- There's a new ideological interest in Silicon Valley: effective accelerationism.
- Tech power players, including Marc Andreessen, are showing support by adding "e/acc" to usernames.
- Here's the lowdown on why e/acc is getting traction in tech circles.
There's an obscure theory doing the rounds in Silicon Valley as it quickly becomes the new ideological hobby of tech's power players. It's called effective accelerationism.
On Twitter, now rebranded to X, some of the tech community's most prominent figures, including veteran investors Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, have decided to include the term "e/acc" in their usernames as a badge of allegiance to the vision.
So what exactly are the underlying tenets of effective accelerationism, and why is having a moment right now?
Effective accelerationism, explained
Let's start with the name.
It's a bit of a play on effective altruism, the social movement focused on an evidence-led form of philanthropy, which was infamously embraced by Sam Bankman-Fried, the fallen founder of crypto exchange FTX.
The ideas of effective accelerationism themselves appear to have their genesis in the theories of Nick Land, a British philosopher who lectured at the University of Warwick and has come to be known as the father of the broader accelerationism movement.
The more formalized e/acc idea has taken shape on Twitter and through Substack newsletters since 2022.
The basic idea of the philosophy is this: in a technological age, the powers of innovation and capitalism should be exploited to their extremes to drive radical social change – even if that means completely upending today's social order.
The first Effective Accelerationism post, co-authored by users named @zestular, @creatine_cycle, @BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord, said technology and market forces, which they term "technocapital," are accelerating with a force that "cannot be stopped."
"Technocapital can usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness," the post said.
In an e/acc world, no idea that offers hypothetical value should be considered too absurd, too dangerous, too out there to make a reality. For e/acc adherents, the path of progress at all costs, would, in theory, make possible any imaginative idea with a purported benefit to humanity.
That could mean justifying the development of something as outlandish as Dyson Spheres — physicist Freeman Dyson's theoretical megastructures, which would surround a star and harvest its energy — or something closer on the horizon, like artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Why is it being talked about now?
Getting to these technological endgames is the goal for effective accelerationism because of the inherent belief that fully realized versions of technology stand to offer the fullest benefits. It goes a long way toward explaining why it might be having a bit of a moment right now.
Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, the promise and potential of AI have animated certain quarters of the tech community who have seen the chatbot's introduction to the world as a moment as game-changing as the launch of the iPhone or the internet.
For these quarters, there is now a very real opportunity to create AGI, or a kind of superintelligence as powerful as the human brain, that has become a bit of a holy grail for certain parts of the AI field.
With AGI manifest, e/acc supporters believe the world can take a huge leap forward in terms of innovation, productivity, stability, and all-round prosperity. For them, it makes the pursuit of AGI as fast as possible an almost morally imperative one – despite concerns about AI's harms.
As of publication, the first descriptor in Andreessen's Twitter bio is "effective accelerationist."
Tan, who is Y Combinator's president, tweeted last week that "e/acc is not 'replace humans with robots'," instead it's a vision that believes "more tech means more humans, more prosperity, but also more AIs."
The ideology may even be talked about in the context of things like city rehabilitation, as Twitter user @thomasschulzz noted this month.
"The most e/acc thing we can do is fix San Francisco. Fix San Francisco and we will create a breeding ground of ideas that will usher in a Golden Age like never before seen in history," he tweeted.
For now, the idea is still fairly fringe and it's uncertain how much traction it will get. But one thing does seem certain: as long as AI remains front and center, so too will effective accelerationism.