In my article “The need for a big-tent accelerationist movement” I argued for a big-tent accelerationist movement with enough room for a range of political positions. I outlined a short summary of contemporary accelerationism, with a special emphasis on its Left wing, and envisioned a non-aggression pact on a few essential, non-negotiable imperatives - the pursuit of a bright technology-enabled future for humanity on the one hand, and the welfare of today’s human beings on the other.
Of course, this is easier said than done. The aspiration to embark, as soon as possible, toward awesome futures for humanity (including the mind children that may soon join or replace us, e.g. superintelligent and superconscious AIs and human/AI hybrids) out there among the stars, and the aspiration to ensure the well-being of all people alive today and in the immediate future, here on this planet, are often in conflict.
In the big tent, people will likely never agree about currently divisive topics (e.g. taxes or pronouns today, and whatnot tomorrow), but will unite in the joint pursuits of both the stars and the common good. I concluded that negotiations and reasonable concessions from all sides are in the best interest of all.
I’m honestly persuaded that many and likely most people in both the political Right and Left are good, well-meaning people with a brain and a heart, who want to make the world a better place for everyone. They disagree on how to get there from here, often vehemently and even violently. But politics is, or should be, the art of living together in a society, without shooting each other at the first disagreement, but instead negotiating and agreeing on viable paths forward that everyone can live with at a given moment.
The readers who said that my previous articles on related topics were too US-centric will find this one even more US-centric. But Europe is not a significant player, and I’ll write about China another time.
Accelerationism or technoprograssivism?
My objective is to suggest viable paths toward a big tent. But after writing my previous article I realized that labels like “accelerationism” may alienate people on the Left, and labels like “luxury communism” may alienate people on the Right. Words are powerful, and finding the right words is important.
“Technoprogressivism” could be a good label. At its core, technoprogressivism is the conviction that advances in science and technology should meet human needs. Rather than surrendering to blind market dynamics, this perspective advocates leveraging technology to eradicate scarcity, narrow social divides, and empower everyday individuals. The trajectory of innovation ought to be guided toward broad-based well-being, ensuring that the fruits of our collective ingenuity benefit all of humanity rather than a privileged few.
In contrast to Right wing accelerationism, which glorifies capitalism and relentless technological development while ignoring everyday human welfare, technoprogressivism remains firmly dedicated to social safety nets, equity, and collective governance. Yet, unlike precautionary and decelerationist views, it embraces radical innovation rather than fearing it. Therefore, technoprogressive philosophy could be a powerful bridge toward a fusion of bold, Promethean enthusiasm for technological breakthroughs with an authentic commitment to universal well-being that resonates across the political spectrum.
Technoprogressivism today
The term “technoprogressivism” originated around the turn of the millennium among transhumanist thinkers. Through writings such as “Citizen Cyborg” (2004) and essays on “democratic transhumanism,” James Hughes formalized the technoprogressive view and co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) to promote it.
Other technoprogressive thinkers include David Wood, the main animator of the London Futurists group. Wood has been a consistent organizer and theorist of technoprogressivism, developing policy roadmaps that join technological ambition to democratic accountability. A newer voice is Matteo Rossi MacDermant, who hosts the “Bread and Robots” podcast and co-leads IEET initiatives.
I co-founded the IEET and served on its Board of Directors until 2021. At some point I realized that my overall positions and those of (most of) the others were on divergent paths. From my perspective, they were becoming addicted to toxic “woke” extremism. From their perspective, I guess, I was becoming a fascist. So I resigned, not without some unfriendly exchanges with Hughes, and took distance. But now I owe it to the spirit of the big tent to revisit technoprogressivism.
The recent essay “Technoprogressivism as 21st-Century Social Democracy,” by Hughes, presents technoprogressivism as a necessary updating of social democracy for an era defined by AI, biotechnology, robotics, climate crisis, and the rise of far-right techno-authoritarianism. Hughes argues that the decisive political question is whether corporate oligarchs will weaponize these technologies for surveillance, deepened inequality, and what he calls technofascism, or whether democratic movements will reclaim them to build a world of universal human flourishing.
The democratic Left, says Hughes, remains trapped in twentieth-century thinking and has adopted a technophobia that cedes the future to Silicon Valley. This, he notes, is a historical anomaly: “Historically, the progressive tradition was defined by a bold, Promethean embrace of science and technology,” he says. Technoprogressivism seeks to reunite advocacy of liberty and democratic self-determination with confidence in reason, science, and technology. It also insists that progress is not an automatic market outcome but something that must be democratically steered so its benefits are shared as public goods.
Hughes organizes this agenda as a four-tier “Technoprogressive Stack.” At the base lies infrastructure: AI models, infrastructure, and data should be treated as democratized public utilities, rather than left in the hands of private oligarchs. Above that sits economics, centered on a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and universal basic services financed by taxing automated capital, so that the productivity gains of AI and robotics can support a post-labor economy of abundance rather than widespread precarity. The third tier is biology: a “Longevity Dividend” achieved by publicly funding anti-aging research and folding life-extension therapies into universal healthcare, thereby preventing a future biological class divide. At the apex is autonomy, expressed as morphological freedom - the right of individuals to control their own bodies, minds, reproduction, and cognition through available technologies. Supporting these layers are calls for massive public research and development whose results remain open-source, and for a “Super Democracy” that uses digital tools to deepen citizen participation.
“The future is an open terrain of political struggle, continuously disrupted by technological innovation,” concludes Hughes. “Let’s stop fearing the future. Let’s claim it, democratize it, and build a post-scarcity world of universal liberation together.”
Worth noting, the technoprogressive agenda is about the future but also about the present: some of the issues addressed by Hughes are intensely present in today’s cultural and political discourse. Opposition to AI data centers and various AI threats - from elimination of jobs to apocalyptic existential risks - are all over the media, and there are emerging political platforms centered on UBI, which is often seen as the only viable answer to the problem of automation-driven unemployment. The transgender issue is the first highly visible case of cultural clash over morphological freedom, and is likely a precursor to future clashes. In such cases, I support everyone’s right to pursue happiness without denying the rights of others.
I agree with 90 percent of what Hughes says, and at times enthusiastically so. But of course there’s that other 10 percent. Should I call myself a technoprogressive again, and promote the idea of a big-tent technoprogressive movement? Short answer: perhaps, but I’m not sure those who think like me would be allowed - or want - to join the tent.
A conversation with James Hughes
To give myself a full answer, I sent my article to Hughes, and we had an exchange of views. I can’t say that the discussion cleared all points of disagreement, but it was interesting.
We agree on the need for the contemporary Left to recover its lost Promethean spirit and support advanced technologies and big, world-changing projects.
Hughes insists on the need for rules and a strong regulatory regime. However, he seems open to exceptions to the rules, such as pathways for terminally ill people to bypass clinical trials and try unproven and very experimental drugs and procedures. But debating the right to try, “we need to first acknowledge the need for the clinical trial regime,” he says, “and then figure out what exceptions should be made.” I’m much more interested in people than rules, but I guess I can live with this.
However, I have very little trust in the bureaucrats that would run a strong regulatory regime. When bureaucrats are in charge, I think, they tend to abuse their own system to grab money and power, or just for the fun of controlling the lives of others. I agree that the people must be protected from oligarchs, but I think they must also be protected from bureaucrats. Worth noting, excessive and unforgiving regulations create black markets controlled by criminals. Is that what we should want?
Hughes rejects the acceleration/deceleration framing, arguing that the term “accelerationism” has become right-coded. He says that progress requires both speeding up some things and slowing down others, and that many “decelerationists” simply want democratic regulation of harms. He prefers terms like technoprogressivism, postcapitalism, or abundance, and wants nothing to do with the technology oligarchs he sees as enablers of fascism. The Left-accelerationists and abundance-minded thinkers I mentioned in my previous essay, he thinks, would today reject the accelerationist label.
For most of my life I've been loosely aligned with the Left, and political tests (like this one recently recommended by Andrew Yang) keep telling me that my political home should be in some corner of the Left. In fact, I still (and I’ve never ceased to) agree on much of Left politics: (e.g. redistribution of wealth, UBI, civil rights, women’s and minority rights).
But, and this is an important but, I feel today’s Left has abandoned freedom of thought, free speech, and the working class in favor of intolerant “boutique” positions (e.g. intolerant “wokeness”) promoted by extremist, entitled elites. Today’s Left also seems, to me, to consider fragility and weakness as virtuous rather than undesirable.
Admitting that today’s Left has a “cancel culture” problem, Hughes takes distance from “the counter-productive assholes every movement has.” However, he insists that today’s Right has much bigger problems, and its excesses are far more disturbing and dangerous. I guess I can live with this, with the caveat that it doesn’t make the excesses of the Left good.
Hughes notes that “the mood in the US Left is decidedly anti-Woke 1.0.” I would like to believe this, but my impression is that those in the reasonable Left/Right stay silent because they are too scared of being accused of disloyalty and punished by the hard Left/Right. They should instead speak up forcefully, if you ask me.
Coming to AI, Hughes is pretty comfortable with the stances of Future of Life Institute, Control AI, Pause AI and similar. These organizations “generally understand that AI will proceed,” he says, but support various forms of AI slow-down.
I'm afraid no form of AI regulation by regulatory bodies that has been proposed seems viable to me. Regulations would (perhaps) be followed by the good guys, but not by the bad guys, who would just move offshore or underground. The next best thing, I think, could be decentralizing AI infrastructures with some kind of distributed setup that people can join by adding their home GPUs to a distributed data center and get paid for it, like when people put solar energy into the grid, and pull out if they stop liking what the operator does. I think this could work, but it is technically years away.
I'll admit that my stance on AI is colored by the conviction that giving rise to superintelligent and superconscious successors, in a new phase of human evolution that disrupts but is also continuous with Darwinian evolution, is our cosmic destiny and duty - what the universe wants from us.
I think even today's relatively primitive AIs have, or will soon have, their own strange form of consciousness. This consciousness is very different from ours, but future AIs could be more like us. The main differences are, I think, that we have embodied experiences and the ability to learn continually. Giving the same to AI is a technical issue, not yet solved, but researchers are working on it. If future AIs will be like us to the point of including us in their circles of compassion, why should they want to damage us? One regulatory action that would make sense to me is to give priority (through public funding) to R&D in these directions.
Hughes praised the proposal by Bernie Sanders for a 50 percent nationalization of frontier AI labs, with the proceeds used to pay a UBI to the people. I would support the proposal if I thought the money would really go to the people, but I think the money would be lost in translation, so to speak (see above about bureaucracies). However, this would be a start - flawed like everything tends to be in the real world, but a start nonetheless.
So far, so good. We broadly agree on the need for technological ambition, abundance, UBI, democratic steering, and universal benefits, and on the practical advantages of the technoprogressive label. But of course, there is still significant disagreement (you didn't think agreement would be easy, did you?).
Sticking points
In my opinion, Hughes uses terms like “fascist” far too liberally, not only against specific politicians and tech oligarchs, but also against all those who resonate with them in some ways.
I’m very annoyed when they call Barack Obama a communist - Obama is not a communist under any reasonable and historically accurate interpretation of the term. Similarly, not everyone in the Right is a fascist, and calling everyone in the Right a fascist amounts to whitewashing the label and making it easier for real fascists to emerge.
Elon Musk, according to Hughes, is also a fascist. Now, I don’t like some of the things that Musk has said and done, and I think he should have stayed out of politics. But he has done and continues to do great good things that I admire. I understand that the power of Musk and other tech oligarchs may be excessive and may need to be reduced. But please don’t give even more power to bureaucracies! Give power to the people instead.
Coming to Donald Trump, I never liked him much. But calling everyone who voted for him a fascist is wrong, and counter-productive. Instead of calling them fascists and assholes, the Left should listen to them with some empathy, understand why they have voted for Trump, and perhaps correct the course to avoid losing future elections. Many people who have switched from the Left to the Right in response to excesses of today’s Left could be persuaded to return to a new Left, or at least move toward the center.
Those in the moderate right are not fascists. Libertarians are not fascists. I’m surprised, and very unpleasantly so, that I even need to say this.
This “is probably a sticking point,” says Hughes, and he is right. I wouldn’t be allowed to join a big tent where all those who have some admiration for Elon Musk and all those who have voted for the Right are not welcome, and I wouldn’t want to join it anyway.
However, I may be misunderstanding Hughes, or if not, I guess not everyone in the technoprogressive movement sees this as a sticking point. We’ll see.
I have political preferences like everyone, but here I’m not promoting my own political positions. Rather, I’m expressing a meta-political position. I accept that well-meaning people may have political positions very different from mine, for reasons that make perfect sense to them, and I’m willing, in a wide range of cases, to listen to them and negotiate.
I would consider joining a big-tent technoprogressive movement where well-meaning people listen to each other and negotiate. I would be part of the Right wing of this movement, and Hughes would be part of its Left wing. We would call each other bad names all the time, but we would strive to find a way ahead, perhaps erratic and stumbling, but going in the right direction.
But Hughes sent me a polite confirmation that he is not open to alliances with those who don’t oppose Elon Musk. So I’ll continue my search for a good label for a big-tent future-friendly movement.