Why effective accelerationism matters

Nearly a year ago, an editor reached out to me about writing a piece on effective accelerationism, or e/acc. Here's what I said in response:

> I've casually tracked their existence but tbh find them to be not dissimilar from other techno-optimist movements, beyond aesthetics and rhetoric

> I think my primary q with e/acc is "what cultural need are they filling that doesn't already exist"

At the time, I didn't have the bandwidth to explore this question, but I picked it up again sometime in the early fall, as I saw all the predictably bad takes come out. E/acc as a cringey tech bro fantasy. E/acc as a "problematic" Silicon Valley billionaire ideology. E/acc as techno-optimism-and-here's-why-that's-dangerous. Even the slightly better pieces seemed to only consider e/acc in the context of the AI ethics debate, though when I read through the tweets of the founders, it seemed there was more to it than that.

I also noticed an unresolved tension between people trying to interpret e/acc as a novel philosophy, which I sensed it was not (but that doesn't make it uninteresting!), and e/acc spreading primarily through memes and shortform. (E/acc is the exact inversion of the rationalist community in this way.) Journalists frequently cited an official e/acc Substack with a few posts, mostly abandoned. It was an easy source to point to, given that persistent artifacts were hard to come by. But given e/acc’s clear penchant for shortform, this didn't seem like a reliable source of truth.

The one longform format that e/acc's founders did seem to enjoy were Twitter Spaces: in other words, talking. So I reached out to the founders to learn what e/acc was all about. This led to a series of phone conversations with Bayeslord, one of the co-founders, from which I tried to deconstruct what had spurred them to start the movement in the first place.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Bayeslord was humble, thoughtful, and intensely principled. From our conversations emerged a clearer picture of e/acc: not as a deep philosophy, not as a stupid meme, but a reaction to ten years of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley. E/acc, it seemed, was an attempt to rediscover one's culture and preserve the tradition of technology.

The outcome of these conversations was a piece that touches on the recent cultural history of Silicon Valley, and how it's playing out in the AI ethics debates, which came out in The New Atlantis today.

Read it here

I hope you enjoy!