Pt.5 - Techno-Progressivism and the Left

A Normie's Guide to the Technocratic Era Pt.5

Most of this series has dealt with Techno-Progressivism on the Right, as it is the “tech bros” on the Right that are the ones most responsible for putting this ideology into practice at the moment. However, Techno-Progressivism is an ideology of both the Left and the Right. It was actually the Left that inspired this series in the first place. It is the transgender movement on the Left that is essentially the first wave of Techno-Progressive transhumanism. Thus, it is this movement that offers us a window into what the future may hold.

The Techno-Progressive Future

The Techno-Progressive future will create several social trends.

As technologies such as Neuralink merge man with machine, people will embrace the technology for a number of reasons. It will improve an individual’s strength, intellect, and memory. It will allow them to interface with machines, downloading information directly to their brains. It will allow them the freedom and power to instantly create works of visual art, music, literature, etc. based on mere will. Omnipresent video recording coupled with the ability to store, download, and upload memories will give everyone perfect memory.

As each of these enhancements become available, they will reach the wealthy first. The wealthy will become superhuman in their abilities, while the poor will be physically weaker, less intelligent, less able to express themselves, and less capable of providing anything of productive value whatsoever. This will have an anti-egalitarian effect, since highly intelligent or competent people born to the poor will not be able to outcompete moderately intelligent or competent people born to the rich and enhanced to a super-human level by technology. Certain races which typically make higher wages will receive these enhancements first, exacerbating racial disparity and consequentially racial conflict, at least until gene editing disposes with the idea of race altogether. Through gene editing, certain physical characteristics will be seen as more desirable and less desirable traits will become rare, erasing human biodiversity.

Artificial wombs, widespread contraception and widespread elective abortions will make birth entirely elective. Longevity treatments will do the same to aging to some extent. Euthanasia will become more socially acceptable, and so the same will be true of death.

Robots and AI will make most jobs obsolete, and people will no longer be needed for their productive capabilities. Money may be distributed through patronage networks from the rich to the poor, who will be indebted to their patrons. This fits nicely with the “neocameralism” of Curtis Yarvin, which has been described as “neo-feudal.” However, it also somewhat resembles the stateless, moneyless, society envisioned by Marx. If society organizes itself this way, then while money may presumably exist, it may not be as closely tied to labor in a world where labor is near-infinite. Be that as it may, there is no reason to believe that social hierarchy will dissolve, especially since the elites will have a huge advantage over the non-elites due to their technological enhancements.

Liberal Techno-Progressivism

We can easily grasp the appeal of transhumanist technologies for a stereotypical left-wing blue-haired enby with a septum piercing. Identity will resemble more and more the “character creation” part of a videogame. Biohackers will have more avenues for self-expression than ever before, limited only by their financial ability.

However, this will make their identity tied to money — and thus the Capitalists writing their paycheck— more than ever before. This may enhance class-resentment, and lower this groups autonomy. This will stoke the ire of the more class-based orthodox Marxists (more on this later).

This “identity-creation” is a form of playing God and ultimately a form of self-worship. Technology becomes the sacrament by which they can commune with their ultimate god, which is themselves as creature/creator. Ironically, this is the same as Nick Land’s vision for the Techno-Progressive future as described in “The Dark Enlightenment.”

To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to define our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its technology. This is neither hereditarian determinism, nor social constructivism, but it is what both would have referred to, had they indicated anything real. It is a syndrome vividly anticipated by Octavia Butler, whose Xenogenesis trilogy is devoted to the examination of a population beyond the bionic horizon. Her Oankali ‘gene traders’ have no identity separable from the biotechnological program that they perpetually implement upon themselves, as they commercially acquire, industrially produce, and sexually reproduce their population within a single, integral process. Between what the Oankali are, and the way they live, or behave, there is no firm difference. Because they make themselves, their nature is their culture and (of course) reciprocally. What they are is exactly what they do.

One could imagine that this takes several forms. The first are cyborgs — fusions of man with machine. Another are digital humans, living entirely as a ghost inside a machine. Another is the splicing of human and non-human genes to create genetic furries and “otherkin” and so forth.

These battle lines need not be drawn across solely frivolous “luxury identity” lines. This type of identity-focused Leftist is simply a subset of liberal. Other liberals will embrace technology in much the same way for more pragmatic reasons. Instead of “identity” per se, they may use technology as the means for some other end — longevity, an increase in their faculties and abilities, money etc. Without an ideological barrier, there is no reason to prevent them from blurring the line between human and non-human, life and machine. The Techno-Progressive acknowledges no human nature, and thus no fixed definition of humanity.

Social Justice Techno-Progressivism

The blurring of life and machine will have enormous repercussions for the concept of human rights.

If transhumans need to be accommodated by society in the same way that transgenders today do, then could this set up some sort of a future conflict between unmodified and transhuman human beings? The right-wing Techno-Progressive capitalists will be happy to provide this accommodation — for a price — while the left-wing Techno-Progressives will “deconstruct” human identity and become political advocates for this new marginalized group. We have already seen the same pattern unfold in the world of gender identity.

However, when one factors in not only transhumanist life but also artificial “life,” the very foundation for human rights collapses in on itself.

On the one hand, if non-human non-life — such as human-like robots or artificial intelligence — have the physical appearance of human life, just as transwomen have the physical appearance of real women, then will the Social Justice Progressives see them as a new group that needs to be “liberated” by securing the same civil rights as human beings? And how far will these rights then extend? Will there be civil rights for my refrigerator?

On the other hand, if non-human non-life should not have civil rights, then on what basis should human life have civil rights, since there is no clear distinction between the two groups? Both, after all, are simply matter endowed with some form of intelligence — either biological or artificial.

In other words, the blurring of human nature may potentially lead to the inevitable end of human rights altogether. As transhumans increasingly blur the line between man and matter, this very blurring of the line degrades the rights of man to that of matter. This is something that Leftist Techno-Progressives, in their pursuit of freedom, may only realize after it is too late.

Marxist Techno-Progressivism

Just as Techno-Progressivism will facilitate the continuing Leftist pursuit of “liberating” themselves from their human nature, it will also facilitate their continuing pursuit of “liberating” themselves from society. This includes “social conservative” cultural institutions such as the family. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, two Leftists influenced by CCRU, explore their goals for Techno-Progressive Accelerationism in “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics” (May 14 2013, Critical Legal Thinking)(https://web.archive.org/web/20171013150828/http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics):

Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other. Progress becomes constrained within a framework of surplus value, a reserve army of labour, and free-floating capital. Modernity is reduced to statistical measures of economic growth and social innovation becomes encrusted with kitsch remainders from our communal past. Thatcherite-Reaganite deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian ‘back-to-basics’ family and religious values.

This is a critique of Land’s embrace of the “deterritorialization” caused by capitalism. It is interesting to note that both Leftist and Rightist Techno-Progressives are in no way ideologically opposed to each other, and seem to critique each other mostly on the basis that the other side is not progressive enough. In “the Dark Enlightenment” this was Land’s critique of Richard Dawkins, and here we see Williams and Srnicek criticizing Land in the same way.

In another part of the essay, the authors argue that capitalism does not accelerate technological progress enough.

22. We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society. The movement towards a surpassing of our current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more rational global society. We believe it must also include recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of a more innocent moment. Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of imagination in our own time, and offer the promise of a future that is affectively invigorating, as well as intellectually energising. After all, it is only a post-capitalist society, made possible by an accelerationist politics, which will ever be capable of delivering on the promissory note of the mid-Twentieth Century’s space programmes, to shift beyond a world of minimal technical upgrades towards all-encompassing change. Towards a time of collective self-mastery, and the properly alien future that entails and enables. Towards a completion of the Enlightenment project of self-criticism and self-mastery, rather than its elimination.

23. The choice facing us is severe: either a globalised post-capitalism or a slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological collapse.

In another article, The Guardian makes arguments along similar lines, in effect calling the Left the “true accelerationists.”

One would think that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the market flounder and the state rise to the occasion with responses such as Operation War Speed’s vaccine development and rollouts, the left would be crowing about how it produced technological progress far better than all this market fundamentalism.

It was the embrace of varieties of economic planning that produced the innovation needed to defeat the virus. For decades, large firms had gotten out of the business of vaccine development because it was insufficiently profitable. The mRNA vaccine delivery vehicle that is now recognized as revolutionary for the life sciences far beyond Covid had been sitting on the shelf for about a decade, spurned by uninterested, risk-averse investors.

…

The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid. It should make the case that all major technological and scientific advancements are best delivered by governments. And it should make the case that we – the people – should embrace faith in technological progress that is rooted in public investment.

In other words, the left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left – from cynicism about space-faring to fear of genetic engineering and opposition to nuclear power.

The left should be calling for government intervention to ensure decarbonization of data centers for AI. It should demand that we direct machine-learning research to prioritize the solving of grand scientific challenges such as prediction of protein folding instead of bad fantasy art fabrication and plagiarism. But instead, the most popular leftwing tech podcast calls for degrowth of generative AI and data centers due the latter’s carbon intensity.

…

This leftwing technophobia is something of an historic aberration. Traditionally, the left had always been enthusiastic about the potential of technology for liberation, to release us from drudgery and boundlessly expand our degrees of freedom – so long as technology was unfettered from the irrationality of profit and hierarchy and yoked to egalitarian reason. Prometheus plus Spartacus, as mid-century Marxist Hal Draper put it.

We sometimes forget that the Communist Manifesto was itself a techno-optimist declaration of intent. It was a critique of capitalism but it was also a celebration of the new technologies, both industrial and social, that this system had set loose.

…

Scientific, technological and industrial development would not only be faster, but broader, for the left would share the fruits of development with all humanity as rapidly as economic capacity would allow, rather than limiting their spread to those locations and populations where such production was profitable. A virtuous circle was then supposed to emerge as a result: with ever more humans benefiting from such progress, ever more humans would be able to contribute to science, engineering, medicine and agronomy, resulting in yet more progress. Liberation would beget ever accelerating liberation.

It was instead the counter-Enlightenment right – aristocrats, the church, Burkean critics of the French Revolution – who were horrified at how technology and industry constantly revolutionized society, washing away ancient traditions and endlessly transforming social relations. The industrial engineering of the factory and the “social engineering” of democracy were the same thing to the reactionary, anti-modernist mind. The children of the Radical Enlightenment, both liberals and socialists, also made little distinction between social and technological progress, but thought them good, and were intent on carrying out French revolutionary Georges Danton’s commandment: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” (“Audacity; yet more audacity; always audacity!”)

…

All of this creeping anti-modernism threatens not merely human development and the expanding freedom that flows from it, but also undermines our ability to adequately respond to a range of existential threats, from climate change to pandemics. We are caught between the capitalist techno-hucksterism of Musk and the Malthusian technophobia of Greenpeace and friends.

Thankfully, there is – to coin a phrase – a third way.

In place of technophobia, the left’s traditional arguments around the “market alignment problem” still offer a better path toward enhancing human liberation. In place of both market fundamentalist neoliberalism and green-inflected neo-Luddism, the left should be talking once again about conscious design of the economy – and thence which technologies we want to develop and accelerate – through industrial policy, public ownership and other forms of democratic economic planning.

…

But a left approach to technology is not just about avoiding harm, but about grand ambition. Getting to Mars and beyond, spreading life throughout the cosmos, is a gargantuan multi-generational endeavour, of the level of audacity that Danton commanded. Markets will never get us there if it isn’t profitable enough – and it is unlikely to be so.

…

Artificial intelligence has already solved the hard problem of protein-folding, and soon it could radically enhance medical diagnosis, accelerate materials discovery, and reduce mineral exploration costs, and maybe even predict earthquakes, but much of this will require humans working alongside AI rather than AI replacing humans – meaning an increased cost over either humans or computers alone, which will thus tend to be far less attractive to capital. And so AI thus far appears to be primarily directed at much more profitable but far less freedom-enhancing endeavours such as enterprise software, theft from artists and musicians, and ever more panoptical state surveillance.

— Where has the left’s technological audacity gone? Mar 11 2025, The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2025/mar/11/democrats-liberal-technology-innovation)

As Marxists Deleuze and Guattari influenced capitalist Nick Land, who in turn influenced Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, we can see the uselessness of the “Left” vs “Right,” “socialist” vs “capitalist” paradigm. We realize that both sides are Techno-Progressivist in their basic assumptions.

In the speculative scenario described above, orthodox Marxists will likely focus on the liberation of the clients from the patrons, who serve as the new ruling class. They will try to redistribute the transhumanist technologies from the rich to the poor and alleviate the widening economic disparity. This will have an accelerationist effect, by more widely dispersing the transhumanist technology.

“Left Accelerationists” such as Williams and Srnicek have already written as much.

An accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.

2. All of us want to work less. It is an intriguing question as to why it was that the world’s leading economist of the post-war era believed that an enlightened capitalism inevitably progressed towards a radical reduction of working hours. In The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (written in 1930), Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would have their work reduced to three hours a day. What has instead occurred is the progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory.

…

5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

…

7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.

The problem with orthodox Marxism is that the orthodox Marxists are working within a purely materialist framework that embraces technological progress as ultimately a liberating force and a historical inevitability. Their aim is to put technologies such as AI in the hands of the people, rather than the elites, but they still ultimately facilitate its development. It is only Left-Wing Populists, such as environmentalists, that are truly hostile towards technologies such as AI (more on this in the next part of this series).

Elsewhere in their article, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek embrace verticality in achieving their ends. In this sense, they echo the Dengist model of state-capitalism as a means to eventually create communism.

13. The overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be left behind. The fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and inclusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the stage for ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).

14. Democracy cannot be defined simply by its means — not via voting, discussion, or general assemblies. Real democracy must be defined by its goal — collective self-mastery. This is a project which must align politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it is only through harnessing our ability to understand ourselves and our world better (our social, technical, economic, psychological world) that we can come to rule ourselves. We need to posit a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality, to avoid becoming the slaves of either a tyrannical totalitarian centralism or a capricious emergent order beyond our control. The command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of The Network.

Their skepticism of democracy as an inefficient means to their ends is not so different from that of Yarvin and Land, but it is starkly different from the Left-Wing Populists who we see attacking Tesla charging stations.

The main differentiating characteristic between Techno-Progressivists and Anti-Techno-Progressivists lies in their value system, with Techno-Progressives having a consistently materialist value system, and their opponents holding some sort of non-materialist value.

In “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO,” we see non-materialist values to an extent, in which technology serves as a means to organize activists, improve conditions for the working class, and expand individual liberty. However, these “left-wing Accelerationists” are a bit less consistent than their right-wing counterparts, since they supposedly advocate for a dialectical materialist system yet clearly ultimately serve non-materialist values which are good in themselves (such as improving working conditions) which technology only serves as a convenient means to achieving. They cannot acknowledge that sometimes technology may hinder these goals. This is why they have to make the dubious claim that capitalism is actually decelerationist in nature.

In reality, many Marxists actually skew more towards “Social Justice Progressivism” which ultimately values human life — especially those of the marginalized and downtrodden in society — and it is this desire to help the working class that motivates them in practice, with Marxism serving as more of an ad hoc justification.

This inconsistency on the Left is what will place some Marxist Leftists in the Techno-Progressive camp, while others may continue to become more skeptical of technology as they see it wielded against them by the Capitalists. While both want to “eat the rich,” the ideology of the orthodox Marxists accepts more of the Techno-Progressivist’s assumptions, and they are thus more ideologically aligned. Left-Wing Populists who are more Luddite in nature, while sharing all Leftist’s resentment for the Capitalist class, will be inherently more dissident in nature in the Technocratic Era.

Next in this Series

In the next article, we will analyze these Left-Wing Populist opponents to Techno-Progressivism, as well as their counterparts on the Right.