Over the past few months, “accelerationist” researcher Benedict Singleton's Twitter account has been full of comments about the need to do away with online privacy. Are these tweets intended to reference the technological hive mind of the singularity? Or the “need” to sacrifice civil liberties in favor of national security? Not exactly. In reality, Benedict is mad because he was identified as the author behind the Pseudo Occult Media (POM) blog, which once posted photos of an oiled, naked ten-year-old, along with other pornographic depictions of children. The photo of the ten-year-old is widely known as part of the most controversial museum exhibit of all time, and the subject of the photo later sued to prevent further distribution of the images. Benedict finally removed the photo after being criticized in the comments section of POM. Another example of his sexualization of children can be found in the screen cap above, where he states that the preadolescent girls in the photo are wearing dresses with cherries on them as a reference to the breaking of their hymens. Refer to the previous post for evidence that Pseudo Occult Media is, in fact, written by Benedict Singleton.
Several people have asked why this blog was started, and if I have had any personal dealings with Benedict. In fact, I have, and hopefully other people will benefit from hearing about it. What happened was that the POM blog had become a place where Benedict, writing as “Benjamin Singleton”, had accused various celebrities of crimes ranging from murder to sexual assault, which he claimed happened as part of the CIA's MK Ultra project. When no evidence was provided, and accusations continued to pile up, it became obvious that the entire blog was based on false claims, many of which are legally classifiable as slander and/or defamation. The false nature of these claims became especially obvious when Benedict publicly admitted that he had no personal experience with MK Ultra, yet had somehow managed to piece together his conclusions through analyzing occult symbolism in the media.
Before the bullshit nature of the entire blog became quite so apparent, a small group of people had started sharing personal stories of involvement with the MK Ultra project and related subject matter in the comments section of POM. One of these commenters was a woman who talked about being raped by a famous fashion designer, and whose family member had been experimented on as part of MK Ultra. I had also divulged personal information about having been exposed to a child sex trafficking ring connected to the government. Other people had shared personal information as well, many under anonymous accounts. Soon after this information began going public somebody set up a number of blogger accounts falsely claiming to be people who commented on POM. One of these accounts falsely claimed my name, once again breaking numerous online privacy laws in the process. At least one of the comments left by these accounts implied the intent to inflict physical harm on people who had shared personal information on POM. The specific quote that stands out in my mind is “what makes you cunts think you're safe?”
As it turns out, that comment was left by Benedict's research partner, Accelerationist Manifesto co-author Alex Williams, who may want to be aware that threatening people with assault can result in jail time for coercion. Both of them have since joked about and referred to this incident in conversation on their twitter accounts. When the comments initially appeared I asked Benedict to remove them, but he refused, saying something vague about freedom of speech. Apparently that's the same “freedom of speech” that allows him to write pornographic fan fiction about preadolescent celebrities and then play it off as concern about “hypersexualization” in the media. Here is another perspective on the idea that “freedom of speech” should be used as an excuse to send violent threats on the internet, via the Society Pages:
We might think that we want an unregulated, unpoliced Internet, or that we want email that is encrypted and 100% subpoena-proof, but really we don’t. We want—or at least, we should want—strong enforcement on the Web, and for that enforcement to come from the state. “Community enforcement” might be a nice idea in theory, but in practice it doesn’t work—at least, not in favor of justice. Community enforcement is how we get vigilantism, or how groups that are already more powerful retain the ability to silence others. “Women get voices on the Internet, but what happens to them afterward?” Okobi asked, referencing the vast quantity of rape threats, death threats, and other harassment that women authors collectively receive via the Web on a daily basis...
Okobi assured the room that “child pornography is A Thing,” and that yes, we do want the state to prevent its circulation...Give the state too much power over the Internet, and it will use that power to squelch its opposition; activists will be targeted, and dissidents silenced.
Give corporations too much power over the Internet, on the other hand, and it’s not terribly different from giving too much power to the state (the downside is even less recourse for the public; the upside is that Google doesn’t command an army…yet). Give power over the Internet to no one, however, and existing power structures continue to reproduce themselves: women get death threats, children get exploited, and marginalized....Until such time as Utopia has arrived and all social injustice has been ironed out, self-policing will not be an effective way to promote justice on the Web writ large. Accordingly, preserving “free speech” must mean building systems and structures that shield our ability to speak not just from the state, but also from each other. Source:
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2014/02/04/recap-defending-an-unowned-internet/#more-17997
After the events at POM occurred, it was both interesting and revealing to discover that both Benedict Singleton and Alex Williams are part of a neofascist group that has coalesced around British philosopher Nick Land, a promoter of “scientific” racism. Both Williams and Singleton have been published by Urbanomic, a philosophy journal that also publishes work by Nick Land. Both of them
have also participated at the Incredible Machines Conference along with Nick Land. Here is more information on Land via the Guardian:
Since 2012 a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It’s called "The Dark Enlightenment". Its modus operandi is well suited to a digital society. Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism. It started, suitably enough, with two blogs. Mencius Moldbug, a prolific blogger and computer whizz from San Francisco, and Nick Land, an eccentric British philosopher (previously co-founder of Warwick University’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) who in 2012 wrote the eponymous "The Dark Enlightenment", as a series of posts on his site. You can find them all here. The philosophy, difficult to pin down exactly, is a loose collection of neo-reactionary ideas, meaning a rejection of most modern thinking: democracy, liberty, and equality. Particular contempt is reserved for democracy, which Land believes "systematically consolidate[s] and exacerbate[es] private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption."
The neo-fascist bit lies in the view that races aren’t equal (they obsess over IQ testing and pseudoscience that they claim proves racial differences, like the Ku Klux Klan) and that women are primarily suited for domestic servitude. They call this "Human biodiversity" – a neat little euphemism. This links directly to their desire to be rid of democracy: because if people aren’t equal, why live in a society in which everyone is treated equally? Some races are naturally better to rule than others, hence their support for various forms of aristocracy and monarchy (and not in the symbolic sense but the very real divine-right-of-kings-sense). The whole bankrupt edifice, they think, is maintained by what they call "The Cathedral" (what conspiracy theorists call the New World Order): a cabal of universities, newspapers, and establishment forces which perpetuate the status quo and prevent dissent. Whenever someone is arrested for a racist tweet, it is taken as proof that the Cathedral is pulling strings. You become darkly enlightened when you start to see these constructs for what they really are: modern atrocities that go against the natural order of things which must be torn down. It’s all a little bit like the movie The Matrix (and indeed some adherents refer to the Red and Blue Pill scene, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between blissful ignorance and painful reality).
So how many have been enlightened? No one knows, but unlikely to be many. Yet. There is certainly a growing interest in this type of rejectionist philosophy and politics. As I argue in a forthcoming essay for the think-tank IPPR, radical anti-establishment politics of all shades are on the rise, driven by a growing belief (and surveys bear this out) that our current way of doing things – our parliamentary system, our judicial system, our economic system – don’t work. While researching my book about internet subcultures, I’ve bumped into plenty of online movements that reject democracy, believe in racial superiority and fantasise about a purer more "natural" life before the French Revolution or the Normans came along and ruined everything.
The internet has transformed the ability of niche movements to gain support across the world: already the Dark Enlightenment has picked up interest from the bigger (though still tiny) New Right and other reactionary neo-fascist movements. By bringing together diverse elements of alternative Right-wing and fantastical rejection of the system into a single political philosophy for internet intellectuals, this could well grow. I’ll be keeping an eye on them, and report back here with any interesting developments as they happen.
Via http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100012093/meet-the-dark-enlightenment-sophisticated-neo-fascism-thats-spreading-fast-on-the-net/
Because Land's devoted followers will inevitably characterize the above article as a misinterpretation of both his and their own beliefs (which are a lot more similar than they would care to admit) here are some direct quotes from the man himself:
"Only Nazis get to tell the truth."
source: brooksbayne.com/page/8
“Anarchist migration policy combined with left-liberal welfare policy is worse than harsh illiberalism in all social dimensions...All White people need is an identitarian religion...Phillippe Rushton, Linda Gottfredson, James Watson, John Derbyshire, Jason Richwine, Pax Dickinson ...one thing everybody on that highly-abbreviated list has in common -- none of them lost an honest argument.”
Source: theumlaut.com/2013/10/17/zombie-apocalypse-or-marginal-revolution/>theumlaut.com/2013/10/17/zombie-apocalypse-or-marginal-revolution/
The one thing that every single person in Land's list shares is a history of having created media controversy for arguing that black people are less intelligent than whites. Here is further information about a few of them from a variety of sources:
What has two thumbs and a homophobic, racist, misogynistic, classist worldview? Pax Dickinson. We just noticed this vile Twitter account from Business Insider's chief technology officer today.
In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though..aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?...Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron.
Via http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-new-tech-bro-nightmare-1280336916
In April 2012, Derbyshire wrote an article for Taki's Magazine titled "The Talk: Nonblack Version." The article was a response to reports in the news media of 'talks' given by African-American parents to their children warning them against white people. The article, which he couched in terms of purported advice he had given his own children on dealing with African Americans, describes 5% of black people as "ferociously hostile" to whites. He then advises his readers to avoid settling in black neighborhoods, avoid events that draw large numbers of black people, and refrain from helping black people who seem to be in distress. He also advises white readers to scrutinize black politicians more heavily than white ones, to cultivate friendships with the handful of "intelligent and well socialized blacks" for reasons of public relations, and argued that the average intelligence of black people is lower than that of white people. http://www.salon.com/2012/10/06/leading_race_scientist_dies_in_canada/
Now let's take a look at how Land's racism has influenced his followers.
In the screen cap above, Benedict Singleton responds to a Facebook post about how software operators have attempted to streamline the process of drone bombing, stating “I found this hilarious! Such a brilliant pragmatic idea. “ok, google vapourize villagers”.” It's not too surprising that someone who's into children would see no problem with bombing Arab civilians. After all, people who abuse their position of power in one context are more likely to do so in another.
In Alex Williams' Rateyourmusic profile, he writes “ask a fan of "real" emo the name of the genre of music he's into and he will probably mutter something about “post hardcore” as the term that is the “person of color” to emo's “nigger” in the current lexicon of credibility.”...Panic! At The Disco are styled, marketed and focused grouped to within an inch of their lives...It isn't as the old cliche goes rocket science, in fact I doubt it's GCSE Chemistry.” Clearly, this casual use of an ethnic slur employed as an insult implies contempt towards the chosen terminology of anti-racist cultural studies.
That Land's acolytes should be inclined to racist provocation should be no surprise considering that Land cites as inspiration and personal hero the American General Kurtz character from Apocalypse Now, who commanded an operation that resulted in the widespread deaths of women and children of the Viet Kong. Kurtz's character is widely considered to be derived from another Kurtz, an ivory trader and commander of a colonial trading post in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novel that exposed the cruelty and corruption of European imperialism.
In the screen caps above, Alex Williams retweets the statement that “there is not a successful social democratic project anywhere in the world”, followed by his own statement, “I'd go full Stalin.” Compare that to quotes from the Accelerationist Manifesto: “The material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed...technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts...To generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures...Politics must be treated as...strategic arms races...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....We need to posit a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority...First, we need to build an intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with creating a new ideology...only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems...
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/
Referencing the Accelerationist Manifesto, sci fi author Charlie Stross describes accelerationists as
“former Trotskyites who have decided that the best way to achieve Communism is to encourage the worst excesses of Neoliberalism, until the system implodes under its own weight and it becomes apparent that the only way out of the rat-trap is forward on full afterburner into the Accelerationist future. They therefore establish Libertarian fronts and enthusiastically encourage the worst excesses of capitalist globalization, including the application of the shock doctrine to the western economies that originally applied it to their former colonies ... all the time living it up. (Because, let's face it, right wing think tank gurus might plausibly get to wear expensive suits, snort cocaine, and drive expensive BMWs rather than sitting around in dismal squats with leaky roofs holding self-criticism sessions like silly old-school Maoists...
Despair is a common reaction to defeat, as is Stockholm syndrome...The Trotskyites of old have donned the Armani suits of libertarian and neoliberal think-tank mavens. And the libertarians have begun to search for a purer pre-modern framework with which to defend themselves against the searing vision of the radiant future. Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists, the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the paradoxical!...The reason I think the reactionaries are full of shit is because we have a modern-day poster child for the hereditary king of a nation that embodies all their declared virtues: Kim Jong-Un. I am fairly certain that everyone who reads this blog can converge on a core consensus that North Korea Is Not An Actually-Existing Utopia. M'kay?
A commenter responds: ...As for the "neoreactionaries", someone on /. noted that they are going to be white men by and large, and more narrowly, white well-off men. Who, for some reason, think that under a monarchy or whatever, they'll end up in an even better situation. Ignoring the fact that historically most people in the nasty sort of dictatorships they seem to be promoting were not and are not well off.
Charlie Stross responds: Make that divorced white well-off men. I detect an unhealthy overlap between the neoreactionaries' anti-feminist agenda and the misogynistic excesses of MRA [men's rights activists] lunatics.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/trotskyite-singularitarians-fo.html
The militaristic focus of accelerationism appears to be based primarily on hostility towards leftist political movements. For some reason there is more invective directed at local food movements than the military-industrial complex or the shadow banking system which accelerationists apparently valorize. As far as military targets go, the local slow food club seems a bit of an odd choice. But
Williams and Accelerationist Manifesto co-author Nick Srnicek deemed them enough of a threat to host an event, Slow Food vs. The Acelerationists, to tackle the problem.
https://m2.facebook.com/events/1489860951227044?aref=22&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fm2.facebook.com%2Fa%2Flanguage.php&_rdr
Here's further neoliberal rhetoric from the Manifesto:
“Thirty years of neoliberalism have rendered most left-leaning political parties bereft of radical thought...The new social movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism...We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.”
Most accelerationists appear to be academics with no combat experience, yet the Manifesto promises a quasi-military regime whose purpose, aside from attacking slow food proponents, remains inexplicable.
Does accelerationism acknowledge the present national security state as a threat to human rights and civil liberties? From the looks of things, not really. In fact, the quotes above demonstrate an attempt to deny the political accomplishments of an entire spectrum of organizations that have mobilized against neoliberal militarization.
Here is a retweeted comment from Benedict Singleton which defends NSA spying. To establish the fact that the comment is not an ironic joke, it's followed by another screen cap discussing how Facebook can do whatever they want because the company is a private entity. Never mind that Facebook uses government-funded technology without paying licensing fees, and that they benefit from corporate tax loopholes. The point here is that both state and corporate surveillance are acceptable.
These ideas are part of an ongoing conversation between a number of different accelerationists including UCSD Associate Professor of Art and former Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo, Benjamin Bratton, who was on the geopolitical accelerationism panel with Singleton. In the following tweet Bratton suggests that an anti-surveillance and pro-transparency position is contradictory. Bratton compares the rights of actual people to the “rights” of a state agency like the NSA that is not accountable to them. Given the international intelligence community's affiliations with private contractors this argument is virtually indistinguishable from the legal justification for corporate personhood.
In a citation for E-Flux journal Bratton refers to a discussion with Srnicek, Singleton and Williams, stating “Between the state, the market, and the platform, which is better designed to tax the interfaces of everyday life and draw sovereignty thereby? It is a false choice to be sure, but one that raises the question of where to locate the proper site of governance as such. ..Not in some obtuse chain of parliamentary representation, nor in some delusional monadic individual unit, nor in some sad little community consensus powered by moral hectoring, but instead in the immanent, immediate, and exactly present interfaces that cleave and bind us...Cloud platforms (including sometimes state apparatuses)...are also an institutional form. They centralize (like states), scaffolding the terms of participation ...Our own subjective enrollment in this is less as citizens of a polis or as homo economicus within a market, but rather as Users of a platform...Our understanding of the political economy of platforms demands its own Hobbes, Marx, Hayek, and Keynes.” http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/
The accelerationist endorsement of Thomas Hobbes is revealing considering that Hobbes is often cited as a founder of totalitarianism due to his belief that human nature is so corrupt that a strong state must use tactics of fear to suppress it. Hobbes argued that an absolute monarchy is necessary to achieve political stability. more from Hobbes' Foundations for Totalitarianism:
“Hobbes does not have a great deal of respect for human beings,
to put it mildly. He tells us not only that it is permissible for them
to do anything they feel like (in pre-political society), but that they
automatically do so...the doctrine of depravity does tend to support totalitarianism. For if it were true, it would cause us to lose respect for other people and for ourselves. And if we have a low opinion of mankind and low self-esteem, we are less likely to care if the government is cruel or even murderous; for what they are destroying is of no great value to begin with.” via econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/hobbes.txt
Not surprisingly, Bratton lists Nick Land as an interest on his Academia.edu profile. The following quote, from Bratton's article in the E-Flux Journal's accelerationism issue, may explain the thought process behind the screen cap below “Any conjunction between aesthetics and politics...is necessarily fraught by estranged agendas—all the more reason for us to conceive of their inter-activation from a willfully ahumanist perspective.” source: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/some-trace-effects-of-the-post-anthropocene-on-accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/
In the above screen cap Benjamin Bratton expresses appreciation for the recent Texas court case in which a man was ruled innocent after having shot and killed a prostitute on account of her refusal to have sex with him. The decision was made because of Texas property crime laws which allow for lethal force as a response to theft.
Pictured above are Facebook posts from Ilona Gaynor, co-founder of the Department of No design studio along with Benedict Singleton. After the last post here on how Singleton writes lengthy incest fantasies about female celebrities on Pseudo Occult Media, Singleton's name was removed from the No Department Twitter header in a hurry. Immediately afterwards Ilona Gaynor wrote about her planned meeting with the FBI. Was this meeting arranged on account of Singleton's habit of falsely accusing celebrities of involvement with the CIA's MK Ultra project? Although this theory is entirely speculative, it would explain Singleton's sudden turn toward support for the civil rights violations of the international intelligence community, especially if he was also meeting with the FBI himself. It's not unlikely that the post would have come to the attention of the FBI because it was also posted on Godlike Productions, a fringe conspiracy website that is widely rumored to be an intelligence front for keeping track of anti-government communities. Again, this is pure speculation, although it does seem unusual that the FBI would have a pressing need to discuss a random design theorist's art project.
Accelerationist Manifesto co-author Nick Srnicek refers to the “banal idiocy of political parties”, yet another example of accelerationist contempt for electoral democracy.
Here's more militant posturing about how violent political upheavals trump social democracy:
In the twitter conversation above Srnicek refers to the “long and slow decline of occupy” and then follows this with support for a petition that would allow IT companies to privatize government services. This petition does not appear to be a joke because it falls in line with the political strategies of Nick Land, who the Manifesto states is the “paradigmatic accelerationist thinker”. There are a number of different problems here. First, Srnicek's opinion of the Occupy movement minimizes the group's significant accomplishments, such as their efforts to rebuild the greater NYC area after Hurricane Sandy. Here's a blurb from the Occupy Sandy website:
In the eighteen months since Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast and forced the entire region to rethink our way of life, people on the front lines of the recovery effort have been working tirelessly to rebuild and restore hope to the community. Eighteen months later, The Occupy Sandy network is still working tirelessly for a just recovery and a more resilient future. Whether it be developing youth programmes, worker cooperatives, and political education and organizing for responsible development in the Rockaways; coordinating rebuilding crews andsharing stories in New Jersey; or building coordination systems for community-led relief, recovery and resilience efforts – our community coalitions are growing strong and there is still so much work to be done. Source: http://occupysandy.net/2014/04/rebuilding-hope-rebuilding-homes/
That doesn't even touch on the Occupy-led Rolling Jubilee debt resistance movement or the fact that Occupy has radicalized thousands who were marginalized by mainstream political parties. The Manifesto gives lip service to the idea of a plurality of organizational modes, but in practice their attitude towards existing leftist movements is dismissive and contemptuous. What Srnicek and Singleton do appear to support, on the other hand, is the privatization of government services. Compare the petition for IT companies to manage the government with Land's support for “neocameralism”, a proposed solution to the “problem” of democracies that centers on the corporatization of of government services:
“There is no longer any need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities. If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers.”
Quoting reactionary philosopher Mensius Modbug, Land continues:
“Although the full neocameralist approach has never been tried, its closest historical equivalents to this approach are the 18th-century tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by Frederick the Great, and the 21st-century nondemocratic tradition as seen in lost fragments of the British Empire such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic freedom.”
full text can be found at http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/
Since Land cites Dubai as an ideal corporate state, and the Accelerationist Manifesto refers to Land as the “paradigmatic accelerationist thinker”, let's take a look at what daily life is actually like in Dubai. The following article, from the Independent, is entitled “Dark Side of Dubai” and it describes the current practice of slavery in the city of Dubai. Apparently this is what's meant by the Dark Enlightenment:
Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out. Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them. Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.
As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised...He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze. The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says. The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks...Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."
This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities. Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.
source: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
Here's a few more examples of the neofascist sympathies found within accelerationist circles:
Land's fondness for totalitarianism continues with the following quote from the twitter account of his publisher, Urbanomic: “Chorus on the Left: “Why aren't Libertarian Nazi tech fiends funding the Dark Enlightenment?” ---Great freaking question!” Are accelerationists racist libertechbrotarians who want to privatize the government?
The following quotations from Alex Williams' “Escape Velocities” article convey the nihilistic focus of most accelerationist philosophy:
“Where Deleuze and Guattari ultimately counseled caution, to accelerate with care to avoid total destruction, Land favored an absolute process of acceleration and deterritorialization, identifying capitalism as the ultimate agent of history. As Land puts it, “Capitalism has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence, [and it is] vast beyond human anticipation.”...Politics and all morality, particularly of the leftist variety, are a blockage to this fundamental historical process...As Land has it, through the acceleration of global capitalism the human will be dissolved in a technological apotheosis, effectively experiencing a species-wide suicide as the ultimate stimulant head rush...today the best we can hope for is marginally improved consumer gadgetry, against a background of political inertia, cultural hyperstasis, ecological collapse, and a growing resource crisis...technological change alone will remain entirely insufficient to radically alter our world. What ought to be aimed towards, this tendency suggests, is a sociotechnical hegemony...The Euro-American Left’s current obsessions with localism, direct action, and deliberative democracy are ill-matched when confronted with the acephalous monstrosity that is global capital today.”
source: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/escape-velocities/
Translation: Don't worry about Native American tribes who have to drink polluted water because of mountaintop removal in their local watershed, or low income neighborhoods whose residents' cancers rates have spiked due to nearby trash incinerators. Or the Garifuna people who are being evicted from their homeland to make way for Libertarian “free trade zones”. Let those people die so you can have more stuff. As part of the Western intellectual elite, what the Accelerationist Manifesto terms the “cognitariat of elite intellectual workers”, you have transcended those concerns through the technological singularity. Instead of constructive political action, watch Terminator 2 and complain about liberals.
Judging from the authors covered here, “accelerationism” is a politics of failure based on giving up any kind of hope for political solutions to environmental problems and social inequality. There is nothing new here, just neoliberalism 2.0. Notions of scientific progress have always been used to justify ecological destruction and cultural extermination. Transforming the biosphere to the “technosphere” is an act of collective suicide because the preservation of human life depends on an intact ecosystem. Why would any sensible person want anything to do with a political movement whose explicit goal is industrial collapse and “species-wide suicide”? Dystopian sci fi apocalypses do not make for good political platforms. Are academics really so blindsided by their own convoluted jargon that they can't recognize pretentious bullshit when they see it? Apparently so. For all practical purposes this article can be summarized as the pathetic rage of a misogynistic Nick Land fanboy who feels emasculated by a leftist political ethos centered on caring for other people and the planet.
Here is a relevant comment via voyou:
“the fact that the criticisms that get ignored here are often from women and people of color contributes to the impression that accelerationism’s theorybro form of posturing seriousness is matched by the reactionary vapidity of its content.” http://blog.voyou.org/2013/07/20/communism-equals-soviet-power-plus-amazon-com/
The following is an example of the “theory fiction” that forms the basis of much of Nick Land's writing, and therefore the basis of a great deal of accelerationism:
“Apocalypse Forever is the final Western religion....a punctual Apocalypse fulfills a semiotic (and in particular numerical) realism, as expressed -- most lucidly -- in occultism and schizophrenia. The apocalyptic exposes a primal encryption of culture, coding the operations of super-human intelligence (God or gods, transcended masters, aliens, time-travelers, spontaneous social order, or bacteria … any will do). “ source" http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/articles/12165
This is not a legitimate political movement with concrete policy goals. If the authors on this page are any indication, accelerationism is sci fi fan fiction written by wannabe serial killers. The entire basis of Nick Land's formulation of accelerationism is that technological development should be brought to its logical conclusion which is the death of entire populations as well as the natural world. After the useless eaters have been eliminated, Robocop and the Apocalypse Now general can go around distributing necessary life-saving technologies to the rest of the survivors. Artificial intelligence and nanotech will then allow these elite super soldiers to live forever. That's really not even an exaggeration.
Accelerationism is dependent upon the anthropocentric presumption that civilization can continue absent a functioning biosphere, even while the vast majority of climate scientists believe that it cannot. Most high profile climate change denialists are economists or politicians without a solid background in environmental science. Accelerationist philosophers are no exception to that rule, even though they have yet to achieve anything more than a marginal presence in the public domain. And yet they persist in devising political strategies predicated upon a post-ecological collapse future, without pausing to consider how demands such as universal basic income can be delivered without the natural resources necessary for supporting large populations. As far as their political beliefs, accelerationists have more in common with fundamentalist Christian climate change denialists than with anyone on the left. The main difference is that accelerationists don't bother to deny that their “policies” will result in catastrophic harm.
update: It looks like somebody's a bit touchy about being affiliated with racists:
In case that's not enough, Benedict complained again, in an August 29 twitter post, that Miley Cyrus' VMA performance wasn't sexy enough, and his twitter follower compared the performance to a Disney lap dance. “Benjamin” appears to have had quite the fixation on Miley, especially when she was around 15-16 years old, even posing with an arm around a wax statue of her in “his” photo that was posted to 
Benedict was responding to a tweet about Miley's VMA performance when he stated “And WTF is with the tongue? Jesus fucking Christ, it's not sexy, it's like a symptom of a serious neurological condition.” Let's contrast that with “Benjamin's” statement from a May 2010 pseudoccultmedia post, “Miley's painful looking movie 'The Last Song' (from the author of 'The Notebook'... kill me now, I am not sitting through this!) has Miley's daddy played by Greg Kinnear (whose father worked for the government, has been in some pertinent movies) in an interesting looking T-Shirt, wink wink from her handlers ;)?” Sounds a bit similar, doesn't it? And what's up with the winking smiley face? If “Benjamin” really believes these celebrities have been tortured and abused then what's up with all the winking and smiling?
And once again, here's one more tweet about the Illuminati on Benedict's twitter feed, just for good measure.
Also consider the following quote from Benedict's essay,