Neo-America Arrives from the Future: American Accelerationism in 2024
“America has no roots except in the future.”
– Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard’s description of America as a “primitive society” with no “ancestral territory” of historically accumulated meaning immediately brings to mind photographer Edward Burtynsky’s widely-memed image of sprawling Exxon gas stations and McDonald’s franchises assembling into an alien and artificial landscape. Energy, cars, and products circulate suspended in a fluid state of perpetual anticipation that overrides the blood-soaked history of territorial clashes.
Baudrillard’s compatriots Deleuze and Guattari advance a similar vision: “In America everything comes together,” they state, “There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations.”
It’s too easy to dismiss these descriptions as the postmodern-theory equivalent of the “The European mind cannot comprehend this” meme, which terminally online Americans deploy to insult their “Europoorian” counterparts. Yet, the perverse fascination that drives these descriptions also captures something inassimilable in American capitalist culture. Marx captured it perfectly: “Everything solid melts into air.” That’s the well-known American M.O.
From this philosophical matrix — which coordinates itself around techno-economic acceleration — flows an abstract entity that channels capitalist energy into what could be called America Corp. America as a host and epicenter of machinic desire — a hollowed-out, cognitively minimally functioning entity, like the walking dead shambling through our favorite apocalyptic fantasies. Does this nightmare vision not bear a disturbing resemblance to the ideology that has metastasized in many boardrooms of multinational megacorps, NGOs, and even certain sectors of state governments? Across conferences in ski resorts and desert spas, postmodernist buzzwords of rhizomatic capital flows and meltdowns merge with keynote talking points on the state of permanent openness, globalization, and fluidity. No wonder, then, that postmodern thinkers feature so prominently in recent attempts to trace the intellectual genealogy of the Marx-inspired “woke mind-control virus.”
The horror story goes like this: in 1969, as astronauts planted the American flag on the moon, a Statist mutation leaked from French theory labs, infecting the US host body politic. Over time, it evolved into a monstrous technocratic Leviathan: America Corp — an optimization engine that converts land into Special Economic Zones to be algorithmically managed by spreadsheets and market forces. The territory is reduced to a map of Excel cells and economic variables to be manipulated. History becomes irrelevant; what lies outside the context window simply doesn’t exist.
But as the results of the 2024 elections demonstrated, this silicon-based vision clashes with red-blooded reality. America, as a future-oriented borg existing in an abstract state of constant re-creation — devoid of territory and population — meets its nemesis in the specific materiality, historicity, and ideology of the United States. America as a global virtual corporate safe space collides, in other words, with America as a bounded national territory, yearning for a future past.
The resurgence of a nostalgic and heroic symbolism of the tangible, the nostalgic, and the mythic represents the reclamation of the “real” America as a national culture. Not the Democracy-As-A-Service franchise dropped into far-flung geographical combat zones, but America as iconography, monuments, and diverse mythopoetic creations, such as Batman, Barbie, Oprah, Ted K, Charles Manson, Hulk Hogan, and Trump himself. MAGA’s electoral victory heralds the cultural triumph of what could be called America™ — America as counter-identity politics, primed for commodification and export, adorned with AI-generated, US-centric symbolism.
There’s real substance to this vision. Imbuing America’s technological infrastructure with sacred significance is a powerful symbolic move. The interstate highway system, the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, the atomic bomb, and the Blackbird have recently all been reinjected with “dark MAGA” energy — or are in the process of being reenergized — with less provocative, Silicon Valley-friendly variants of American Dynamism and Effective Accelerationism.
Two examples: SpaceX’s recent Starship and Mechazilla feats, and the sleek surfaces of generative AI chatbot interfaces, coalesce into a form of magic indistinguishable from technology — making technology a transcendent experience once again.
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America as pure virtuality and America as the radical real ultimately each contain critical elements that coalesce into a generative conception of America as what philosopher Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) termed a hyperstition.
In the 1990s, the concept of hyperstition was still confined to the academic containment zone. Today, it has escaped that container and is wreaking havoc on the internet and IRL. Unlike superstitions, which describe ideas without reality, hyperstitions transform fiction into truth over time. In 2009, it made little sense to claim that Bitcoin represented a viable alternative to the fiat currency system. But over time, that proposition has steadily become more true, to the point where Bitcoin might soon be absorbed by the United States Government as a strategic reserve asset.
A hyperstitional object, Land says, is “no mere figment or ‘social construction’ but is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it.” A hyperstition amplifies itself through sheer belief and repetition, ultimately achieving world-historic proportions.
Viewed through the lens of this theoretical construct, America appears as perhaps one of the most powerful hyperstitional examples in history. Long before the hyperstitional objects of cyberspace or the metaverse (hatched originally from the pages of Neuromancer and Snow Crash) attracted waves of mental and financial investment to transform the digital world into a tangible global reality, the discovery and terraforming of the New World began a process that would one day see America bestride the world as a colossus.
America thus can be reconceptualized as Hyperamerica — a hyperstitional engine that moves us inexorably toward a kind of apocalyptic rupture, where belief itself becomes an agent of creation. The “grip of ‘future shock’” is a symptom of a world entangled in this hyperstitional force field: an inevitable, self-reinforcing process driving us toward a revelatory space fusing mythic virtual fictions with geopolitical realities.
America, along with its economy, market, culture, and theology, can be viewed not as a static, fixed system but as a shifting, cybernetic meta-organism that interacts with and intensifies apocalyptic feedback loops. American hegemony is, consequently, not merely a question of the military power and cultural dominance of a single nation. America is a mythic force that shapes geopolitics through a Promethean will.
Hollywood is the clearest example: a system that deconstructs reality and reconstructs it in its image — a space where fiction and reality fuse. That’s why the low-energy Marvel and DC comic multiverses, or the equally brain-dead Star Wars franchises — which are spawning endless sequels and prequels — have been culturally so deleterious. A return to a thymotic and truly mythic high-agency Hollywood is critical.
As Oswald Spengler noted, Western culture is driven by the Faustian impetus to expand toward infinity and break the terminal horizons of the present order. One sees this same metaphysical impetus at work in Gothic architecture and infinity-seeking paintings. Cathedrals, ICBMs, and supermen that cut through the heavens to touch the impossible, contact the outside, and break into the unknown incarnate this spirit.
Territorial expansion across planetary space is another aspect of the same phenomenon, which Carl Schmitt once termed the nomos of the earth. Techno-scientific superiority expresses the nature of the hyperstitional process: ideas need to materialize, take root in the soil of history, push the boundaries of the real, and abolish the constraints of the virtual.
It’s a moral imperative to think bigger than the moon — and even beyond Mars. The natural limits of Hyperamerica are, to a large extent, defined by the constraints on our hyperstitional capacity. Perhaps it will span from what was once known as the Global American Empire and the former EU to outer colonies on the asteroid belts, where robot mines and fully automated luxury communism prison colonies may be located. Maybe the Vatican will serve as the launch base for interstellar colonization and intergalactic missiles, mass-produced by automated cyber-foundries in territories resembling the sovereign enclaves from Snow Crash. Critical mineral trade flows might get routed through former Switzerland, where monetary energy is converted and stored in the apocalypse-proof, cryptographically secure Bitcoin blockchain. Or, at the edges of the Hyperamerican Empire — and to the dissatisfaction of a future Council of Spontaneous Order — a dark, intergalactic, memecoin-fueled barter economy might one day emerge due to the universal abundance of machine intelligence and the absolute scarcity of Dyson-sphere-mined Bitcoin.
Will Hyperamerica appear in its synthetic form as a disturbing mixture of Blade Runner’s anarcho-futurist Off-World colonies, the gated space communities of Elysium, the luxury automated consumerism of Wall-E (which GLP-1 drugs might help to prevent), and the perfect simulation machines of the Matrix pods, which protect a listless population from a reality of post-apocalyptic wastelands, killer robot swarms, dirt, and gruel? We don’t know yet — one man’s fictional dystopia is another’s utopia.
Like the figure of the Hyperborean Nietzsche describes in The Anti-Christ, Hyperamericanization is a movement that traverses ideology and space-time. As it expands across the West, “Neither by land nor by water will you find the road” to Hyperamerica.
Tobias Huber is a writer from Europe, investor, and co-author of “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation”. He can be followed @TobiasAHuber.
