TY - THES ID - 137259899 TI - Rethinking the Future: Imagining an Accelerationism of Technology and Time AU - Johnston, Nicholas AU - Lievens, Matthias AU - KU Leuven. Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte. Opleiding Research Master of Philosophy (Abridged Programme) (Leuven) PY - 2019 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:137259899 AB - Technology plays a critical role in shaping how we conceive of time. It has opened up countless possibilities of what to do with said time and historically accompanied the promise of a better future. Despite this, sociological and psychological research reveals that today we face chronic time pressure, a lack of time. This pressure alters how we understand events and act politically. Theorists of social acceleration, and accelerationists have have expressed the view that contemporary society pathologically struggles to imagine the future at all, as if we are subject to cultural and political presentism. Theorists of acceleration have explained the processes which accelerate technological innovation, the pace of life, and rate of social change. Accelerationists argue that these processes should be intensified. These two discourses have until now not entered into conversation. This paper aims to explain accelerationism in terms of the theory of social acceleration found in the works of Reinhart Koselleck and Hartmut Rosa. We claim the theme of technology is a bridge between the two discourses. We argue that acceleration and accelerationism puzzle over the same question of how acceleration in modernity produced our expectations of a novel future, yet today no new future is expected. All authors we examine make use of technology to illustrate how this came to be about. Accelerationists argue that it should be used to accelerate certain aspects of life, to regain a sense of a future on the horizon. However there is disagreement over technology’s role in history and what forms of acceleration are desirable. To disambiguate accelerationist positions we begin by suggesting a rubric for the evaluation of a position’s technological determinism. Then, using insights from Koselleck and Rosa, we suggest a new taxonomy for understanding accelerationists. Rather than divide accelerationists using the old labels of right and left, we use their stances on technology and time to understand them anew. ER -