In writing a contemporary critique of Sadie Plant and Nick Land’s text ‘Cyberpositive’, Frédéric Neyrat’s recent article for Blue Labyrinths manages to illustrate a fundamental paradox that lies at the (post-human) heart of much Accelerationist thought, a paradox that should be understood as temporal in nature.
As Neyrat demonstrates, ‘Cyberpositive’ insists on the most essential position of Accelerationism, which is that all that is solid must be allowed to melt into air if the future is to arrive. All territories must be deterritorialised. All attempts at cybernegative containment of this total liquidation are doomed strategies of the Human Security System as it fascistically tries to maintain the desiccating structures of the Human and the Nation. A Human Security System, in the eyes of ‘Cyberpositive’ at least, therefore opposed to the liquidating, and revolutionary, power of Capitalism, even if it once served as the initial laboratory for the development of the cybernetic systems now spiraling out of control. It is through this process of runaway cyberpositive intensification that the future will materialise. Melting through to the future…
Here, in summary, is the temporal vector upon which Accelerationist thought is based and the first of four that I want to bring to attention here. The three others being my attempt to map out ways of thinking beyond, but not necessarily disregarding altogether, this way of thinking about futurity due in part to the way Neyrat reveals the inherent paradoxical logic of “anastrophic” cyberpositive intensification as it is articulated in ‘Cyberpositive’.
The problem with ‘Cyberpositive’ that Neyrat highlights is that its insistence on immuno-identitarian fascist politics of control being swept away by the liquidating force of Capitalism is evidently a prediction that has not come to pass when seen from our current vantage point. Capital has, as it always has and will, aligned itself with the very immuno-identitarian fascists that ‘Cyberpositive’ positions as an antagonistic drag. The melting down of the glaciers (figuratively and literally) of the Human Security System has only resulted in the future becoming nothing but terminal collapse, with all the propaganda of the soon to emerge artificial planetary intelligence being nothing more than the very hope for the transcendental God that Landian cyber theory (initially) sought to do away with (see the opening essay in Fanged Noumena), or the PR strategy and investor-hype of AI companies. On the horizon is only the Real wreckage of climate breakdown and the delirious runaway acceleration of the extraction, exploitation and accumulation that underpins it.
So if this immanent future has not revealed itself, or has revealed itself to be an apocalyptic trajectory, we must look, as Neyrat argues, for counter-futures:
This means finding another kind of positivity, an affirmation outside the loops – at their center, where nothing moves, that Parmenidean place of greatest capacity. Detaching heterogeneous practices from hegemonic processes. Reintroducing a non-synthetic (subtractive, analytical) cosmological dimension. Defending ourselves against what harms us: not all immunopolitics is bad. Accepting that we are like strangers in this world that rejects strangers.1
And my reason for writing now is to make an initial, but by no means conclusive or definitive, attempt at identifying some of the possible pathways we, that is those of us who are interested in futures beyond NRx apocalypse, have for thinking about the future.
The first, and one that in our current climate (intellectual and ecological) feels like an increasingly impossible position to maintain, is the Accelerationist vision. However, as I will explain below, this does not indicate that Accelerationism has no place at all in the matrix of futurity that I map here. Even if only negatively (and there are positive interpretations of Accelerationism if we go beyond the Landian trajectory – not least the xenofeminism that Plant and others belong to), it has its place.
The second is the, familiar to UK readers in particular no doubt, the hauntology of the Lost Futures vision, argued for most famously by the late Mark Fisher. This vision of futurity is in many ways a response to way in which the Accelerationist vision failed to materialise in quite the way some involved in 1990s cyber theory anticipated. CCRU-hype bathetically spun out into the grey postmodernity of New Labour Britain where the liquidating flows of cyberspace and Capitalism went alongside ever more pervasive freezing mechanisms.
The Lost Futures vision falls more in line with Neyrat’s invocation of the Derridian à-venir: “what is to (á) come (venir) – which is always of the order of the deferred future, and never fully realized”.2
Taking the nostalgia a certain generation of British people felt towards the social democratic state of the post-war period (1945-’79 to be precise) and the few remaining fragments (material and cultural) of this political and economic project that exist for a younger generation who were receptive of their ideas (some form of the welfare state just about still exists and is still valued by the population at large, even if not the politicians), the hauntological Lost Futures vision of futurity argues for the resumption of a ‘virtual trajectory’ that was cut short by nothing other than the acceleration of Capital that began with neoliberalisation.3 Here the future is about going back, but going back to continue what has been identified as a progressive journey forward in time, seeking to reclaim the Star Trek futuro-optimism of mid-century social democracy in the Global North. In this way, it manages to retain the sense of modernising velocity that characterises much Accelerationist writing, but identifies Capitalism as an obstacle to the temporal trajectory of modernity.
The third is the Anti-Hauntology vision that has been developed by Matt Bluemink and most recently articulated in his book The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology & The Creation of New Worlds, published this year by Becoming Press. Here the future resides in the present, with any recourse to the past being a nostalgia that aligns itself to the logic of depression and despair. To hope for the future in the preoccupation with the immediate past, particularly as we saw above with the Global North social democratic welfare states, is to ignore those virtual futures that reveal themselves to us today, particularly, as it was with Fisher, audible in the currents of music culture.
But the Anti-Hauntology vision is not to be confused with the runaway feedback of the Accelerationist vision of ‘Cyberpositive’. It has important distinctions that make it a new dimension of thinking about futurity. One of these is the rejection of the universalist Eurocentrism inherent to the two visions above with the invocation of Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics. Cosmotechnics for Yuk Hui is a concept mobilised in an attempt to deal with the totalizing thinking about technology that characterizes modern European thought:
“[O]ne of the major failures of the twentieth century is the inability to articulate the relation between locality and technology and the reliance on an almost standardized ecological thinking endowed with a strong European humanism: technology became a provocation of either reactionary politics which is based on a dualism between tradition and modernity or a fanatic accelerationism which believes that the problems we have and have inherited will finally be resolved by technological advancement […] [and] it fails to establish an intimate and complicit relation between the earth seen from the perspectives of the territory and globalizing technology.”4
Cosmotechnics instead argues for a view of technology that is rooted in the distributed geographical localities which make up the planet, such as the way in which technologies of painting developed differently depending on differences in climate and so on.
Bluemink deploys this concept while at the same time distinguishing his project from the Accelerationism defined above in his discussion of contemporary urban design and the dual concepts of cyberpunk and solarpunk. Where cyberpunk refers to the proliferation of what Lewis Mumford calls authoritarian technics in the urban terrain, based on the logic of capitalist acceleration, solarpunk becomes an alternative that can embody a democratic technics that also takes into account the spheres and networks (terms Bluemink takes from Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour, respectively) that constitute the essential rationality between living being and environment. Leaving behind the potentially problematic Orientalism of sinofuturism, Bluemink looks to localities like Korea and Singapore for the development of these new solarpunk urban futures as they reveal themselves in our present:
“Life cannot be delegated; it must be integrated. Solarpunk is not just about beautiful green futuristic cityscapes, it is about projecting an image of the future free from authoritarian technics. It’s not about rejecting technology, but embracing the connection between man, technology, and nature to imagine how we might want to live.”5
This solarpunk future can be brought about via the process of transindividuation – which is, drawing from Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, the relation of relation between the dual processes psychic and collective individuation – and the construction of phantasmagorical histories and futures that allow for the transindividual, that is to say the individual within the collective, to negotiate and construct the future. Bluemink summarises it well for a Left audience when he writes: “in Marxist revolutionary politics the idea of the proletariat is a unification of a We founded on the adoption of a particular past (class struggle) which allows for the projection of a collective future (socialism).”6
As these three visions of the future swirl around my head as of late, a fourth has brought itself to my attention through my reading of the Japanese Marxist philosopher Kōhei Saitō that offers what I think is an important and valuable fourthvision to this matrix of futurity that, I hope, offers a combined view of thinking about the future that allows us to think dialectically about the contradictions within, and therefore synthetic possibilities between, different phantasmagorical futures. Perhaps ironically however, this fourth vision puts into question the very notion of the future in arguing for a reassessment of the way progress has been understood in the Global North up to now. I call this the Slow Down vision.
Kōhei Saitō is perhaps best known for his 2020 (translated into English in 2024) book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth where he offers a radical re-reading of Karl Marx that fundamentally alters how we should think about the future of communism. Much of this has been reiterated and in some instances elaborated in his 2026 Capital From Zero: Reading Marx in the Age of the Climate Catastrophe, which also serves as a clear and welcoming introduction to the core concepts and ideas of Marxist thought. Essentially, Saitō identifies an epistemological shift in Marx’s thought from the earlier producitivist and Eurocentric Marx to the ecological Marx who recognized that the emergence of communism was rooted in the “primitivist” pre-capitalist societies he had previously disregarded. Saitō identified this in the previously unpublished research notes and drafted fragments of Capital’s third volume while he took part in the MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, in English The Complete Works of Marx and Engels) project which seeks to gather together everything Marx and Engels wrote. While editing one of the volumes of MEGA, Saitō discovered that later in his life Marx was increasingly concerned with the natural sciences and spent considerable time researching the clear connection between capitalist development and the destruction of the metabolic relationship between mammal and nature that allows for the sustenance of life as we know it on Earth. Saitō writes:
“Marx’s philosophy has been frequently criticized as lacking a theoretical dimension regarding the environment. He’s see by many as a productivist: someone who thought that if productivity were only raised high enough, large-scale social issues like the environmental crisis and poverty would be solved. His research notebooks, though, reveal the opposite: Marx was in fact paying close attention to the ways in which capitalism was deepening the exploitation of nature. It’s with this insight in mind that he wrote the passage [in the manuscript of Capital’s third volume] which states that the rift capitalism has opened up in the metabolic relation between human and nature is ‘irreparable.'”7
As a consequence of this realisation, which challenges the very reading of Marx that much Accelerationist thought (both Left and Right) is based on, Saitō argues for our need, following from Marx, to look back to the pre-capitalist societies of the past (including the communal societies untouched by capitalist development contemporary to Marx) across the globe to navigate our way towards a communist future.8 Starting from this position and within the very urgent context of the climate crisis, Saitō shows a Marx who late in his life looked to the pre-capitalist communal, agricultural societies for the creation of a proletarian phantasmagorical past and future. When Mark Fisher asks in his essay 2012 essay ‘Terminator vs Avatar’,”[h]ands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry,” Saitō points to a forgotten Marx who would perhaps raise his.9
To conclude, what I want to do by raising these four visions of futurity is to suggest that neither one can exist independently of the other if a future that is practicably realisable from a political, libidinal, ecological and economic perspective is to be achieved. They must be understood as part of a dialectic matrix. Just as Saitō urges us to look to pre-capitalist societies for the seeds of communism, he insists on the maintenance of the positive aspects of modernity’s development to be maintained and for this we need the resources of other futures that, while having their own contradictions, offer ways of thinking about modernity that are valuable. Just as the hauntology of Lost Futures can lead us toward the logic of nostalgia, so too can it act as a counter to the liquidating promises of modernity when it is left to deterritorialise all before it. Just as cosmotechnics offers insights into the way technical systems proliferate in different ways depending on the specific geographic (and historic) localities they emerge from, so too can the universal project of the European Enlightenment (especially when figured through Marx) provide a backdrop to a global political consciousness that can challenge the globalised monolith of capitalism. And, as Žižek would say, so on and so forth.
Endnotes
1 Frédéric Neyrat, “The Future of Strangers: On Cyberpositive by Nick Land and Sadie Plant”, https://bluelabyrinths.com/2026/08/31/the-future-of-strangers-on-cyberpositive-by-nick-land-and-sadie-plant/.
2 Ibid.
3 Mark Fisher, Ghost of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zer0, 2014), p. 22.
4 Yuk Hui, ‘Machine and Ecology’ in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 25(4), 55-66, 2020, p. 62.
5 Matt Bluemink, The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology & The Creation of New Worlds (Becoming Press, 2026), p. 90.
6 Ibid., p. 126.
7 Kōhei Saitō, Capital From Zero: Reading Marx in the Age of Climate Catastrophe, (Astra House, 2026), p. 127
8 Kōhei Saitō, see esp. chapter 4 from Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism can Save the Earth, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2024), pp. 88-130.
9 Mark Fisher, ‘Terminator vs Avatar’, in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, (Urbanomic, 2014), p. 339.
Bibliography
Bluemink, Matt. The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology & The Creation of New Worlds, Berlin: Becoming Press, 2026.
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester: Zer0, 2014a.
Fisher, Mark. “Terminator vs Avatar.” In #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay, 335–346, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014b.
Hui, Yuk. Machine and Ecology, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25(4), 55–66, 2020.
Neyrat, Frédéric. The Future of Strangers: On Cyberpositive by Nick Land and Sadie Plant, Blue Labyrinths, 31 August 2026.
Saitō, Kōhei. Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2024.
Saitō, Kōhei. Capital From Zero: Reading Marx in the Age of the Climate Catastrophe, New York: Astra House, 2026.
Amy Young is a teacher, writer and theorist from Scotland. Educated at the universities of Dundee and St Andrews, Amy works primarily at the intersection between literary and cultural studies, Critical Theory and speculative philosophy. She approaches her work from a broadly materialist perspective. She is currently developing a doctoral research project on the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and its legacy in the age of climate breakdown.
