The Accelerationism of Woke Led to MAGA

Accelerationism is accelerating. Accelerationism is the idea that the best way to overcome a system you oppose is to intensify the processes rather than resist or slow them down. Accelerationism was conceived by Marxists as a means to destroy capitalism. However, accelerationism only works in destroying ideologies or systems when those ideologies or systems are false.

Wokeness burned out in 2024 because of its acceleration in 2020. Leftists were not intentionally trying to accelerate wokeness into oblivion--they simply had become so ravenously captured by the ideology that they could not help but spread it wider and farther. During the Summer of George, wokeness reached such a peak that it could only go down from there--and so it did. Wokeness relied on having a certain social cachet of being hip and cool, which helped it spread among young people on college campuses and online forums like Tumblr and Reddit. But by 2020, wokeness had accelerated to such a degree that every corporation, hick lib, and wine aunt were adopting the latest woke ideology. At that point, not only was wokeness overbearing and oppressive, but it was simply no longer “cool.” So woke could only go down in popularity from that point on.

Now MAGA has replaced woke as the cool, hip new thing. But eventually that will fade as well, replaced by the next fad ideology. Accelerationism was originally formed as a means to take down capitalism, but the difference is capitalism is not a false ideology like wokeness--or what wokeness represents, which is communism. If you accelerate communism, it will lead to the collapse of the system, as we saw in the Soviet Union. But if you accelerate capitalism, that will not destroy capitalism--because capitalism is not built on lies. It is simply the freedom of exchange between individuals. Accelerated to its extreme, capitalism does not destroy itself.

There could be negative externalities that come from hyper-capitalism, such as ecological destruction and environmental pollution that harms humanity, or other technological problems like AGI or nanotech gone haywire. But those things would not put an end to capitalism itself because capitalism would find a way to deal with those problems as they arise--through capitalist processes.

The only thing that could truly end capitalism is the end of humanity. And not just humanity, but all conscious beings, including artificial life (if AI can become conscious actors). It is easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism, because the only way capitalism can end is by the world itself ending. If capitalism is the free exchange between individuals, it will exist as long as individuals exist.