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.

I hope you enjoy!