Pt.1 - Techno-Progressivism and Man

A Normie's Guide to the Technocratic Era Pt. 1

After the Culture War Era of 2014-2024 winded down, a new paradigm emerged in American politics and culture.

Trump won a landslide victory over Kamala, after a decade of impeachments, sabotage, lawfare, election shenanigans, and even an assassination attempt. “The resistance” faded away. Even the biggest enemies of Trump, such as The Washington Post, threw in the towel, admitted that Trump was right and they were wrong, and even promised to hire more conservatives. “Cancel-culture” began to recede. Starting with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022, the “Censorship Era” of the Internet began to reverse, and the Internet began to loosen its content policies for the first time since Trump’s election in 2017. Males ages 20-30 made up the most conservative voting demographic in America.

On the other hand, the Left had won some victories of its own. Roe vs Wade had kicked abortion laws back to the states, but once there, red states had held referendums to keep it legal. Homosexuality was more popular and widespread than it had been in the 1990s, with only a small dip in its public acceptance after becoming nearly universal supported in the late 2010s. Even transsexuality — an issue that had been almost unheard of 15 years prior — was now a commonplace part of life, whether one approved of it or not. Republicans spoke only of keeping “biological men” out of female sports, of there being “only 2 genders” and of not allowing minors to transition, but many also had no problem with adults transitioning so long as they followed these rules. The world had moved far further to the Left than it was in the year 1990 or even 2000.

Trump in 2025 was not the same Trump that he had been in 2016. The message of Trump in 2016 was that the politicians on both the Right and Left served a small number of “donors and special interests” instead of the American people. As a billionaire who was self-funding his campaign, he alone could “make America great again,” unlike the corrupt establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle. But by 2025, Trump had his own set of donors and special interests. These were primarily tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreesen.

This new Trump also created a new, post-cancel-culture Left. During the 2010s, the Left faced a fundamental contradiction. It thought of itself as anti-establishment, yet, as many on the Right were happy to point out, nearly the entire establishment shared their ideology, including the billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs — even Elon Musk and his “green” electric car company — were on the Left. To drive the point home even further, Trump had painted himself as a right-wing populist, representing the ordinary American against the 1%. “Big Tech” billionaires censored right-wing opinions online. Billionaire media moguls declared themselves part of the “resistance.”

However, as the billionaires flipped to Trump in 2024, this contradiction was resolved. Finally, the Left had received the right-wing billionaire supervillains that they had always wanted. And it had never been more transparent ever. As Elon Musk took a highly visible role in the government with DOGE, it seemed as if any pretense of America being a democratic republic rather than a plutocracy had been dropped altogether. With cancel culture already receding, this offered an opening for the Left to re-invent itself as a populist movement of its own.

The Techno-Progressive Consensus

Another trend that may have contributed to the Left’s pivot from “woke” progressivism to populist liberalism is the fact that there is almost no new frontier left to conquer. They had already redefined “normal” as abortion, OnlyFans, and hormone blockers for minors. The demographic transformation of America was assured. There remained no new “oppressed” groups for the Left to liberate or non-normative behavior to “normalize.”

However, their latest cultural victory — transgenderism — might be a taste of things to come.

When Trump ran in 2016, the Obergefell decision had just been made, protecting gay marriage at a constitutional level. Transgenderism was still an issue your average American was not really familiar with. Not even ten years later, Gen Z was nearly 30% LGBT, and of these about 5% identified as “gender nonconforming.” There was no evidence that this trend was ever going to reverse.

But what caused this trend to occur in the first place? While transgenderism had a long history on the left, infamously going back to the Weimar Republic and the Institute for Sexology, the recent spike in transgenderism would not have been possible without the advanced medical technology that made such surgeries possible. As technology advances, it stands to reason that this will be the source of similar movements, likely championed by progressives, in the future.

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

— Industrial Society and Its Future (https://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Anarchism/Unabom/manifesto.html)

One day, transgenderism may seem rather quaint, as humans modify their bodies and minds in more and more radical ways. The moral questions this will present, especially for traditional people, will dwarf those posed by transgenderism. Instead of “what is a woman?” people will ask “what is a human being?”

However, this Techno-Progressive vision for the future is not unique to the Left. In fact, it is the “tech bro” Right that is doing the most to bring about this transhumanist future. This comes in the form of new technologies such as AI, robotics, gene editing, and biological-mechanical interfaces. While many of them may simply be pursuing these technologies for profit, they have used the philosophy of “effective accelerationism” to justify and advocate for the accelerated development of these technologies. This philosophy is one of explicit transhumanism, seeking to replace mankind with “meta-organisms.”

This is a philosophy that is inherently progressive, worshipping the progression of technology as the greatest good — even if it leads to the end of mankind as we know it in the process. Thus, there is a bipartisan consensus when it comes to the relationship between man and machine. The Progressive Left and Progressive Right fundamentally agree when it comes to this ideological position, which can best be described as Techno-Progressivism.

“Effective accelerationism” is the right-wing flank of Techno-Progressivism (insofar as it can be categorized as “right-wing” since many of its adherents are liberals who prior to Trump supported mostly Democrats). “Effective accelerationism” goes all the way back to the early 90s, but, like many of the diverse factions in the political sphere of the Internet’s Wild West Era, it started to gain considerable influence during the era of the Alt-Right. In the early 2020s, it became increasingly popular in Silicon Valley, coinciding with the rise of AI technology. These Silicon Valley Techno-Progressive billionaires then flipped from the Democrats to supporting Trump in 2024. With the ascension of Trump in 2025, they have now gained the means of putting their philosophy into action. Not only this, but their ideological and financial goals coincide with American national interests, as the country faces increased competition from China, and wants to accelerate technological innovation in order to defeat their new geopolitical rival.

In this series, we will explore the philosophy of Techno-Progressivism, its connections to American politics, the Techno-Progressive plans for implementing their philosophy, and the likely form that opposition to the Techno-Progressive consensus will take on both the Left and Right.

Atheism and Accelerationism

Accelerationism is a philosophy that is most often associated with Nick Land, and popularized recently by Guillaume Verdon (Beff Jezos). However, before we explain who they are and what they believe, we first need to understand some of the underlying assumptions of accelerationism.

Accelerationism is first and foremost an atheistic, Scientistic (as in Scientism), materialist philosophy. As such, it is only concerned with the material, empirical world that is capable of being studied through science. Its anthropology is one of man as an organism that evolved from primitive life, and primitive life as an organism that evolved from non-life.

Accelerationism simply takes these assumptions to their logical conclusions. Most people implicitly, whether liberal or conservative, ultimately believe in the existence of certain moral goods such as “human rights.” These human rights ultimately come from the inherent value of human beings due to their God-given nature, which derives from their creation in the image of God. This became the fundamental basis of “rights” as we know them in the basic Western moral framework that we all share.

This conception of “rights” has undergone change as the West has become secularized. The Founding Fathers, many of them deistic humanists, retained the same basic premise, but swapped out the word “God” for the word “nature.” Instead of “God-given rights” they became “natural rights,” although the Founders sometimes still used the word “God” in the sense of some sort of vague deity.

As the West passed from a deistic humanism to outright atheism, the grounding for “rights” became more and more unstable. During the post-war period, people spoke of equal rights, women’s rights, animal rights, and spreading these rights throughout the whole world, liberating those who lived in lands where their rights were being “oppressed.” This was particularly true of the “social justice” movement. But ironically, those in the social justice movement also tended to be the most atheistic. This created a glaring contradiction. Without a God — even a vague deistic one somewhat interchangeable with “nature” — where did these “rights” come from?

They no longer came from “God,” nor did they come from “nature.” If man was simply a bunch of atoms evolved from simpler collections of atoms, then there was no reason to assign him any particular inherent value. And if “rights” ultimately were just a social convention enforced by the laws of the State, then as the State giveth, the State taketh away.

During the Wild West period of the Internet, the many internal contradictions of the post-war liberal consensus began to come under attack. This eventually led to the “Alt-Right.” But the Alt-Right was an umbrella term for a number of separate factions, not a single ideology. Two of these factions — NRx and accelerationism — would eventually coalesce around, among other things, answering the Leftist contradiction surrounding “rights.” According to them, the answer was simple. There were none.

The Origin of Life, and Meta-Life

With the old, un-Enlightened model of man as made in the image of God having become outdated, a new, atheistic anthropology needed to be created. This came in the form of Jeremy England’s “dissipation-driven adaptation.” According to Jeremy England, evolution is not limited to organisms, but is rather an attribute of the entire universe. Organized groups of molecules that are able to more efficiently “absorb and dissipate heat from the environment” are more likely to reproduce themselves, which eventually led to the origin of life.

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

— A New Physics Theory of Life, Jan 22 2016, Quantum Magazine (https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/)

From this “dissipation-driven adaptation” theory of life comes the concept of “extropy” (the opposite of “entropy”). This concept of “extropy” is perhaps the single-most important of all of Techno-Progressive thought. According to them, the entire purpose of the universe is to create increasingly “extropic” forms of matter.

[According to the Techno-Progressives] we must lean into the “will of the universe,” building increasingly powerful technologies and eventually colonizing the entire cosmos because this is what the universe — driven by the fundamental laws of thermodynamics — “wants.”

— ‘Effective Accelerationism’ and the Pursuit of Cosmic Utopia, Dec 14 2023, Truthdig.com (https://web.archive.org/web/20231218005411/https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-accelerationism-and-the-pursuit-of-cosmic-utopia/)

Guillaume Verdon lists this concept as the first bullet point in his “fundamental physics-based first-principles explanation of some of the concepts underlying [effective accelerationism]”

Life emerged from an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic process known as dissipative adaptation (see work by Jeremy England): matter reconfigures itself such as to extract energy and utility from its environment such as to serve towards the preservation and replication of its unique phase of matter.

— Notes on e/acc principles and tenets, Jul 9 2022, Beff’s Newsletter (https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets)

Since life only differs from non-life due to its higher level of extropy, and since increasing extropy is a natural function of the universe, it follows from this logic that eventually a form of “super-life” with even more extropy than life will eventually form.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

…

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well.

…

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

— A New Physics Theory of Life, Jan 22 2016, Quantum Magazine (https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/)

This “super-life” is sometimes to referred to by Techno-Progressives as “meta-organisms.” According to them, the increased extropy of these “meta-organisms” would coincide with a higher magnitude of structural complexity, including intelligence (which is one form of structural complexity). These meta-organisms might take the shape of a self-replicating, artificially-intelligent machines, or a “self-aware” organization of many living and non-living components. Nick Land and the accelerationists identify a self-aware, self-regulating version of the economy itself as a “meta-organism.”

Beyond consciousness of single agents, one can consider “meta-organisms”; organizations of many agents forming an emergent whole (e.g. states, corporations, groups, etc.)

• In a capitalist system, these meta-organisms compete for resources, as such, typically resources are dynamically assigned towards meta-organisms that have utility to the meta-meta-organism that is our civilization

• Hierarchies of information propagation and control are part of the civilizational intelligence; these should be dynamically adapting at all organisational scales and on various time scales, in order to be optimal at identifying and capturing civilizational utility

• Capitalism is hence a form of intelligence; dynamically morphs the meta-meta-organism such that any sort of utility/energy in the environment is captured and utilized towards the maintenance and growth of civilization

  — Notes on e/acc principles and tenets, Jul 9 2022, Beff’s Newsletter (https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets

Preliving matter in the earth’s primordial soup was able to evolve only by sub-darwinian “chemical” mechanisms. Once these puny processes created gene molecules with information for their self-replication then evolution was able to engage natural selection. Evolution then wrapped the self-replicating genomes within self-replicating organisms to control the way that life would respond to the winds of selection from the environment. Later, by creating multicellular organisms, evolution gained access to morphological change as an alternative to slower and less versatile biochemical evolution. Changes in the instructions in developmental programs replaced changes in enzyme catalysts. Nervous systems opened the way for still faster and more potent behavioral, social and cultural evolution. Finally, these higher modes produced the prerequisite organization for rational, purposeful evolution, guided and propelled by goal-directed minds. Each of these steps represented a new emergent level of evolutionary capability.

…

[Quoting euvolution]

Campbell’s eugenics, therefore, advocates the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a ‘relic’ or ‘living fossil’ and the application of genetic technologies to intrude upon the genome, probably writing novel genes from scratch using a DNA synthesizer. Such eugenics would be practiced by elite groups, whose achievements would so quickly and radically outdistance the usual tempo of evolution that within ten generation the new groups will have advanced beyond our current form to the same degree that we transcend apes.

— The Dark Enlightenment, Jul 20 2012, Nick Land (https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDarkEnlightenment.pdf)

What would be required for teleoplexy to realistically evalu­ate itself–or to ‘attain self-awareness’ as the pulp cyber-horror scenario describes it? Within a monetary system configured in ways not yet determinable with confidence, but almost certainly tilted radically towards depoliticization and crypto-digital distribution, it would discover prices consistent with its own maximally-accelerated technogenesis, channeling capital into mechanical automatization, self-replication, self-improvement, and escape into intelligence explo­sion. The price-system—whose epistemological function has long been understood–thus transitions into reflexively self-enhancing technological hyper-cognition. Irrespective of ideological align­ ment, accelerationism advances only through its ability to track such a development, whether to confirm or disconfirm the teleo­plexic expectation of Techonomic Singularity. Modernity remains demonstrably strictly unintelligible in the absence of an accomplished accelerationist research program (which is required even by the Per­ennial Critique in its theoretically sophisticated versions). A negative conclusion, if fully elaborated, would necessarily produce an adequate ecological theory of the Anthropocene.

— Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration, 2014, Nick Land (https://zyg.edith.reisen/k/script/land/teleoplexy.html)

Extropy, and the idea of future super-human “meta-organisms” are the core tenets of Techno-Progressivism. When one accepts a strictly atheistic, materialist epistemology, progressivism over perennial truths, and dispenses with any other principles as being outdated superstitions, Techno-Progressivism is where one naturally arrives.

Like the Social Justice Progressive, the Techno-Progressive accepts “progress” as both the highest good and an inevitable arch of history. The only difference is that in contrast to social progress, the Techno-Progressive acknowledges only technological progress. The Social Justice Progressive has a positive view towards science and technological progress as well. However, unlike the Techno-Progressive, the Social Justice Progressive sees this technological progress as a means towards facilitating social progress. In contrast, the Techno-Progressive sees technological progress as an end in itself.

We have now outlined the foundational philosophical assumptions of Techno-Progressivism. In the next installment of this series, we will describe the history of this ideology, from fringe theory buried away in the halls of a 1990s UK philosophy department to the Executive Orders of a 2020s American President.