to change the economic and monetary drivers of acceleration and expansion. Within that field, some people are noticing an irony, or incoherence, in their work. Author Marcos Rupérez Cerqueda explains: “Many degrowth advocates, myself included, live at the pace of the civilization we want to slow down: flights to conferences, careers that demand more output, a constant rush to tell everyone we need to slow down.”
The concept of ‘slowing down’ does sometimes appear amongst environmental activists and professionals. The Buddhist community Plum Village has been encouraging climate activists and professionals to do just that, as an opportunity for seeing with new eyes, and reassessment, not only for more moments of calm. Separately, Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe’s statement that “the times are urgent, we must slow down,” is increasingly quoted amongst environmentalists. To take that sentiment to heart means the inner work of slowing down and observing our habits and aversions, so we allow our perception of reality to change us. It can also imply the outer work, of identifying social acceleration, and its economic drivers, as a fundamental challenge. However, when calls to ‘slow down’ are understood merely as a critique of the validity of messages of urgency and calamity from scientists, activists and professionals, then that is a confusion. We don’t need climate activists to remove the urgency in their rhetoric, but hope that they find the time to deepen their understanding of the complex dynamics of climate and the deeper monetary drivers of ecological destruction, as two reasons why humanity has not been slowing climate chaos.
This broader understanding of the importance of slowing down, and the unavoidable barrier of systems which demand we speed up, is why I think the term decelerationism could be useful. Other people with concern over the centralising power of capitalism and/or authoritarianism have, instead, chosen to accommodate the idea that to accelerate is good. For instance, with d/acc, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is supporting what he considers are technologies against authoritarian control. With re/acc, author Benjamin Life is promoting the development of technologies which enable more community-owned resourcing, communication, and exchange. Although the projects they champion are often good ones, by using the term accelerationism, the risk is that people will overlook deeper critiques of accelerationism, and the importance of a general philosophy of slowing down technology, capital, and society, along with our personal lives and habitual thinking.
Is this just intellectual pontification? Clearly, having written this essay, I don’t think so. Crucially, these ideas are relevant to help passionate activists not lose their way and get used by powerful interests. I am referring here to another form of collapse accelerationism, found amongst grassroots activists. This is believed by some people who become so annoyed that they sometimes smash things up. I met some of them during the anti-globalisation protests in Genoa in 2001, where they were called the ‘black bloc’. On the streets, during a riot, a couple of them told me that burning a bank, fighting a cop, and triggering police brutality on peaceful protestors, were all part of a tactic for radicalising society. Historical evidence of social struggles, plus evidence of what happened in Genoa that week, proves the opposite is the case. That’s because groups within the state, or powerful private networks, insert undercover ‘agent provocateurs’, who then trigger violence to enable both public disgust and state repression of anyone expressing critical views, even if peacefully. This is important to keep in mind, because as societies become more unequal and less affordable, more divided and less aspirational, there will be more social unrest. That is why the riots of 2026 have come as no surprise to many sociologists. Nor does the existence of the ‘black bloc’ within them, and the video evidence of hooded men moving around alongside police during the riots in France. In most cases the street violence will be used to generate public support for, and justify, more divisive and authoritarian politics, just as it has done throughout history.
Recognising the temptation towards performative violence is relevant to our situation today. Environmental activists are feeling bereft at the lack of change, are dreading what is unfolding with climate chaos, while also suffering the consequences of the state repression of their non-violent tactics of awareness raising. In that context, some commentators are arguing for environmental movements to abandon a commitment to non-violence. Looking at the book of one of the main proponents of this view, I immediately saw reckless, logical fallacies. Academic Andreas Malm makes his case for reconsidering the principle if non-violence by listing all the non-violent strategies and tactics that have not worked. But the fact they haven’t produced massive social change towards sustainability and justice does not mean that violent tactics will achieve that. The examples in his book on how to achieve change through violent action are few and irrelevant for people in contexts of advanced societies. They also overlook the one area where destruction of property has a history of working — industrial sabotage by employees. For instance, if an employee of an oil company is also a clandestine activist, no one needs to blow up a pipeline — the employee can simply order the wrong one. If a movement imagines itself as engaged in performative outsider-only tactics, then it is not a serious movement. Sadly, many people involved in environmental activism are members of the middle classes who are expressing their values and identity rather than focusing on what can help drive change.
Some people have argued that advocating for non-violence is only possible from a position of privilege — that is, from a place where one is not being violently oppressed. However, this assumption implies that speaking from privilege automatically makes your view incorrect, regardless of what you are saying or what the implications might be for both privileged and non-privileged people. That line of thinking can also lead to an illogical conclusion: that simply by recognizing one’s own privilege — or identifying the privilege of others you disagree with — one’s own position automatically gains merit. Instead, we can recognise that many of the most effective non-violent movements — from Gandhi in India to the U.S. civil rights movement to Solidarity in Poland — were led by oppressed people, not privileged outsiders. So, the premise that non-violence is only advocated from privilege is empirically false. I make this point here, as my past arguments against agnosticism on violent tactics within environmentalism were criticised by some on the basis of my privilege. Today the arguments are worth repeating, as governments in many countries are gearing up to be able to use individual instances of violence as excuses for widespread ideological oppression. Therefore, anyone encouraging activist violence is doing the bidding, knowingly or not, of the emerging fascist agenda to control populations during societal disruption and collapse.
A louder no and a greater yes
You may agree with my arguments, but still feel angry, and want to give that some expression. Me too. So, let’s not hold back in calling the accelerationists cowardly ignorant malevolent scum, whose billionaire adherents should be prosecuted, fined and jailed for their attempts to disrupt societies around the world. But let’s also be bigger than that. Let’s acknowledge they may have made some mistakes in a rather stressful time for us all, and could have an awakening one day to become useful allies in the turbulent times ahead. Let’s also get back to becoming the best we can be according to our own truth.
What might that involve? Well, there is a lot I have heard people doing because of their awareness of metacrisis and collapse. I recently met Finn Harries, who was a famous YouTuber before my Deep Adaptation paper woke him up to the urgency of the climate crisis. That started him on a journey that now sees him running a regenerative farm and promoting such approaches through his new podcast (please see our conversation). Also, recently I met Kin Thao from Vietnam, who is blending interfaith understanding with international cooperation on promoting ecovillages and eco-communities across Asia (you could see our conversation as well). Last month I received an email from a friend saying the founder of Biggar Market Garden in Scotland had started the initiative after reading my Deep Adaptation paper years ago. We don’t hear much about what has become a globally dispersed movement of collapse preparedness, as both the mainstream media and algorithms do the ideological work of elites to keep us blaming outgroups and believing false hopes. It is why people like you, my dear reader, could help by sharing writing like this essay with some individuals you know (avoiding the social media black hole that exists for truly radical content).
I mention those examples not just to illustrate what’s happening, but to some offer some inspiration. Other commentators on this situation have said that we need a clear narrative to challenge the accelerationists. Naomi Klein advises countering “their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival.” Many people who have the privilege to write and talk about these things advocate for an alternative narrative that is neither collapse-accepting nor apocalyptic. They often imply that people with relative privilege, such as you and me, do not need to face a drastic decline in our living standards. However, an alternative narrative to that of the accelerationists will need to be more honest and humble than that.
First, the narrative needs to accept what science is indicating, economics is forcing, and politics is spoiling. Already modern industrial societies are in the early stages of a process of collapse. The data shows that negative trajectories are being observed in countries around the world, pointing to fractures in the underlying foundations of energy, resources, biodiversity, food, climate and political-economic legitimacy. People are experiencing that as extreme price rises, rising debt, thwarted life expectations, fracturing communities, as well as physical and mental difficulties. An honest narrative will not be one that gaslights people about their own experiences and the science on the predicament faced.
Second, the alternative narrative to accelerationism needs to include the correct diagnosis of why the current predicament has emerged. It must explain how our difficulties are the result of an economic and monetary system, and that system is why there is such concentration of wealth and the power of mass manipulation, which now makes the derangement of elites a public risk. Anyone who argues that our response to tech accelerationism, or ‘end times fascism’ should be some more taxes, regulations on technology, and a nice new story of the future, would be misunderstanding the dynamics that brought us to this point. They would also be overlooking the evidenced failure after many decades of that kind of reformism.
Third, as we are a world of 8 billion people, it is both silly and unethical to attempt to be prescriptive for how people around the world can respond to the predicament. I say unethical, as I recognise the dignity and sovereignty of people to assess and decide for themselves in their contexts. This inspires my anti-imperialism and eco-libertarianism. By anti-imperialist, I mean that I oppose the imposition of political, economic or cultural models by powerful states and institutions upon less powerful peoples for the maintenance of that power (even if people think they aren’t doing that). By eco-libertarian, I mean that I favour self-determination, outside of the manipulations and coercions from modern capitalism, while recognising that we must collectively choose to restrain behaviours within ecological realities (see more on these definitions here). These principles have made me wary of general recommendations for others to adopt, across radically different cultural, political and material circumstances. Instead, my approach has been to support people’s own exploration of what’s important to them. Since 2018, I have offered the Deep Adaptation framework for personal and collective reflection. Now that many people are thinking about how to prepare for disruption and collapse, I developed a menu of positive action areas to consider (check out ‘Rainbow Prepping’). In all this work, I am encouraging a diversity of efforts to slow and soften collapse, to learn from it and seed new ways of life, without attachment to outcome. In that sense, I am supporting a greater Yes to many responses, after a louder No to the latest extremes of imperialist power.
I hope I have explained why I claim that I am a decelerationist and you are too. As sane, aware, and kind people, we want to slow the development of technologies that require masses of the world’s finite resources, while adding to existential risks, so that we in civil society have the opportunity to shape the direction of technological development. We are also decelerationists because we want to slow the destruction of the natural world, without neglecting or accelerating human suffering. And we are decelerationists because we want the opportunity to slow things down in our own lives, as we seek to be our best selves.
I find it ironic that one Big Tech company knows it can benefit from slowing things down. Apple TV decided to release the final season of Silo nine months after Season 3, despite filming the season at the same time. That means ‘word of mouth’ and social commentary can spread and build a new audience ahead of the final series. It also means some fans can ‘binge watch’ the earlier series just before the last one begins. But that’s just a dynamic for a TV series. If we want to try to slow down tech, slow down our lives, slow down destruction, we will need to act. Although it would be nice to get some ‘social’ media engagement with these ideas, I recognise the irony of feeding the beast. So here are five suggestions:
- Explore and plan how to reduce your reliance on most of US Big Tech (see the information and interaction sovereignty section of Rainbow Prepping)
- Send this essay to one of the social commentators you follow with a request they give more attention to the systemic economic drivers behind accelerating destruction and unrestrained technology.
- Send this essay to the leader of any spiritual, religious, cultural, or educational group, which you are part of, with a covering letter about your concerns, expressing the view it is time to speak out against the strange ideas being promoted by tech oligarchs and those cultural leaders and political leaders whom they fund.
- Write to your political representative, and any relevant official in a trade union or professional association you are part of, with a covering letter about your concerns, and request for a change in reliance on US Big Tech services.
- Eat a meal more slowly than normal and talk to someone about why you are doing that (if you already eat slowly, just enjoy your freedom with that). OK, this one is meant for me!
I look forward to hearing your ideas, if you are part of the Metacrisis Initiative (information to join the next salon follows below). The Deep Adaptation and Metacrisis Leadership group on LinkedIn is another space where you can share your thoughts on this essay.
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This is a reader-supported human, doing the thinking, talking and then writing. I used DeepSeek to check some ideas and find some sources, but the drafting of text is all my own (sorry if it was a bit clunky in places). It takes a while to put together essays like this, where I try to integrate what I know from my past in interdisciplinary academia, analysis of my own life, listening to others, reading social commentary, and choosing what’s most relevant to share with people who know me as a thinker and educator on positive responses to metacrisis and collapse. I aim for another 100 members of the Metacrisis Initiative to ensure I can keep allocating my time to this kind of analysis on related topics. As a member you also have the opportunity of attending salons and participating in the peer mentoring groups. In any case, you help to keep it all going. It’s 8 bucks a month, or 80 a year. Join us?
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During the next Metacrisis Salon, we will discuss how we can usefully slow down our lives as well as those within our fields of influence — where ‘usefully’ means less damage to ourselves, others, and nature. The background reading for the salon is this essay.
Join the Metacrisis Initiative to chat with me and others in a salon
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