When the Means are the End: Evaluating Militant Accelerationism as a Social Movement
by Dr. Amy Cooter
Militant accelerationism, “a set of tactics and strategies designed to put pressure on and exacerbate latent social divisions” presents a challenge to traditional understandings of social movements. Its emphasis on hastening societal collapse, its ability to bridge diverse and even contradictory ideological manifestations, and its often-decentralized, online nature seemingly complicate its categorization as a movement. However, it complies with more definitional elements than not, and those elements it challenges reveal weaknesses with the definition of social movements in modern society hallmarked by online relationships. Thinking of militant accelerationism as a social movement may better assist us consider strategies for addressing its harmful impacts.
What are social movements?
Social movement scholars do not have one uncontested definition for the phenomenon they study; as with most concepts intended to describe human behavior and association, there is room for disagreement and debate as to how, precisely, such ideas are defined. Definitions of social movements commonly share elements about the nature of participants, their goals, and the tactics they use to accomplish those goals. For the purposes of this paper, the core definition through which militant accelerationism’s movement status is being evaluated comes from sociologists Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper who say, “social movements are conscious, concerted, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of their society by using extra-institutional means.” This definition has four core elements worth closer examination in the context of militant accelerationism, with the first element requiring special focus.
First Element: Effortful
To qualify as a social movement, action must be effortful, which the definition more precisely details as three separate components. Social Movements must be intentional, planned, and happen over some period of time. The exact duration is not specified, however; some social movements may happen over the course of days, some over the course of decades and other increments in between. This definitional element is perhaps more important than it first appears because early social movement studies first underestimated their rationality–almost equating them to emotional outbursts–and thus likewise underestimating their capacity for social change. Each component of this element needs close examination in the evaluation of militant accelerationism.
Conscious & Sustained
Militant accelerationism very easily fits two components of this first element; individuals who buy into the idea that it is their responsibility to help hasten a social collapse do so with intentionality. Their beliefs and actions require a conscious evaluation of societal conditions and a similarly conscious conclusion that society is beyond repair. Their violent actions to hasten collapse require concerted planning, including target selection, weapons acquisition, detection evasion, and other elements that further underline intentionality and awareness behind these actions. Their actions are sustained over some period of time, whatever time is required for a given individual to move from negative social evaluation, to violent planning, to plan execution.
At the group (not individual level), this element of social movements applies similarly: ideas of societal decline and collapse are discussed and evaluated in online militant accelerationist spaces, and militant accelerationists have been conducting offline violence globally since 2011.
Concerted
The notion of concerted action, however, requires more evaluation in the context of militant accelerationism. Online accelerationist communities certainly discuss and evaluate possible tactics and tools in a concerted manner, but, with social movements, “concerted” is also intended to capture the idea of joint planning and collective action. Social movements are, by definition, social, requiring more than one person, and therefore cannot be actions conducted by individuals. We have, after all (and usually for good reason), very different perceptions of a single individual chanting and holding a sign on a street corner compared to a small group of people together doing the same actions.
The difficulty for this analysis is that militant accelerationists rarely act in concert, much more typically relying on a lone actor model where individuals carry out their plots alone. There are some exceptions to this trend, such as the two Boogaloo affiliates who worked together to target and kill security officers outside of a federal building in 2020 with the intention of initiating a civil war. But the majority of offline accelerationist actions–76% of criminal accelerationist events since 2011–have been committed by a lone attacker according to data presented in partnership between START and the Accelerationism Research Consortium.
Lone action is the dominant mode of criminality and violence for both practical and tactical reasons within this space. Fewer perpetrators mean fewer conversations about a plot and thus fewer chances of being detected and apprehended before an attack can occur. It is typically easier to successfully and quietly acquire effective weapons for one assailant rather than multiple. Additionally, the idea that all that is required for a mass casualty attack in a public place is a single individual evading minimal security measures is intended to induce fear. The idea, in other words, that anyone–any given individual–could be a terrorist is part of accelerationists’ intention to erode social trust.
The analysis then must necessarily consider the nature of the online environment that cultivates lone actors to more completely assess how they fit within a social movements framework. Traditional movements research tends to lag woefully behind the ways online environments shape social movements and vice versa. This is because of how rapidly these environments, including the platforms themselves, evolve relative to the usual academic publication cycles that easily see a year or more between project completion and publication of findings in typical outlets. This may, in other words, be one area where the traditional understanding of concerted, collective planning and action may need to be expanded when considering the applicability of a social movements designation rather than disqualifying militant accelerationism as a social movement.
The internet has dramatically facilitated communication such that traditional ingredients of social movement building, like door knocking and organizing invigorating in-person meetings, simply are not necessary to form a collective identity. Accelerationists’ online spaces are, at their core, like any other online community. They include individuals chatting about and sharing information on various topics even if the particular channel or chat has an overarching theme.
In a typical, non-extremist, online community, the experience is one of building camaraderie and connection with like-minded individuals, an experience that creates positive feelings and encourages participants to repeat and increase their participation. Within militant accelerationism, community building can be more complicated than some of these traditional spaces. Feelings of connection and like-mindedness both exist and are cultivated, but the core of that perceived similarity is not built around, say, a shared interest in a hobby, but rather around despair and nihilism.
To make it even more complicated, the surrounding ideological stances–or even a profound lack of them–that push individuals to seek these groups out in the first place are incredibly varied and sometimes contradictory. In a typical social movement, we do not expect every member to have the exact same motivations for participation. Some individuals may support abortion access because they believe women should have autonomy. Others may care less about this issue but more generally believe that the government has no business in personal healthcare decisions and worry that if certain abortion rights are lost, other healthcare infringements may follow. These reasons, while different, nonetheless reach the same end of opposing abortion restrictions and have the potential to push people with different overall political perspectives together for a shared cause.
Accelerationism bridges a wide spectrum of ideological positions, ranging from left-wing critiques of capitalism to far-right visions of ethno-nationalist utopias. Left-wing accelerations have, thus far, not engaged in militant actions of note, and communities online that advocate for violent actions are, presently, more conducive to racist, misogynist right-wing frameworks that insist oppressed groups have unfair advantages, as opposed to left-wing frameworks that consider how oppressed groups are harmed by existing institutions. We have nonetheless already seen that both groups and individuals with very mixed political perspectives can be brought together for the same end via a desired accelerationist endpoint. Boogaloo again serves as a key example here, where affiliates exercised Second Amendment rights, often in an anti-government context, while occasionally advocating on behalf of Black Lives Matter or pro-LGBTQ+ groups. Similarly, accelerationist spaces can foster school shooters who disparage their own racial and other identity characteristics, absorbing the racist and other derogatory frameworks as inspirational truth.
The shared ends of violence, fear, and chaos nonetheless bridge these and other differences within online spaces. Collective identity is thereby premised on the belief that existing societal structures are inherently corrupt, unsustainable, and destined to fail. This nihilism makes other ideological specifics for arriving at the conclusion largely irrelevant while still allowing for pursuit of the shared end of hastening that failure. Nihilism and fatalism, alongside various degrees of self-loathing, depending on the chat, are actively fed and encouraged in these spaces with the explicit intent to push as many participants as possible beyond mere complaining about the state of society and into militant, violent action to facilitate its collapse. The way that this encouragement is indeed a concerted effort, a core function and tactic of these groups, is exemplified in how successful attackers are venerated to the position of “Saints” who become highlighted in stylized memes and other aspirational materials that are redistributed to various chats and channels.
Perhaps common action, rather than collective action, is a more accurate term for capturing the behavioral outcomes that then result from the shared identity that coalesces around nihilism. Another way to think about this is that radicalization is never a “lone” process, but action that results from it can be. The virtual, online communities that promote radicalization are where the real, concerted work of online social movements happens. Traditional understandings of social movement strength are rooted in large, visually salient, and in-person demonstrations, but militant accelerationism’s strength is rooted in its online, on-demand accessibility from any time zone and any geographical location. The online environment is pivotal. It facilitates misinformation and echo chambers that contribute to the radicalization of individuals and the normalization of extremist views while anonymity suppresses worries of immediate consequences for hateful speech and actions.
Second Element: Ordinary People
The second element of the social movements definition is that they are conducted by ordinary people. While “ordinary” is open to interpretation, it has usually been intended to capture that movement participants are not professional organizers, they are average citizens with jobs and lives outside of activism who are inspired by some grievance to join or form a movement. Movements, especially successful ones, can develop or attract recognizable leaders who, in some cases, become synonymous with the movement. Movements nonetheless maintain their definitional compliance as long as the majority of members are not professional activists, and this is certainly true within militant accelerationist spaces. [something here about how many violent actors, esp school shooters, observed to be very ordinary/unremarkable - age]
It is worth underscoring that formal leaders are not required for collective action to qualify as a social movement. In fact, there has been a clear tendency toward so-called leaderfull movements in the United States in recent years, including both Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. This linguistic turn is constructed in conscious opposition to the traditional notion of leaderless action that has been associated with right-wing violence, yet important structural and tactical parallels exist. Leaderfull movements explicitly reject the concept of national leaders, focusing simultaneously on two goals. The first is maintaining individual members’ agentic potential to respond to movement needs in their respective communities. The second is the need to avoid identifiable potential targets of either retributive countermovement violence or government repression. Militant accelerationists, like others who have been labeled lone actors or lone wolves, have the same approach of trying to empower each individual in the community to take, in this case, violent action, for the end of social chaos and degradation while avoiding detection and capture.
Third Element: Change
All social movements are fighting something, whether it be the implementation of something new, or the removal of something that already exists. Movements usually have clear goals (such as the implementation or nullification of some law), which may evolve or change over time, which build to a clear and aspirational vision of the future.
Militant accelerationists also seek change, but the change they seek is neither progressive nor particularly clear. They feel deeply that almost any future must be better than the present but do not have a robustly defined vision of this improved future, or even a vision that is uniformly shared across their community. They only know that a better future can only arrive following the complete destruction of modern society, a destruction that often entails the fantasized annihilation of certain undesirable outgroups.
A lack of clear, aspirational outcomes is often a barrier to traditional social movements. If people do not know what benchmarks they are fighting for, they lose a sense of agency and purpose and believe their efforts are better spent elsewhere. For militant accelerationists, however, it is the means are more important than the ends: violence and the chaos are the goals, rather than whatever future is left in their wake. Disruption and pursuit of social collapse is itself the change that accelerationists seek, in other words, and accelerationism sustains its momentum because individuals can take a choose-your-own-adventure approach to the precise reasons they participate and the potential futures they envision while still pursuing the same definition of change.
Fourth Element: Extra-Institutional Means
Social movements by definition must largely pursue their efforts to change society by using methods outside of normative institutions. This is by necessity: if mainstream institutions (namely, the political and legal systems) were responsive to the concerns of social movement constituents, they would not need a social movement but instead could, for example, file legislation and expect it to reliably effect the change they desire. Protests, sit-ins, boycotts, organized work stoppages, and other tactics have been required for traditional social movements because the systems are not responsive and, in some cases, not even accessible to movement members. For example, when only white men could legally vote, other individuals could not access legitimate routes of political change through candidate endorsement at the ballot box. Militant accelerationists want to do more than work outside of existing institutions. They want to destroy them.
Accelerationist tactics extend beyond overt violence, such as shootings or attempts to sabotage infrastructure, to include subtler, yet also disruptive, extra-institutional methods. Even online adherents who do not engage in direct violence actively cultivate a culture of chaos. They fetishize violence and groom young members to distrust established authority figures. For example, some of these communities work to groom young members into deeper distrust of their parents and other supportive adults as they encourage future violent actions. Some adjacent spaces even employ blackmail, threatening to expose youth to parents or others, thus discouraging meaningful communication and trusted relationships within offline families and communities. Other spaces actively encourage offline actions that are designed to put pressure points on long-standing cultural debates, such as shootings committed in a way they believe will inevitably lead to restricted gun rights and further result in enhanced polarization and cascading violence as certain Second Amendment advocates fight back.
The success of these more insidious tactics has been mixed and, so far, largely limited to the micro-level. But success is not required for social movement status, and even actors who are not committing direct violence greatly enhance the scope of accelerationism’s destruction by including the degradation of normative societal principles in this varied tactical repertoire. Further, accelerationists’ deliberate transgression of social norms further alienates them from any traditional political process or institutional approach, contributing to a deeper investment in accelerationist identity.
Other Considerations: Dramatization
One important element of social movements that the Goodwin and Jasper definition at the center of this analysis omits is the way they dramatize their concerns. In this sense, “dramatize”does not necessarily mean “exaggerate,” but rather references sociologist Erving Goffman's dramaturgical model. This model asserts that all individuals are constantly performing for other people, like actors on a stage, but not because social actions are false or meaningless, quite the opposite. Goffman’s model articulates how social situations required different scripts for action because there are general, shared expectations for how people should behave and interact with each other that vary across different contexts. Within a social movement context, this in part means that the broader audience of non-members who are watching a social movement from the outside expect a degree of performativity. They need to be incentivized to pay attention to the movement and also need to be able to easily understand what it is that a given movement wants. That is, all social movements must communicate their concerns and desire for change in a way that is visible to people outside the movement, and ideally encourages other people to join the movement, or at least not stand in its way.
Mottos, chants, and visual symbols become a major part of a social movement’s language and branding as it tries to efficiently capture its cause. The disability rights movement, for example, in its visual repertoire various iterations of the familiar wheel chair icon. One such iteration features this icon drawn in white stars that replace the usual array of stars on the American flag to efficiently convey the goals of the movement and situate it as a fundamentally American effort to advocate for equality and inclusion.
Militant accelerationism, with its very different message, thrives in this kind of dramatized performativity. Adherents’ offline violence is intended to capture attention and to induce both fear and mimicry, in addition to causing as much physical harm as possible. Successful assailants become stylized memes and are immortalized as Saints to be emulated. Accelerationists’ distinct and provocative visual language rapidly captures visual attention and solidifies ingroup identity. Their symbols and iconography are selected and often intentionally mutated to disrupt conventional norms and signal a rejection of mainstream society. This visual arsenal frequently draws from historical and esoteric sources, appropriating imagery associated with revolution, chaos, or the occult to convey a sense of defiance and impending societal collapse.
The primary purpose of accelerationist’s visual dramatization is to create and signal ingroup belonging. They contribute to the shared narrative by acting as a visual shorthand for their beliefs and cause. Traditional social movements pursue this internally-facing purpose, too, but are more typically engaged in using symbols and other visual communication to nurture external support. Accelerationists care much less than traditional social movements about garnering new members or financial support, however. They define themselves as social outcasts and do not seek mainstream recognition, taking a vicious quality over quantity approach for a more targeted kind of recruitment that singles out vulnerable individuals who are already somewhat disintegrated from social supports.
Conclusion
Militant accelerationism easily aligns with most core components of the definition of social movement. Accelerationism is not simply a collection of isolated individuals holding radical beliefs but rather a network of adherents who actively and consciously pursue extreme social change. These individuals, ordinary people in the sense of not being professional activists, engage in sustained efforts outside mainstream institutions. Their activities, whether online or in real-world spaces, are driven by a shared vision of a collapsing social order.
Accelerationism most struggles to meet the requirement that social movements be concerted actions because of its decentralized and online nature. However, this network and the overarching intent of its members to facilitate and create offline violence means that concerted efforts are present but require an updated understanding to accommodate how the internet changes social relationships and communication well beyond accelerationists alone. Dramatization, too, takes on a slightly different meaning than we typically expect from other social movements where most of the performative communication is directed internally, rather than externally. Paired with the performative elements of extreme, offline violence, this internal focus must, however, be understood as a reinforcing feature of accelerationist identity and tactics rather than a true deviation from the social movements model.
In this context, accelerationism should clearly be considered and evaluated as a social movement. The areas where it challenges our traditional definition are not sufficient to reject its movement status, but instead are reasons to question the flexibility of that definition as online relationships are instrumental to increasingly more movements and human relationships more generally. In fact, accelerationists’ disruptive, destructive actions allow them to circumvent the limitations of conventional social movements, which rely on public support. They exert influence through chaos and violence, rather than persuasion or negotiation, and do not cede power to outsiders as a result.
It is worth noting that other entities accepted as social movements today have had more ambiguity in their past, with their status as a movement only solidified later in their trajectory. Occupy Wall Street, for example, long held an ambiguous status for some scholars due to its lack of clearly articulated–or at least clearly recognized–goals. Openly mocked by some members of the media during its two months of real activity, it is now recognized as a range of successful outcomes. Likewise, Black Lives Matter was disparaged with claims that a lack of clear national leadership equated to a lack of clear goals and thus inaction; but, Black Lives Matter in fact had enormous successes in police reform and more across the country.
Both Occupy and Black Lives Matter challenged the traditional definition of movements during their early days, perhaps one factor behind why some people did not take them seriously, only for their full impact to be felt many years into their success. We should not make the same mistake with militant accelerationism. Accelerationism's online presence, its potential for radicalization, and its capacity to inspire acts of violence pose serious challenges to social cohesion and political stability. Evaluating accelerationism as a social movement brings it into dialogue with other social movements literature and thus can facilitate developing effective counter-strategies. Considering accelerationism as a movement allows a more nuanced analysis of its potential for disruption as well as its vulnerabilities, and the most effective ways to mitigate its harmful effects.
