As [Benjamin] Noys points out, these first accelerationists did much more than fail to spark a populist revolution; they actually helped legitimate the technologies of domination in place today. Noys saves his harshest criticism for the French theorists of the 1970s, and for the CCRU. In the social unrest of 1968, he argues, the French left saw their hopes for an anticapitalist revolution raised and dashed. In response, thinkers such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari turned their frustration into celebration. They not only accepted their inability to escape capitalism; they reveled in it. They dreamed of individuals who could melt into the libidinal slipstream of media spectacles and consumer delights. Like the Marx of the “Fragment on Machines,” they dreamed of human beings who could become one with their tools.

Fred Turner, “On Accelerationism”