Up to this point, we have been engaged in historical reconstruction. We have traced the evolutionary paths of the Promethean and Gaian myths, and their various mutations from antiquity to modern capitalism. Our task now is to critically evaluate these ideas—to move from history to philosophy. This will require a change in our method. The point of philosophy is to not only comprehend ideas, but to provide a normative analysis of the same. Put frankly, are these ideas any good? Do they track with reality? Do premises lead to their putative conclusions, and are the fundamental premises themselves true?

When dealing with contemporary Prometheanism, philosophical analysis comes up against special challenges. In the twenty-first century, the standard-bearers of Promethean mythos have been the so-called accelerationists. As alluded to earlier, accelerationism is a highly eclectic ideology which spans both the political Left and Right. Right-accelerationists, such as Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and Justin Murphy, hope to reach new horizons by exacerbating the processes of capitalism and even white nationalism. Left-accelerationists, like Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, and the Laboria Cuboniks collective, by contrast, hope to accelerate past capitalism by democratizing productive technologies. Meanwhile, “Blaccelerationists” emphasize the historical exclusion of black people from white humanist discourses, and the historical process whereby capitalism has engendered the “black nonsubject.” These are treated, not simply as moral wrongs, but rather as levers for a radical emancipation. Whatever their political outlook, accelerationists tend to reject a narrowly conceived local politics and affirm large-scale, technologically infused transformation.

But alongside this preoccupation with “the new,” even verging on a sci-fi break with humanity itself, accelerationists tend to deploy their ideas in highly eccentric ways. The result is a plethora of neologisms, either original or often borrowed from continental philosophy: Terms such as “rationalist inhumanism,” “teleoplexy,” “autonomous bootstrapping,” “abstractify,” “abductive non-monotonicity,” and confounding phrases like “telecommercialised nomadic multiplicity” abound. Other times, accelerationists will use strikingly physicalist language to describe their abstract ideas. These have included, “critical torsion,” “reformatting,” “closed positive feedback loop,” “short-circuiting,” “machinic,” “navigational,” “mutational driver,” as well as opaque expressions such as “discontinuous cut in the fabric of ontological synthesis,” to say nothing of “trajectories of a vectorial […] and not rotational or circulatory […] sort.”