Pour Gasoline. Call the Fire Department.

Disciplined accelerationist bets in a world of realpolitik

Cuyahoga River fire, November 1952. Photo by James Thomas, Cleveland Press. Courtesy of the Cleveland Memory Project, Cleveland State University Library, Special Collections.

The Cuyahoga River had caught fire more than a dozen times before 1969 — slick with oil, choked with steelworks waste, burning roughly once a decade since the 1860s. The June 1969 fire wasn’t even the worst; the 1952 fire had been bigger. But this one ran in Time magazine, with a photograph that ricocheted across the country.¹

Within eighteen months, Congress created the EPA. Within three years, the Clean Water Act. The river hadn’t changed. Public awareness had.

No one was running a strategy. A river burning for a century didn’t change federal law; a single photograph did.

Aviation has its own name for waiting for visibility: tombstone regulation. Each safety rule arrives only after the next preventable crash.

Waiting for change is optional. The combination of chronic harm and concentrated visibility can be assembled on purpose.²

Accelerate the bad to get the good

MLK Jr. had a name for it: creative tension. Lenin was blunter: “the worse, the better.”

Accelerationists drive harm into view to force a correction. Short-term harm is a price we can pay for long-term good.³

Each case of acceleration shares the same structure: a corrective system existed but wasn’t acting, and an accelerator that forced its hand.

MLK Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference marched children into police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham because they knew that Bull Connor would respond brutally to peaceful protest. The federal government had known about Jim Crow for a century. The televised brutality of children attacked by police made federal inaction electorally costly. Weeks later, JFK introduced the Civil Rights Act.

In the late 1980s, ACT UP turned the same logic on the FDA’s slow-walking of AIDS drug trials — die-ins on agency steps, public funeral processions, ashes thrown on the White House lawn. Regulators knew people were dying yet didn’t feel the urgency. ACT UP supplied it.

Accelerationist bets aren’t a new invention. Reformers have used the move from labor to public health to civil rights, and the same pattern shows up in markets and organizations.⁴

Software-security researchers use a similar strategy: full disclosure. When a vendor refuses to patch a known vulnerability, the researchers publish the exploit themselves, accept the brief window of potential harm, and make it too costly for the vendors to ignore.

Patience as moral failure

When the people making up our institutions refuse to fix what they could, the moral failure is theirs first. It is also ours, if we don’t force their hand. Just like the addict, our institutions sometimes need to hit rock bottom before they change.

The cost of not accelerating can be devastating: by 2008, regulators and legislators had watched predatory mortgage lending and toxic securities accumulate for years. They had the authority to act. They didn’t. Millions lost their homes. The crisis forced Dodd-Frank, the regulation those agencies should have been writing all along.

It’s a gamble either way: short-term pain from acceleration, or the long-term cost of collapse. Real people suffer either way. Betting on futures takes strategy, will, and cold-hearted empathy.

Plenty of these gambles don’t pay out. To place smart bets requires evaluating each acceleration strategy on its merits.

Reform or regime

The bet pays off when the pressure from acceleration raises the cost of inaction enough to force a corrective response, and when the accelerator is not in charge of implementing the fix.

The bet fails when the people accelerating change alone decide what gets fixed and how. The Bolsheviks accelerated Russia’s collapse, then took sole control of the new state. Stalin’s regime followed.

Many hands — power distributed

American revolutionaries forced the collapse and shaped what followed. They didn’t get Stalin because power got distributed.

Plural stakeholders with real power: federalists and anti-federalists had to negotiate the Constitution. Self-imposed checks: Washington stepped down after two terms. Inherited institutional infrastructure: colonial legislatures, common law courts, and town meetings were preserved as the foundation rather than purged. External pressure stayed external: movements that pushed corrective institutions kept structural distance from them.

Mandela’s TRC built the same separation: National Party officials, business, church, and white South Africans sat on the commission.

Brexit shows partial failure. The Tory Brexiteers who forced the rupture became the government managing the aftermath, with no real opposition coalition. UK parliamentary structure stayed partly intact, so the result wasn’t Stalin. But dysfunction has compounded for years.

The addict isn’t in sole control of recovery (nor should he be). Treatment, group, sponsor, steps. Sharing the fix is what makes acceleration produce reform instead of regime.

Get mad⁵

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”⁶

Friedman described crises that arrive. The accelerationist creates them.

When the odds favor real change, bring the crisis. With discipline.

There are plenty of candidates — pick one.

Live wagers⁷

Basic survival: hunger, lead pipes still in service, extreme-weather deaths in low-income communities, rent gouging, eviction abuse, preventable gun deaths.

Healthcare: maternal mortality, antibiotic resistance, hospital and private equity consolidation, drug pricing opacity, insurance claim denials, long-term care abuses, ER patient dumping, Medicare Advantage upcoding fraud, mental health and mentorship gaps for boys and young men.

Labor and environmental harm: wage theft, worker heat deaths, child labor violations, asthma near refineries, forever chemicals (PFAS), pesticide poisoning, microplastic contamination, preventable shelter euthanasia.

Tech and information harm: social-media harm to teens (Haugen-revealed), data broker abuses, algorithmic discrimination, rental home price-fixing.

Justice and consumer harm: cash bail abuses, indigent defense failures, civil asset forfeiture, forced arbitration, repair lockouts.

Whichever you pick, commit. No retreat.

Hernán Cortés burning his ships at Veracruz, 1519. No retreat. Image generated in Canva.

End Notes

[1]: The photo was technically from the 1952 fire. No one cared.

[2]: This article grew out of listening to JVL and Sarah Longwell on the Bulwark argue a version of this gamble: give Trump what he wants and accelerate the need for voters, courts, and his coalition to confront the cost.

[3]: Distance from the fanatics — some readers hear “accelerationism” and think of Nick Land, Eco-fascism, or the Shock Doctrine.

Land’s version argues for capitalism accelerated past humans. Breakdown is the destination, not the start of repair. Disciplined acceleration argues the opposite: the fix is the point.

Eco-fascists accelerate toward a racialized post-collapse order; the killings are how the order gets built. The Christchurch shooter murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in 2019 in this tradition. Disciplined acceleration treats cost as a debt the accelerator owes. Eco-fascism treats the dead as the fuel.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine documents elites using a crisis to push privatization, deregulation, and austerity while blocking the public from organizing. Disciplined acceleration puts the affected at the table. The shock doctrine clears the room.

I reject all those types of acceleration as useless, hateful, and corrupt.

[4]: See Kotter’s corporate “burning platform” (1996) and Christensen’s “incumbents who refuse to accelerate get displaced by entrants who do” (1997).

[5]: The people must get angry for change. For companion listening, see Life Has Value by Chill Bump.

[6]: Milton Friedman, preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom.

[7]: This part will alienate many readers, so if you are upset with my choice of programs, please propose your own in the comments below for consideration.