A Field Guide to Accelerationist Aesthetics (or: a Conference Talk, if You're Paying)

This is a shitpost if you have any issue with it, and a proposal for a conference talk if you’re willing to pay at least travel expenses and a bottle of champagne.

TESCREAL, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, and cute/acc look like three opposing factions in the ideology wars of the near future. None of them are Luddites, which is worth noting once and then moving past, since it’s a bit like observing that fascists and monarchists both dislike the Internationale. All three are emotional and aesthetic responses to the same underlying question: what do you do with human messiness? They just answer it in completely different registers, and those registers tell you more about them than any policy comparison would. I favor two of them over the third on purely aesthetic grounds — aesthetics is my method here, not a lazy substitute for one.

The hardbody and the deathtrap

TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres for what they called a “bundle” of “interconnected and overlapping ideologies.”¹ Whether or not you buy the genealogy, the aesthetic is coherent. TESCREAL has a vibe, and the vibe is grey, armored, and grimly optimizing toward a posthuman future that most currently living humans are expected to miss.

The body is where this gets interesting. Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher who is more or less the canonical theorist of the project, writes in “Letter from Utopia,” from the perspective of a posthuman looking back at us: “Your body is a deathtrap. This machine, unless it jams first or crashes, is sure to rust anon.” In time, he promises, “you will discover ways to move your mind to more durable media.” The biological body isn’t idealized here; it’s condemned as inadequate hardware. A deathtrap. Something to escape.

This might seem to complicate the “hardbody” reading. But look at what the transitional aesthetics require: until escape is possible, the body must be hardened. Elon Musk, in what became a minor media event in 2018, announced he’d been sleeping on the Tesla factory floor for months, not at home, not in a hotel — framing it explicitly as visible performance for the workforce, taking the body’s punishment so the workers would take it too.² Bryan Johnson, the biohacker, subjects his body to algorithmic governance down to the calorie level (“every calorie must fight for its life”), tracking himself against percentile rankings for men of all ages and declaring his body effectively 18 years old again. Marc Andreessen opens a section of his Techno-Optimist Manifesto with the heading “Becoming Technological Supermen” and paraphrases Marinetti approvingly: “Beauty exists only in struggle.”³

In a May 2025 Zeit Online interview, the cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit, whose two-volume Male Fantasies analyzed the psychopolitics of the proto-fascist Freikorps soldiers through their diaries and novels, was shown a photo of Musk and asked to respond. He said, in Geert Lovink’s translation: “His body constantly threatens to fragment, against which he tries to armour himself. His way of being equals violence.” And, later in the same interview: “The self-armour replaces their ego.” He’s reading Musk as an instance of a type: men who armor themselves against perceived dissolution. Theweleit’s framework was built around what he called “not born to the end” masculinity, men whose bodies are in permanent defensive posture against dissolution, against the softness and fluidity they associate with weakness, who respond by constructing themselves as increasingly machinelike. The transitional TESCREAL aesthetic (the factory-floor sleeping, the testosterone tracking, the algorithmic body) is this structure rendered in Silicon Valley grammar. The body is simultaneously contemptible (a deathtrap) and, until escape is possible, a site of armoring discipline.

The emotional register of all this is messianic, not consumer-disappointed. This is the aesthetics of someone who believes they’re living in the last chapter of human history, who finds the mess and limitation of biological existence not merely inconvenient but cosmically unacceptable, who armors against dissolution because the stakes are, in their framing, existential. Elon Musk put the endgame plainly in April 2025: “humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Humanity isn’t the point; it’s the scaffold. The body is something to harden and then discard. The unhappiness about human imperfection is a theological position. And like any theological position, it has a heaven, which is where the grey-and-armored reading needs correcting: that’s the transitional aesthetic, not the destination. The destination is ecstatic. The same “Letter from Utopia” that calls the body a deathtrap is written as rapture, a posthuman looking back and promising joy beyond anything the current hardware could run. But notice the texture of that bliss: disembodied (the mind moved to more durable media), quantified and maximized rather than simply lived, scaled to astronomical numbers of future minds who don’t exist yet. It’s the sublime of the very large, not the warmth of a particular life, and it’s always deferred, paid for by present humans who are, on this telling, the bootloader and not the beneficiaries. The grimness now is the asceticism that earns the rapture later: the athlete’s discipline and the beatific vision, hardening yourself because the stakes are salvation.

The raver-bohème and the communists who love beauty

FALC, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, began in the early 2010s British left.⁴ Aaron Bastani popularized the term via Novara Media in 2014. The “Gay” and “Space” additions appeared by 2015, anonymous, internet-native, politically intentional: “Gay” encoding queer liberation as a non-optional component of any actual utopia, “Space” encoding the horizon as genuinely without limits. Iain M. Banks’s Culture series is its canonical fiction.

The aesthetic argument is in Mark Fisher’s framing. In his talk “Designer Communism,” Fisher called for addressing “the aesthetic poverty that is so much a feature of late capitalist life.” That’s the whole move in one phrase. This is not the standard left political argument, which tends to run through justice, redistribution, structural critique. The luxury-communist version runs through love of beauty and joy, through abundance rather than austerity: we are communists because we want a world that is rich, beautiful, fun. The aesthetics isn’t peripheral; it is the claim. The raver, the lacquered nails, the abundance-not-austerity: these are the argument, not its packaging. Underneath the meme-layer irony, the Fisher/xenofeminist strand is genuinely warm; the cheerfulness is real, not performed.

FAGLSC shares with TESCREAL the bet on technology and automation. Srnicek and Williams’s 2013 #ACCELERATE Manifesto, the closest thing to a theoretical foundation for this tradition, treats capitalism’s technological infrastructure as “a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism,” not something to smash. The difference is: who benefits from the acceleration, and what does the world that comes after look like? TESCREAL’s posthuman future is controlled by whoever can afford to upload and is already structured by longtermist logic in which present humans are, at best, lucky bystanders and, at worst, acceptable collateral. FAGLSC’s automated future is explicitly “everything for everyone.” Where TESCREAL’s heaven is deferred and counted, FAGLSC’s is present and spent: the happiness is meant to be embodied and particular, enjoyed by people who are alive now rather than banked for minds who don’t yet exist. The Gay isn’t decorative, and the Space isn’t a joke.

The catgirl faction and the emblematic adventure

cute/acc exists in two parallel registers that converge somewhere around the catgirl programmer, which is either the most frivolous or the most important figure in this whole taxonomy, depending on your patience for internet culture making philosophical arguments through aesthetics.

The theoretical version: Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, both of whom come out of the xenofeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks, published Cute Accelerationism through Urbanomic/MIT Press in 2024. Their argument is that “classic” accelerationism (the grim, Landian version, a “somewhat macho, martial vision of an ominous future where we’re all going to have to be grim, hard, and cold,” in Kronic’s words) has the politics of acceleration entirely wrong. Against the hardbody, they propose: “dollification: people getting cosmetic surgery to look like dolls, makeup tutorials, nail art, cat ears.” Against dysphoria as the engine of transformation, Kronic starts from the opposite pole: “I wanted to see what would happen if I took euphoria as the starting point for thinking about that.”⁵

The internet-native version is the programming socks meme (4chan, December 2016), the catgirl programmer aesthetic, the Scatter.art CUTE/ACC MANIFESTO from November 2023 (“We will create the cutest superintelligence in the world”), the protesters at the Nvidia GTC conference in 2024 demanding “Accelerate Catgirl Research.”

The transfem-coding is not decoration. Ireland and Kronic write that “gender transition in all its forms is perhaps the emblematic accelerationist adventure of the contemporary moment, since it brings together refusal of the given, submission to a process whose outcome cannot be entirely foreseen, self-production, technological mediation, and the emergence via electronic networks of collective means of production.” Trans women doing cute/acc aren’t using an aesthetic to gesture at a politics; they are the theory made literal: refusing the body as given, using technology to produce new subjectivities, doing it collectively and online. The catgirl programmer is the anti-hardbody, not by being soft instead of hard but by refusing the entire armoring logic; not counter-hardness but active passivity, euphoria as method, turning even Nick Land’s own line back on the grim version of his project: “revolution is not duty, but surrender.”

cute/acc doesn’t optimize toward an endpoint or flee the body’s mess. The body is a construction site, not an obstacle; the mess isn’t something to eliminate or outsource but to inhabit, to work through, to transform from the inside. Consider what an estrogen injection means in this framework — not optimizing the body toward some cleaner spec, not fleeing the flesh for durable media, but euphoria through transformation, the body becoming something it wasn’t, the process itself as the point.⁶ cute/acc is indifferent to the perfection/imperfection axis entirely; it’s about becoming rather than arrival.

The cute/acc position on accelerationism proper is worth naming: Ireland and Kronic say “accelerationism is refractory to any political position.” cute/acc doesn’t claim to be left or right; it claims to be cute. This is not FAGLSC, which has a program (post-work, automation, universal abundance, liberation, space). cute/acc has an orientation, a method, a way of being in relation to the future. “Cuteness cares nothing for judgement, and is infuriating to power.”

The aesthetic verdict

Three registers, something like three ages: TESCREAL is 35, founding a family that turns out to be a cult, grimly converting every room of the house to accommodate the singularity. FAGLSC is 24, going to Fusion, lacquered nails, entirely serious about the politics underneath the meme. cute/acc is 13, lost in a PC Music fantasy of being a teenage girl, and I mean that.

The TESCREAL endpoint is “biological bootloader,” done with the body entirely. The manifesto reaches for Marinetti. The mess isn’t something to grieve or work through; it’s something to transcend at speed, cosmically, with appropriately grim urgency.

FAGLSC is: lacquered nails, raves, the Culture series, “everything for everyone,” beauty and joy as the political program rather than its reward, the bet that the future should be fun for the people who currently exist rather than interesting for an imagined posthuman elite. cute/acc is: e-girls, t-girls, cat ears, nail art, programming socks, DIY HRT, the “collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties,” euphoria as the starting point, the body not as deathtrap or optimized machine but as a site of becoming, of something the future is pulling through rather than escaping from.

So, being honest about the grounds: I’ll take the raver-bohème with lacquered nails and the slightly cringe transfem catgirls over Elon’s Theweleit-coded immortal hardbody fantasies, any day of the week. This preference is aesthetic. I’m making it on aesthetic grounds and I’m not apologizing for that, because this is precisely the kind of argument that aesthetic preference is actually suited for: when the structural premises are shared and the disagreement is about what kind of humans we want to be in relation to the technology, the answer “I find the catgirls more interesting than the iron filings” is not a deflection. It is the point.

If you think that’s not a serious argument: travel expenses and a bottle of champagne, and we can discuss it properly.