14 ms·

"Accelerationism" is an overdue corrective to years of gloom

118 points by jseliger 3y ago

Danielben 3y ago
[flagged]
quantified 3y ago
The investor class makes the most money when there is a new growth area. Ergo, getting more of new growth areas is in their interest, and it makes sense to be putting new echoes into the chamber, maybe some will escape to the wider world. Perhaps AI will be as impactful as splitting the atom, who can tell.
JohnFen 3y ago
> [...] but to widespread public concerns about the risks posed by the tech industry at large. Effective accelerationists worry that these concerns have become so entrenched that they threaten to extinguish the light of tech itself. Those "years of gloom" (which aren't very many years -- has everyone forgotten when the tech industry was widely seen in optimistic terms?) have been brought on by the behavior of the tech industry itself, in large part because of the misapplication of the idea "move fast and break things" (which is, unless I'm misunderstanding, the very essence of e/acc that this article discusses). Our industry has been breaking a lot of things that people don't want broken, then tends to shame people for being upset about that. The problem isn't some inherent fear of tech itself, it's a (supportable) fear of the tech industry and what other things it may damage as time goes on. If the industry wants to assuage these fears, the solution isn't to move even faster and break even more things, it's to start demonstrably acting in a way that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  There is no possible path for advancement that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear. It never worked that way in the past, and it won't now.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Tech is like a fission reactor: powerful, elegant, delivering value through leverage, but requires strong controls and protections (moderators, containment) for humans so it doesn’t ruin us all. People worry about AI paperclip maximizing, but Tech is already that in some ways (find or build moats, blitz scaling, no concerns for the harm incurred). It’s just fuzzy cohorts of tech workers and management doing the paperclip maximizing, for comp and shareholder value respectively. Not much different than AI reward functions.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes, but there's a critical difference now. Now, the tech industry breaks many things at an unprecedented pace, and largely doesn't offer a reasonable replacement for the things that have been broken. People can only handle a limited amount of loss within a given period of time before they start pushing back hard against further loss and consider those causing them harm to be forces of evil. There's also another factor that the tech industry is largely blind to: tech people tend to think that "we know best" and that pushing our ideas on the general public against their will is a Good Thing. But it's not a Good Thing, it's a Bad Thing. Another thing we need to be doing is allying with the general public rather than dictating to them.
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      Who is pushing anything on the public? The tech industry wouldn't exist in the form that it does now except that it gives people something they want, not the other way around. Disruption from tech advancement is caused by tech changes displacing existing industries and it hurts the people currently making money from those industries. But to be against that disruption you would have to believe that those people have some sort of right to make that money and continue doing the things that make them those profits when the public wants the more efficient tech. So really it's the anti tech people who are pushing things on the public. E.g. people often complain about Amazon displacing small retailers, but really it's just that given the choice, most people choose Amazon.
      - 3y ago
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I agree mostly, though I think the "break things" bit got twisted and misunderstood. We were supposed to break; limits, barriers, status-quos, ossified ideas... Instead we broke; treasured social norms, privacy, mutual respect and dignity. There's a difference between benevolent innovation and reckless iconoclasm. I think it started the day Peter Thiel gave money to Mark Zuckerberg.
  - trgn 3y ago
    I understood it much smaller fwiw. As long as you can add useful features really quickly, it's fine if your website crashes every once in a while.
    - Kye 3y ago
      Yep. It came from Facebook, and it was changed to favor stability while moving fast almost a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History >> '"On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure".[40][41] The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."[42]"'
    - __s 3y ago
      Last night I changed some solid-js ui code to replace mutating game in ui state with updating ui state with mutated clones (cloning is efficient & shares most data, optimizations made for AI efficiency long ago) ofc, with these stale game references around, I soon got reports of broken things: targeting was broken, pvp was broken, fade out animations were broken A few hours later these issues were resolved. The players are used to these things happening sometimes. It's fine since the stakes are low. It's just a game after all. & being free, the active playerbase understands that they're QA
    - chmod600 3y ago
      And, crucially, you'd generally be around to help fix the website.
- reissbaker 3y ago
  IDK, I think a big part of the "years of gloom" was an official (but secret) NYTimes policy of only publishing negative stories about tech, as confirmed by Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. [1] 1: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
  - xrd 3y ago
    I just wonder if that can be extended to every. single. news. organization. They all do it. Doom gets more clicks than happy talk.
    - IncreasePosts 3y ago
      They wouldn't need a specific policy for tech if that was their general policy
      - pixl97 3y ago
        This depends if 'tech' said something like "screw the media, we're going to replace it with media2.0". That could take you from the normal doom and gloom (that can be dispelled with the right ad buys) to a hated enemy that must be destroyed at all costs.
    - reissbaker 3y ago
      IMO the Verge actually strikes a pretty good balance of writing about tech like the old days of Wired, while still being willing to call out bad behavior when they see it.
    - __loam 3y ago
      I mean we're acting like tech is just a net good with this kind of attitude. Monopolies and surveillance hurt people. Facebook caused a genocide in Myanmar. They wouldn't publish anything if it was all good.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Here’s the real funny bit: the whole “doom gets more clicks” thing is itself a consequence of the ultra-competitive attention marketplace that tech created. Sure it’s been “if it bleeds it leads” for a long time, but not until digital advertising has it been “if you’re not bleeding profusely 24/7 then you are going bankrupt.”
- captainbland 3y ago
  Ultimately it's the purse string holders who want to move fast and break things. Investors are the people who would rather try to shove ten figures into undercutting taxi markets everywhere to try to build a monopoly. Imagine if instead they'd put that into cancer treatments and diagnostics or novel forms of energy generation. Move fast and break things is shit compared to building new things at the centre of human need and at the edge of human understanding.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    Uber is a particularly silly example due to the sheer volume of money they burned, but it did prove that the taxi medallion monopolies were suppressing market opportunities. I don’t believe that the founders or VCs really understood the available market potential, but it was 100% a farce that “ride sharing” was a meant for “sharing”. Taxis (incl Uber) are bigger now than they have ever been. Add in Uber Eats and co., and there’s so much new demand for similar services. Even Amazon flex has shown that car based services have unmet demand and utility. The taxi industry should have been broken down. It was good for humans to have better access to the market, even if it wasn’t cancer treatment. There’s tons of money going to research cancer. New energy opportunities are a huge source of investment already, let’s not pretend the existence of Uber foreclosed the opportunity to cure cancer.
- neltnerb 3y ago
  I'm confused by their idea that insider criticism and self-reflection is a sign of collapse rather than maturity in this case. If professional architects find value in working together to develop and adhere to standards before building a city (which I'd consider "technology") it is not a warning sign that architecture will cease to exist. Gene drives, nuclear weapons, space organisms getting to earth, self-reflection on potential risks is not a sign of failure unless your only goal is to move. We only get to make some of these choices, as an entire global civilization, once. AI is not exactly in that category but it's sure not a sign of failure that the people making it are actually considering the results before just making decisions with world-scale impacts. It slows things down but that is important when decisions only get to be made once and cannot be reversed. That was less the case with earlier tech, so I don't understand the surprise at the difference in scrutiny over time.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > self-reflection on potential risks is not a sign of failure unless your only goal is to move. (my emph) The root of this is a deflated concept of "progress". Progress is a vector. It has a magnitude and a direction. And it has a context that entirely defines its value. You would not be happy if the doctor told you you have a progressive illness. But "progress" gets used carelessly as a bare noun.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Every time we try to do something somebody is in the way. We can have reasonable conversations with these people but when their arguments deevole to screaming, yelling about Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve or throwing food at paintings you have to ask yourself how long before you push the (metaphoric) peddle to the metal and keep going. We can’t deal on an adult basis with children, no matter their age, how long do we have to let them stop us?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Log_out_ 3y ago
  Mafia with chips extracting maximum value from every vital industry comes to mind.. Tech has shown its cards and people hate it for a reason.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
This other thread [0] "Easy to criticise, hard to create" and my remark here [1] about the demise of market research have something in common with this topic. It's about the gravity of the mob. Risk taking in business (which is now being called "acceleration" AFAICS) is about the courage not to think about "what everybody wants". I observe it's really hard for the SV tech mindset to escape that gravity. Downvote me all you like for saying such uncomfortable things. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346374 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39344991 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39344991
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  "Finding what the market wants and providing it" only worked when the market had wants, and wants are finite. Once those are all taken care of, everything past that is engineered desire, which is where consumer culture comes into play. You don't need to explain to someone why they want food. Of course they want food, they're hungry. You do need to explain to them why they want a pizza covered in gold leaf. You don't need to explain why they want a car: they want to get around in the United States, and a car is more or less mandatory: you need to explain why they want a $100,000 SUV that gets worse fuel economy than a comparable van while holding less cargo and has such terrible visibility there's a non-insignificant chance they will run over and kill one of their own children with the thing. You don't need to convince them they want a smart phone, you need to convince them they want a new smart phone that's 11% faster than the old one even though their current one works fine. Tons and tons of business, not even remotely isolated to the tech sector, has nothing at all to do with meeting consumer demand or fulfilling wants in the market; it has to do with building slightly different versions of products that already exist, and then spending millions if not billions of dollars so you can scream at the market's ear as loud as possible until they think that voice is coming from inside their own heads, and they'll buy it to make it shut up. And then repeat.
- bdw5204 3y ago
  If you ask people what they want, they're going to tell you they want a slightly better version of whatever they already have. That's if you're lucky. If you're not, they're going to tell you they want whatever they think everybody else wants or they want what they think they're supposed to want or they want what you want them to want. If you're going to innovate, you ultimately have to go out on a limb and predict what people will want. That means high risk/high reward products not the kind of consistent reliable profits that Wall Street wants.
mistrial9 3y ago
as a contrast to "accelerate" let's consider "addiction" cycles. Business-driven tech seeks addiction cycles in consumers due to orders of magnitude larger results.
mathgradthrow 3y ago
If you're writing a nostalgic tech "thinkpiece" please be specific about what you're nostalgic for.
debacle 3y ago
In political circles, "accelerationists" believe that the demise of the US is inevitable, and that the faster it happens the better the world will be. I see similar parallels to the tech sector. Is the death of SV inevitable? If so, is the world better off if it dies quickly or slowly? Kind of a tangent to the core article, but it seems to me that we are in a large-scale transition of society in many ways, and the redemocratization of technology is a critical aspect of a bright future..
- namlem 3y ago
  That's a different type of accelerationism.
lm28469 3y ago
Accelerationism is the best way to go at it since it ensures either a quick death or a fix and not the ugly in-between we're all starting to slowly catch a glimpse of
- JohnFen 3y ago
  So in that view, accelerationism is about placing a high-stakes, binary bet that such actions will result in a utopia rather than utter destruction. But what gives those people the right to gamble with the lives of the rest of us in that way? The entire line of thinking is, in my view, not only horribly egotistic and authoritarian, but antagonistically so.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    Oh yes it is, but apparently that's what we, as a specie, want for now
    - Vecr 3y ago
      Have you looked at recent opinion polls? e/acc is polling at -51 and various "AI doom" positions are polling strong into the positive percentages.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I don't think that we, as a specie, want this at all. I think a subset of powerful people want it.
pfdietz 3y ago
My attitude about safety of AI is this: if AI is an existential risk dangerous enough to justify draconian measures, we're ultimately fucked, since those measures would have to be perfect for all future times and places humans exist. Not a single lapse could be allowed. And it's just not plausible humanity could be that thorough. So, we might as well assume AI is not going to be that dangerous and move ahead.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  I guess but its similar how diplomqcy and international agreements need to be perfect forever to prevent nuclear war but so far it has worked and its worth it to keep trying.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Your first paragraph is exactly how I feel about nuclear weapons, to put it into context. I don’t think the logical conclusion from that viewpoint is that nuclear weapons aren’t that dangerous so we should just move ahead.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    I don't think nuclear weapons are the kind of existential risk that AI doomsters imagine for AI.
    - thrill 3y ago
      Other than those that have called for nuking AI datacenters.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        That presumably demonstrates they think nuclear war is less dangerous than AI.
      - PoignardAzur 3y ago
        I feel obligated to point out that nobody has argued for nuking datacenters; the most radical AI existential-safety advocates have argued for is "have a ban on advanced training programs, enforced with escalating measures from economic sanctions and embargos to, yes, war and bombing datacenters". Not that anybody is optimistic on that idea working.
bparsons 3y ago
The author lacks any context for what accelerationism is. The original idea comes from Marxists advocating for the adoption of free market capitalism as a means of bringing about the alienation of the working class, which is a necessary precondition for socialist revolution. The idea of effective accelerationism (which was a joke making fun of people like Musk and SBF) is the rapid, uncontrolled promotion of AI as a means of destroying the entire tech industry and all that surrounds it.
- m00x 3y ago
  If this is your take of e/acc, you're wildly misunderstanding it. e/acc is about building fast and making changes that benefit humanity, while pushing useless bureaucracy away. Elon Musk himself is a proponent of e/acc. It has nothing to do with AI specifically, and especially nothing to do with destruction. The core belief of e/acc is that we can solve our problems not by austerity, but by growth. Instead of limiting births and limiting technological progress, we can instead find solutions to support more people and push humanity beyond its boundaries.
  - nyssos 3y ago
    You're just describing normal techno-optimism. E/acc, as in the Beff Jezos shitposting, is openly and intensely anti-human. From the man himself: > Effective accelerationism (e/acc) in a nutshell: > Stop fighting the thermodynamic will of the universe > You cannot stop the acceleration > You might as well embrace it > A C C E L E R A T E https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-ten... where "the thermodynamic will of the universe" means endless darwinian struggle.
    - m00x 3y ago
      I don't see what is anti-human in these citations. Your interpretation of it doesn't make it fact.
      - Vecr 3y ago
dghlsakjg 3y ago
Am I the only one that associates the term "accelerationism" mostly with right-wing extremism and terrorism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Far-right_accelerationist_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Far-right_acce... If you are a techno-optimist, you should ask your AI to come up with something less associated with race war and neo-nazi ideology
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  I mostly associate the term with the original left-wing version of accelerationism (which is a little further up in the Wikipedia article you linked to). In both versions, the view is essentially that the society we have now is so bad as to be practically unredeemable, so the next best course of action is to accelerate this society's downfall so the new "good" society can be built instead. Obviously, the vision of the "good" thing that comes next is, uh, wildly different. In either case, seems very different than what proponents of e/acc are about, but in a cynical sense, not totally unrelated. The Wikipedia does include, "It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible."
  - devmor 3y ago
    e/acc seems very similar in premise to the original left wing accelerationism, but with the very important caveat that its proponents trust implicitly that whatever the current capital market decides is worthy of funding will somehow be the appropriate technology to accelerate.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      e/acc is firmly based on far right wing accelerationism of Nick Land (a blatant racist https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1707443031803363432 https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1707443031803363432 ). e/acc founder has cited him as has Marc Andreesen in his "manifesto."
keiferski 3y ago
It's a bit funny, a bit annoying, and a bit scary how these e/acc people don't seem to understand the slightest thing about Nick Land's philosophy, which is ultimately where the term accelerationism came from. Probably because it's extremely dense, filled with "Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis", and because Land himself is hard to follow or understand. He gets described as a neoreactionary, which is pretty accurate to my reading, but...it definitely has little to do with, quoting from the article: “Do something hard. Do it for everyone who comes next. That’s it. Existence will take care of the rest.” I am by no means an expert or huge fan of Land, but he's definitely more along the lines of, "the machines are going to eat everything and there's basically nothing you can do about it." So, in some sense, this is just another round of "economic elites co-opting someone else's culture." Edit: I did some searching on Twitter and found this great quote, which really does sum it up: > E/ACC is a fitting end to Accelerationism. After having been passed around by dissident intellectuals and online deviants it can finally settle into retirement as another kitschy pastel MS Powerpoint Californian grindset aesthetic stripped of all its substantial insights. https://twitter.com/augureust/status/1691893969678913692 https://twitter.com/augureust/status/1691893969678913692
- ultra_nick 3y ago
  Actually, the e/acc community has stated it rejects Nick Land's more recent work. If you read older posts, you'll find the earlier e/acc members got started with Fanged Noumena.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Interesting. I don’t doubt that the earliest online people were familiar with it, but I am extremely doubtful that the big names dropped in the article have even heard of Land.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
I wish they would have explained what the original Accelerationism actually means instead of just giving it a quick nod: >“Accelerationism is unfortunately now just a buzzword,” sighed political scientist Samo Burja, referring to a related concept popularized around 2017. Accelerationism is a political reaction that basically works like this: when faced with any kind of dilemma, choose the option that is the most progressively destructive. The idea is that society & institutions are so tainted, that the only way to fix it is to continue knocking down all those boundaries and Chesterton's Fence's in order to effect some kind of institutional collapse that's being headed toward anyway. Why slowly implement policies that spell our doom when we can implement them fast - accelerate! That's the idea. And they should have mentioned that in the article, because the contrast with the Globo Tech notion of "Effective Accelerationism" is just good irony.
adverbly 3y ago
Can we just stop with these absolute positions already? You can justify horrible atrocities if you strongly believe in extreme outcomes. Effective altruism, accelerationism, doomers... All of these mindsets are toxic for the same reason that extreme religious stances are toxic. Believing that the world is going to end or that it's going to reach salvation or whatever extreme outcome you feel like, and then using that to justify short-term atrocities is not the way. Stop putting infinity in your forecasts. It breaks everything. We have been down this path before many times and it never ends well.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  > You can justify horrible atrocities if you strongly believe in extreme outcomes. Yeah.. that’s the goal.
sp527 3y ago
Beff is a late-stage capitalism incarnation of the useful idiot, sucking off the landed technogentry in hopes of securing a life raft in the economic apocalypse e/acc is attempting to usher in. When 89% of US stock equity is owned by the top 10%, you know that e/acc is a sclerotic and thinly veiled “fuck the poors” ideology being perpetrated by precisely that well-insulated 10%, who have little to nothing to fear from a world where labor value goes asymptotically towards zero.
- astrange 3y ago
  > When 89% of US stock equity is owned by the top 10%, you know that e/acc is a sclerotic and thinly veiled “fuck the poors” ideology You forgot to control for "older people own more stocks because they spent more time saving for retirement".
  - sp527 3y ago
    https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...
AlexandrB 3y ago
There's a combination of exploitation and lack of humility that marks recent tech. On the one hand, a lot of newer tech treats you like some kind of tech peasant: no sideloading, endless dialogs that have no option to say "no", arbitration clauses, no ability to fix your own devices, little or no customer support, etc. On the other hand you have proclamations about what the future will look like that turn out to be terribly wrong: blockchain, metaverse, VR, self-driving truck convoys, etc. After such an atrocious track record of tech leaders being completely wrong about what "the next big thing" is, why should anyone trust these people and why are they so certain they're "accelerating" in the right direction? Edit: I miss the era when tech companies treated their users as customers, not as marks to be manipulated for the purpose of profit maximization.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
tmaly 3y ago
50 year cycle? All of the recent breakthroughs seem to be happening on every shortening cycles.
Animats 3y ago
"Or, perhaps, wanting to be regulated is a subconscious way for tech to reassure itself about its central importance in the world, which distracts from an otherwise uneasy lull in the industry." There is that. There hasn't been a must-have consumer electronics thing since the smartphone. 2019 was supposed to be the year of VR. Fail. 2023 was supposed to be the year of the metaverse. Fail. Internet of Things turned out to be a dud. Self-driving cars are still struggling. All those things actually work, just not well enough for wide deployment. LLM-based AI has achieved automated blithering. It may be wrong, but it sounds convincing. We are now forced to realize that much human activity is no more than automated blithering. This is a big shakeup for society, especially the chattering classes.
- PoignardAzur 3y ago
  Holy crap, I'm realizing it's been 4 years since Half Life Alyx. I really wish it had been the first of many.
- ctrw 3y ago
  LLMs and generative AI are on par with the spreadsheet for impact on office work. It's just that most people who be obsolete are in denial, again.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Are they? While I love LLMs, I don't find them extremely useful for much more than faster API documentation.
    - nirav72 3y ago
      Or wasting time going through the crap that google throws up in its search results these days. I find it faster to just ask GPT when I forget some command argument. LLMs have basically replaced the web search engine for me in most day to day cases now.
      - 15457345234 3y ago
browningstreet 3y ago
e/acc is just the logical +1 follow-up to hodl. a tech subculture: creates its own acronym, posts a lot of self-referential coded messages, add exclamation marks, ignore those who decry it as annoying. no whining no complaining no critique. helps to get a tech alpha to engage/retweet you. tolerate a little discourse but mostly exclaim. make sure everyone knows you think X rulez. pro$it.
rglover 3y ago
It's chasing a high that no longer exists in the current epoch and labeling it a virtue. The party is over. The cheap money is gone (it was wasted on a lot of bad ideas and bad implementations of good ideas). The DJ has left. The coke guy is gone. And now you have to pay the carpet guy to get the stains out.
tech_ken 3y ago
> If it becomes paralyzed by a fear of the future, it will never produce meaningful benefits This kind of straw-manning seems like the main game of e/acc types. Bin all criticism as gloom and fear, rather than actually engaging with the substance of it. Nobody (or at least virtually nobody) who criticizes SV culture is "afraid of the future", they're pissed off at a couple decades of shitty management grown fat, greedy, and stupid off ZIRP dynamics. Rather than face the obvious failures of the industry and its leaders, they'd rather pretend it's the kids who are wrong and blithely continue stepping on rakes.
beepbooptheory 3y ago
Truly a "first as tragedy.." kind of situation here. The kind of hyperstitional violence of taking "accelerationism" and turning it into a tech-bro feel good huddle is almost too on the nose. Nick Land is now just one more CEO promising the future. This is, at once, exactly what the CCRU warned us about and brought about. The lemurians are in full force, the time is nigh! http://www.ccru.net/index.htm http://www.ccru.net/index.htm
PheonixPharts 3y ago
"Years of gloom"? For my entire career in tech, anything that isn't the most extreme of optimistic view points has been relegated to unnecessary and destructive pessimism. Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". We had a very necessary correction in this industry but people couldn't handle it and just completely lost their minds on AI. I say this as someone who works in AI very close to the metal (i.e. not just calling an API all day). While these tools are very impressive, when I talk to people outside of my area it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore. Even the AI "doomers" are, by my view, extreme optimistic because they don't see, or maybe just don't want to see, how much all of the public discourse on this subject is largely smoke and mirrors to drive yet another tech bubble. Personally I think this is just mass hysteria created by the increasing awareness of the fundamentally unsustainable nature of industrial society. Reading this article is like listening to some hallucinating maniac on the streets of SF scream at you about things that really aren't there.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  The view from outside of tech is very much "We went from having no AI to having ChatGPT overnight! Imagine how soon the future will be here, we could have a breakthrough for AI at breakfast tomorrow and talking companion robots the day after that!" And the doomers just add on "and the week after that we'll all be dead!" I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit.
  - orand 3y ago
    > I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit. Unless you explain this statement, most people here are likely to dismiss everything you have to say on the topic of AI.
    - spencerflem 3y ago
hot_gril 3y ago
"Bezos admits that his initial announcement was a bit of a 'shitpost.'" Honestly how I feel about anyone mentioning "accelerationism." It's not an ideology or movement, it's just a way to act sophisticated about trolling online.
5cott0 3y ago
the only thing they've accelerated is the posting
nickpinkston 3y ago
I agree with most techno-optimism, but e/acc is a pretty braindead version of it unfortunately. Nadia's article here seems like a much more reasonable version of this philosophy that embraces political solutions instead of naive pure tech ones. By contrast, "Beff Jezos" (Guillaume Verdon) says he wants to be a "cultural engineer" [1, Lex podcast], but when recently challenged by Lex Friedman and Connor Leahy [2], he comes across like a dorm room libertarian who has an immature idea of what he's saying, not someone with something new to say, which I think is at least partially him trying to maintain a kayfabe [3] for the e/acc community (like a nichy techno Trump) and partially him actually being a true believer. My critique [4] of e/acc, Jezos, Andreessen's thread is essentially that these philosophy-esque ideas are actually (unlike what they believe) not very ambitious in that they in practice advocate for: "don't touch the system, it works for me", and never mention (or seemingly talk about) how this tech can actually have massive impacts for regular people, or how we can use the gov't and broad prosperity and access to tech (and tech-enabled hyper-democracies) to further accelerate the best version of our vision for the future. These guys are like the Underpants Gnomes of futurism: Step 1: Build superhuman technology without any safeguards. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit for me. I at least expect "Profit for everyone" at step 3, but taking a try at Step 2 is what really would impress me. [1] Beff on Lex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU [2] Beff v. Connor Leahy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zxi0xSBOaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zxi0xSBOaQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe [4] https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947 https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947
m00x 3y ago
I've been in e/acc since the beginning, so I'll add a bit of context of how I interpret the ideology. The core belief of e/acc is that we can solve our problems not by austerity, but by growth. Instead of limiting births and limiting technological progress, we can instead find solutions to support more people and push humanity beyond its boundaries. Historically, it's the mindset that worked the best for countries, but it does have a limit. Recently it got very culty and I since distanced myself from it. I don't think now is a good time to judge it since many people have their own understanding of it. You can just slap (e/acc) on your Twitter username and somehow become a voice for the "movement". I don't think people should take it so seriously, it's just a way of thinking and everyone has their version of it. Just like effective altruism, people will use the label for their own agenda.
seltzered_ 3y ago
It's worth noting that Nadia Asparouhova is married to Delian Asparouhov ( https://foundersfund.com/team/delian-asparouhov/ https://foundersfund.com/team/delian-asparouhov/ ), a partner at Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. She previously wrote https://nadia.xyz/climate-tribes https://nadia.xyz/climate-tribes last year and there were critiques of her essay such as https://twitter.com/cognazor/status/1607509056499101696 https://twitter.com/cognazor/status/1607509056499101696
mlsu 3y ago
Any article about e/acc that does not mention cryptocurrency is missing something fundamental. It smells funny, because it is. People in e/acc claim to be "building" something fundamental that will change the world, change the future, etc. They are the heroes of the story. But if you are actually building something, you are silent. Why? Because you're BUSY! Just like cryptocurrency: if crypto is going to revolutionize payments, and make things seamless and interoperable, and, and and... then why do you have to spend hours a day blabbering on about it? The answer, of course, is because talking is easier than building, and with talking, it's all about you. Talking about cryptocurrency and then getting rich for talking is a lot easier than actually building it to make it useful. Likewise with this e/acc stuff. Most of the LLM startups are basically worthless appendages on the original tech. A pump and dump for VC money that just wants to be part of the next thing. Just like sh&tcoins were a worthless appendage on the original tech, and were similarly pumped. I'll give them this, LLM are a lot more useful than crypto. What's kind of sad about it all is that I actually think a proactive movement to build is a good idea. Let's build! How about with light rail, walkable buildings, bike lanes -- yknow, the things that actually improve people's lives? instead of "quantum qubit agentic neurographic models" or whatever else is being shilled?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
RobotToaster 3y ago
Are we talking about the same accelerationism that Nick Land professed?
- nyssos 3y ago
  Yes and no: e/acc twitter is fundamentally unserious and so has no problem simultaneously endorsing both full-blown "capital is an awakening alien god that will kill us all (and that's a good thing)" Landianism and conventional "AI will help us cure cancer" techno-optimism. What they really believe, if anything, is anyone's guess.
kibwen 3y ago
Accelerationism is just rebranded Futurism, which was an early incarnation of the 1920s Italian Fascist movement. If Marc Andreessen is on board, that's a dead giveaway that it's shit.
llm_trw 3y ago
>The outcome of the U.S. presidential election not only shocked legislators, who set about searching for answers from tech companies they believed were partly to blame for Donald Trump’s victory; it also marked the turnover of the Obama administration, which had enthusiastically supported tech’s optimism. The fact that blame is required for the result of an election is kind of mind blowing. It's a throw away sentence yes, but it's also a very nice summation of the attitudes the Wests mandarins. Trumps first victory happened because Obama threw the working class under the housing repossession bus. Trumps second victory will be because Biden threw the working class under the inflation bus. Blaming tech is a very easy way of those people not having to look at the mirror and facing the desolation they have created.
advael 3y ago
The whole AI risk vs accelerationism debate strikes me as an intra-bubble squabble between two groups of people who want to define an overton window about the tech industry that focuses on the tech part Personally, I don't think the widespread negative turn public opinion of the tech industry has taken has all that much to do with the tech. It's way more about the industry part. The business models of tech are defined by our current economic moment, one of rising inequality and governments that are increasingly complicit in supporting profit over human well-being. I don't personally think technology can be inherently good or bad, but what we do with it matters, and what we're doing right now is, in aggregate, reinstating a feudal society wherein the whims of powerful rentiers increasingly screw with people's lives. As far as I can tell EA and e/acc are just a distraction from this reality
cyanydeez 3y ago
wat.. do they know in the non IT realm, accelartionism refers to far right nazi groups believing the only way to bring back far right ideals is to accelerate conflicts with mainstream politics? ... and it's generally working, to the detriment of stability.
casebash 3y ago
EA here: "Discussing the risks and opportunities in front of us intelligently, e/accs believe, is a sign of a flourishing civil society" Except e/acc has made a massive contribution to lowering the standard of discourse. Beff talked intelligently on Lex and they are much more reasonable on Twitter Spaces, but on the Twitter timeline itself 90% of their posts are some combination of trash/propaganda/insults. "Rather, their moral vision is one where more people — including and especially those who consider themselves hands-off today — actively engage with emerging technology and identify concrete plans for its development and stewardship, rather than reflexively backing away from what they don’t understand" Again, e/acc seems to be all about "build, build, build!" which stands in stark contrast to taking a step back and thinking carefully about the impacts of what you're doing before you do it. "Discussing the risks and opportunities in front of us intelligently, e/accs believe, is a sign of a flourishing civil society." Again, this isn't accurate. E/acc is very much not about balance and also very much not about about discussing risks intelligently vs. almost always criticising the people making the claims instead of engaging in discussion on a technical level. ... Criticism aside, this article paints a picture of e/acc which, while not representative of the movement as it exists, is something which it could choose to grow into.
hughesjj 3y ago
Was this article ai generated?
atleastoptimal 3y ago
The problem is that from 1980 to 2000, and even 2000 to 2010, there was a reliable "upgrading" on a regular basis of the average person's quality of life due to tech. Since then that upgrading has halted, and whatever benefit marginal improvements in consumer tech has bequeathed most people has been overshadowed by inflationary pressures on housing, cost of living, etc. which make it seem things are only getting worse. This draws anyone to one of two conclusions: 1. Things are just going to keep getting worse or stay the same. Preserve what we can, don't be a bad person, etc 2. It's up to us to make things better, our dreams a reality, etc 2 is a much more attractive general ideology for young people, and anyone not well situated financially.
Astraco 3y ago
I'm tired, boss

118 points by jseliger 3y ago

[flagged]

The investor class makes the most money when there is a new growth area. Ergo, getting more of new growth areas is in their interest, and it makes sense to be putting new echoes into the chamber, maybe some will escape to the wider world. Perhaps AI will be as impactful as splitting the atom, who can tell.

JohnFen 3y ago

> [...] but to widespread public concerns about the risks posed by the tech industry at large. Effective accelerationists worry that these concerns have become so entrenched that they threaten to extinguish the light of tech itself. Those "years of gloom" (which aren't very many years -- has everyone forgotten when the tech industry was widely seen in optimistic terms?) have been brought on by the behavior of the tech industry itself, in large part because of the misapplication of the idea "move fast and break things" (which is, unless I'm misunderstanding, the very essence of e/acc that this article discusses). Our industry has been breaking a lot of things that people don't want broken, then tends to shame people for being upset about that. The problem isn't some inherent fear of tech itself, it's a (supportable) fear of the tech industry and what other things it may damage as time goes on. If the industry wants to assuage these fears, the solution isn't to move even faster and break even more things, it's to start demonstrably acting in a way that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear.

fallingknife 3y ago
There is no possible path for advancement that doesn't threaten people and the things they hold dear. It never worked that way in the past, and it won't now.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Tech is like a fission reactor: powerful, elegant, delivering value through leverage, but requires strong controls and protections (moderators, containment) for humans so it doesn’t ruin us all. People worry about AI paperclip maximizing, but Tech is already that in some ways (find or build moats, blitz scaling, no concerns for the harm incurred). It’s just fuzzy cohorts of tech workers and management doing the paperclip maximizing, for comp and shareholder value respectively. Not much different than AI reward functions.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Yes, but there's a critical difference now. Now, the tech industry breaks many things at an unprecedented pace, and largely doesn't offer a reasonable replacement for the things that have been broken. People can only handle a limited amount of loss within a given period of time before they start pushing back hard against further loss and consider those causing them harm to be forces of evil. There's also another factor that the tech industry is largely blind to: tech people tend to think that "we know best" and that pushing our ideas on the general public against their will is a Good Thing. But it's not a Good Thing, it's a Bad Thing. Another thing we need to be doing is allying with the general public rather than dictating to them.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    Who is pushing anything on the public? The tech industry wouldn't exist in the form that it does now except that it gives people something they want, not the other way around. Disruption from tech advancement is caused by tech changes displacing existing industries and it hurts the people currently making money from those industries. But to be against that disruption you would have to believe that those people have some sort of right to make that money and continue doing the things that make them those profits when the public wants the more efficient tech. So really it's the anti tech people who are pushing things on the public. E.g. people often complain about Amazon displacing small retailers, but really it's just that given the choice, most people choose Amazon.
    - 3y ago
nonrandomstring 3y ago
I agree mostly, though I think the "break things" bit got twisted and misunderstood. We were supposed to break; limits, barriers, status-quos, ossified ideas... Instead we broke; treasured social norms, privacy, mutual respect and dignity. There's a difference between benevolent innovation and reckless iconoclasm. I think it started the day Peter Thiel gave money to Mark Zuckerberg.
- trgn 3y ago
  I understood it much smaller fwiw. As long as you can add useful features really quickly, it's fine if your website crashes every once in a while.
  - Kye 3y ago
    Yep. It came from Facebook, and it was changed to favor stability while moving fast almost a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History >> '"On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure".[40][41] The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."[42]"'
  - __s 3y ago
    Last night I changed some solid-js ui code to replace mutating game in ui state with updating ui state with mutated clones (cloning is efficient & shares most data, optimizations made for AI efficiency long ago) ofc, with these stale game references around, I soon got reports of broken things: targeting was broken, pvp was broken, fade out animations were broken A few hours later these issues were resolved. The players are used to these things happening sometimes. It's fine since the stakes are low. It's just a game after all. & being free, the active playerbase understands that they're QA
  - chmod600 3y ago
    And, crucially, you'd generally be around to help fix the website.
reissbaker 3y ago
IDK, I think a big part of the "years of gloom" was an official (but secret) NYTimes policy of only publishing negative stories about tech, as confirmed by Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. [1] 1: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
- xrd 3y ago
  I just wonder if that can be extended to every. single. news. organization. They all do it. Doom gets more clicks than happy talk.
  - IncreasePosts 3y ago
    They wouldn't need a specific policy for tech if that was their general policy
    - pixl97 3y ago
      This depends if 'tech' said something like "screw the media, we're going to replace it with media2.0". That could take you from the normal doom and gloom (that can be dispelled with the right ad buys) to a hated enemy that must be destroyed at all costs.
  - reissbaker 3y ago
    IMO the Verge actually strikes a pretty good balance of writing about tech like the old days of Wired, while still being willing to call out bad behavior when they see it.
  - __loam 3y ago
    I mean we're acting like tech is just a net good with this kind of attitude. Monopolies and surveillance hurt people. Facebook caused a genocide in Myanmar. They wouldn't publish anything if it was all good.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Here’s the real funny bit: the whole “doom gets more clicks” thing is itself a consequence of the ultra-competitive attention marketplace that tech created. Sure it’s been “if it bleeds it leads” for a long time, but not until digital advertising has it been “if you’re not bleeding profusely 24/7 then you are going bankrupt.”
captainbland 3y ago
Ultimately it's the purse string holders who want to move fast and break things. Investors are the people who would rather try to shove ten figures into undercutting taxi markets everywhere to try to build a monopoly. Imagine if instead they'd put that into cancer treatments and diagnostics or novel forms of energy generation. Move fast and break things is shit compared to building new things at the centre of human need and at the edge of human understanding.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Uber is a particularly silly example due to the sheer volume of money they burned, but it did prove that the taxi medallion monopolies were suppressing market opportunities. I don’t believe that the founders or VCs really understood the available market potential, but it was 100% a farce that “ride sharing” was a meant for “sharing”. Taxis (incl Uber) are bigger now than they have ever been. Add in Uber Eats and co., and there’s so much new demand for similar services. Even Amazon flex has shown that car based services have unmet demand and utility. The taxi industry should have been broken down. It was good for humans to have better access to the market, even if it wasn’t cancer treatment. There’s tons of money going to research cancer. New energy opportunities are a huge source of investment already, let’s not pretend the existence of Uber foreclosed the opportunity to cure cancer.
neltnerb 3y ago
I'm confused by their idea that insider criticism and self-reflection is a sign of collapse rather than maturity in this case. If professional architects find value in working together to develop and adhere to standards before building a city (which I'd consider "technology") it is not a warning sign that architecture will cease to exist. Gene drives, nuclear weapons, space organisms getting to earth, self-reflection on potential risks is not a sign of failure unless your only goal is to move. We only get to make some of these choices, as an entire global civilization, once. AI is not exactly in that category but it's sure not a sign of failure that the people making it are actually considering the results before just making decisions with world-scale impacts. It slows things down but that is important when decisions only get to be made once and cannot be reversed. That was less the case with earlier tech, so I don't understand the surprise at the difference in scrutiny over time.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > self-reflection on potential risks is not a sign of failure unless your only goal is to move. (my emph) The root of this is a deflated concept of "progress". Progress is a vector. It has a magnitude and a direction. And it has a context that entirely defines its value. You would not be happy if the doctor told you you have a progressive illness. But "progress" gets used carelessly as a bare noun.
tomjen3 3y ago
Every time we try to do something somebody is in the way. We can have reasonable conversations with these people but when their arguments deevole to screaming, yelling about Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve or throwing food at paintings you have to ask yourself how long before you push the (metaphoric) peddle to the metal and keep going. We can’t deal on an adult basis with children, no matter their age, how long do we have to let them stop us?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Log_out_ 3y ago
Mafia with chips extracting maximum value from every vital industry comes to mind.. Tech has shown its cards and people hate it for a reason.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

This other thread [0] "Easy to criticise, hard to create" and my remark here [1] about the demise of market research have something in common with this topic. It's about the gravity of the mob. Risk taking in business (which is now being called "acceleration" AFAICS) is about the courage not to think about "what everybody wants". I observe it's really hard for the SV tech mindset to escape that gravity. Downvote me all you like for saying such uncomfortable things. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346374 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39344991 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39344991

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
"Finding what the market wants and providing it" only worked when the market had wants, and wants are finite. Once those are all taken care of, everything past that is engineered desire, which is where consumer culture comes into play. You don't need to explain to someone why they want food. Of course they want food, they're hungry. You do need to explain to them why they want a pizza covered in gold leaf. You don't need to explain why they want a car: they want to get around in the United States, and a car is more or less mandatory: you need to explain why they want a $100,000 SUV that gets worse fuel economy than a comparable van while holding less cargo and has such terrible visibility there's a non-insignificant chance they will run over and kill one of their own children with the thing. You don't need to convince them they want a smart phone, you need to convince them they want a new smart phone that's 11% faster than the old one even though their current one works fine. Tons and tons of business, not even remotely isolated to the tech sector, has nothing at all to do with meeting consumer demand or fulfilling wants in the market; it has to do with building slightly different versions of products that already exist, and then spending millions if not billions of dollars so you can scream at the market's ear as loud as possible until they think that voice is coming from inside their own heads, and they'll buy it to make it shut up. And then repeat.
bdw5204 3y ago
If you ask people what they want, they're going to tell you they want a slightly better version of whatever they already have. That's if you're lucky. If you're not, they're going to tell you they want whatever they think everybody else wants or they want what they think they're supposed to want or they want what you want them to want. If you're going to innovate, you ultimately have to go out on a limb and predict what people will want. That means high risk/high reward products not the kind of consistent reliable profits that Wall Street wants.

mistrial9 3y ago

as a contrast to "accelerate" let's consider "addiction" cycles. Business-driven tech seeks addiction cycles in consumers due to orders of magnitude larger results.

mathgradthrow 3y ago

If you're writing a nostalgic tech "thinkpiece" please be specific about what you're nostalgic for.

debacle 3y ago

In political circles, "accelerationists" believe that the demise of the US is inevitable, and that the faster it happens the better the world will be. I see similar parallels to the tech sector. Is the death of SV inevitable? If so, is the world better off if it dies quickly or slowly? Kind of a tangent to the core article, but it seems to me that we are in a large-scale transition of society in many ways, and the redemocratization of technology is a critical aspect of a bright future..

namlem 3y ago
That's a different type of accelerationism.

lm28469 3y ago

Accelerationism is the best way to go at it since it ensures either a quick death or a fix and not the ugly in-between we're all starting to slowly catch a glimpse of

JohnFen 3y ago
So in that view, accelerationism is about placing a high-stakes, binary bet that such actions will result in a utopia rather than utter destruction. But what gives those people the right to gamble with the lives of the rest of us in that way? The entire line of thinking is, in my view, not only horribly egotistic and authoritarian, but antagonistically so.
- lm28469 3y ago
  Oh yes it is, but apparently that's what we, as a specie, want for now
  - Vecr 3y ago
    Have you looked at recent opinion polls? e/acc is polling at -51 and various "AI doom" positions are polling strong into the positive percentages.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I don't think that we, as a specie, want this at all. I think a subset of powerful people want it.

pfdietz 3y ago

My attitude about safety of AI is this: if AI is an existential risk dangerous enough to justify draconian measures, we're ultimately fucked, since those measures would have to be perfect for all future times and places humans exist. Not a single lapse could be allowed. And it's just not plausible humanity could be that thorough. So, we might as well assume AI is not going to be that dangerous and move ahead.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
I guess but its similar how diplomqcy and international agreements need to be perfect forever to prevent nuclear war but so far it has worked and its worth it to keep trying.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Your first paragraph is exactly how I feel about nuclear weapons, to put it into context. I don’t think the logical conclusion from that viewpoint is that nuclear weapons aren’t that dangerous so we should just move ahead.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  I don't think nuclear weapons are the kind of existential risk that AI doomsters imagine for AI.
  - thrill 3y ago
    Other than those that have called for nuking AI datacenters.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      That presumably demonstrates they think nuclear war is less dangerous than AI.
    - PoignardAzur 3y ago
      I feel obligated to point out that nobody has argued for nuking datacenters; the most radical AI existential-safety advocates have argued for is "have a ban on advanced training programs, enforced with escalating measures from economic sanctions and embargos to, yes, war and bombing datacenters". Not that anybody is optimistic on that idea working.

bparsons 3y ago

The author lacks any context for what accelerationism is. The original idea comes from Marxists advocating for the adoption of free market capitalism as a means of bringing about the alienation of the working class, which is a necessary precondition for socialist revolution. The idea of effective accelerationism (which was a joke making fun of people like Musk and SBF) is the rapid, uncontrolled promotion of AI as a means of destroying the entire tech industry and all that surrounds it.

m00x 3y ago
If this is your take of e/acc, you're wildly misunderstanding it. e/acc is about building fast and making changes that benefit humanity, while pushing useless bureaucracy away. Elon Musk himself is a proponent of e/acc. It has nothing to do with AI specifically, and especially nothing to do with destruction. The core belief of e/acc is that we can solve our problems not by austerity, but by growth. Instead of limiting births and limiting technological progress, we can instead find solutions to support more people and push humanity beyond its boundaries.
- nyssos 3y ago
  You're just describing normal techno-optimism. E/acc, as in the Beff Jezos shitposting, is openly and intensely anti-human. From the man himself: > Effective accelerationism (e/acc) in a nutshell: > Stop fighting the thermodynamic will of the universe > You cannot stop the acceleration > You might as well embrace it > A C C E L E R A T E https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-ten... where "the thermodynamic will of the universe" means endless darwinian struggle.
  - m00x 3y ago
    I don't see what is anti-human in these citations. Your interpretation of it doesn't make it fact.
    - Vecr 3y ago

dghlsakjg 3y ago

Am I the only one that associates the term "accelerationism" mostly with right-wing extremism and terrorism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Far-right_accelerationist_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Far-right_acce... If you are a techno-optimist, you should ask your AI to come up with something less associated with race war and neo-nazi ideology

UtopiaPunk 3y ago
I mostly associate the term with the original left-wing version of accelerationism (which is a little further up in the Wikipedia article you linked to). In both versions, the view is essentially that the society we have now is so bad as to be practically unredeemable, so the next best course of action is to accelerate this society's downfall so the new "good" society can be built instead. Obviously, the vision of the "good" thing that comes next is, uh, wildly different. In either case, seems very different than what proponents of e/acc are about, but in a cynical sense, not totally unrelated. The Wikipedia does include, "It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible."
- devmor 3y ago
  e/acc seems very similar in premise to the original left wing accelerationism, but with the very important caveat that its proponents trust implicitly that whatever the current capital market decides is worthy of funding will somehow be the appropriate technology to accelerate.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    e/acc is firmly based on far right wing accelerationism of Nick Land (a blatant racist https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1707443031803363432 https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1707443031803363432 ). e/acc founder has cited him as has Marc Andreesen in his "manifesto."

keiferski 3y ago

It's a bit funny, a bit annoying, and a bit scary how these e/acc people don't seem to understand the slightest thing about Nick Land's philosophy, which is ultimately where the term accelerationism came from. Probably because it's extremely dense, filled with "Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis", and because Land himself is hard to follow or understand. He gets described as a neoreactionary, which is pretty accurate to my reading, but...it definitely has little to do with, quoting from the article: “Do something hard. Do it for everyone who comes next. That’s it. Existence will take care of the rest.” I am by no means an expert or huge fan of Land, but he's definitely more along the lines of, "the machines are going to eat everything and there's basically nothing you can do about it." So, in some sense, this is just another round of "economic elites co-opting someone else's culture." Edit: I did some searching on Twitter and found this great quote, which really does sum it up: > E/ACC is a fitting end to Accelerationism. After having been passed around by dissident intellectuals and online deviants it can finally settle into retirement as another kitschy pastel MS Powerpoint Californian grindset aesthetic stripped of all its substantial insights. https://twitter.com/augureust/status/1691893969678913692 https://twitter.com/augureust/status/1691893969678913692

ultra_nick 3y ago
Actually, the e/acc community has stated it rejects Nick Land's more recent work. If you read older posts, you'll find the earlier e/acc members got started with Fanged Noumena.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Interesting. I don’t doubt that the earliest online people were familiar with it, but I am extremely doubtful that the big names dropped in the article have even heard of Land.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

I wish they would have explained what the original Accelerationism actually means instead of just giving it a quick nod: >“Accelerationism is unfortunately now just a buzzword,” sighed political scientist Samo Burja, referring to a related concept popularized around 2017. Accelerationism is a political reaction that basically works like this: when faced with any kind of dilemma, choose the option that is the most progressively destructive. The idea is that society & institutions are so tainted, that the only way to fix it is to continue knocking down all those boundaries and Chesterton's Fence's in order to effect some kind of institutional collapse that's being headed toward anyway. Why slowly implement policies that spell our doom when we can implement them fast - accelerate! That's the idea. And they should have mentioned that in the article, because the contrast with the Globo Tech notion of "Effective Accelerationism" is just good irony.

adverbly 3y ago

Can we just stop with these absolute positions already? You can justify horrible atrocities if you strongly believe in extreme outcomes. Effective altruism, accelerationism, doomers... All of these mindsets are toxic for the same reason that extreme religious stances are toxic. Believing that the world is going to end or that it's going to reach salvation or whatever extreme outcome you feel like, and then using that to justify short-term atrocities is not the way. Stop putting infinity in your forecasts. It breaks everything. We have been down this path before many times and it never ends well.

the_only_law 3y ago
> You can justify horrible atrocities if you strongly believe in extreme outcomes. Yeah.. that’s the goal.

sp527 3y ago

Beff is a late-stage capitalism incarnation of the useful idiot, sucking off the landed technogentry in hopes of securing a life raft in the economic apocalypse e/acc is attempting to usher in. When 89% of US stock equity is owned by the top 10%, you know that e/acc is a sclerotic and thinly veiled “fuck the poors” ideology being perpetrated by precisely that well-insulated 10%, who have little to nothing to fear from a world where labor value goes asymptotically towards zero.

astrange 3y ago
> When 89% of US stock equity is owned by the top 10%, you know that e/acc is a sclerotic and thinly veiled “fuck the poors” ideology You forgot to control for "older people own more stocks because they spent more time saving for retirement".
- sp527 3y ago
  https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...

AlexandrB 3y ago

There's a combination of exploitation and lack of humility that marks recent tech. On the one hand, a lot of newer tech treats you like some kind of tech peasant: no sideloading, endless dialogs that have no option to say "no", arbitration clauses, no ability to fix your own devices, little or no customer support, etc. On the other hand you have proclamations about what the future will look like that turn out to be terribly wrong: blockchain, metaverse, VR, self-driving truck convoys, etc. After such an atrocious track record of tech leaders being completely wrong about what "the next big thing" is, why should anyone trust these people and why are they so certain they're "accelerating" in the right direction? Edit: I miss the era when tech companies treated their users as customers, not as marks to be manipulated for the purpose of profit maximization.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

tmaly 3y ago

50 year cycle? All of the recent breakthroughs seem to be happening on every shortening cycles.

Animats 3y ago

"Or, perhaps, wanting to be regulated is a subconscious way for tech to reassure itself about its central importance in the world, which distracts from an otherwise uneasy lull in the industry." There is that. There hasn't been a must-have consumer electronics thing since the smartphone. 2019 was supposed to be the year of VR. Fail. 2023 was supposed to be the year of the metaverse. Fail. Internet of Things turned out to be a dud. Self-driving cars are still struggling. All those things actually work, just not well enough for wide deployment. LLM-based AI has achieved automated blithering. It may be wrong, but it sounds convincing. We are now forced to realize that much human activity is no more than automated blithering. This is a big shakeup for society, especially the chattering classes.

PoignardAzur 3y ago
Holy crap, I'm realizing it's been 4 years since Half Life Alyx. I really wish it had been the first of many.
ctrw 3y ago
LLMs and generative AI are on par with the spreadsheet for impact on office work. It's just that most people who be obsolete are in denial, again.
- stavros 3y ago
  Are they? While I love LLMs, I don't find them extremely useful for much more than faster API documentation.
  - nirav72 3y ago
    Or wasting time going through the crap that google throws up in its search results these days. I find it faster to just ask GPT when I forget some command argument. LLMs have basically replaced the web search engine for me in most day to day cases now.
    - 15457345234 3y ago

browningstreet 3y ago

e/acc is just the logical +1 follow-up to hodl. a tech subculture: creates its own acronym, posts a lot of self-referential coded messages, add exclamation marks, ignore those who decry it as annoying. no whining no complaining no critique. helps to get a tech alpha to engage/retweet you. tolerate a little discourse but mostly exclaim. make sure everyone knows you think X rulez. pro$it.

rglover 3y ago

It's chasing a high that no longer exists in the current epoch and labeling it a virtue. The party is over. The cheap money is gone (it was wasted on a lot of bad ideas and bad implementations of good ideas). The DJ has left. The coke guy is gone. And now you have to pay the carpet guy to get the stains out.

tech_ken 3y ago

> If it becomes paralyzed by a fear of the future, it will never produce meaningful benefits This kind of straw-manning seems like the main game of e/acc types. Bin all criticism as gloom and fear, rather than actually engaging with the substance of it. Nobody (or at least virtually nobody) who criticizes SV culture is "afraid of the future", they're pissed off at a couple decades of shitty management grown fat, greedy, and stupid off ZIRP dynamics. Rather than face the obvious failures of the industry and its leaders, they'd rather pretend it's the kids who are wrong and blithely continue stepping on rakes.

beepbooptheory 3y ago

Truly a "first as tragedy.." kind of situation here. The kind of hyperstitional violence of taking "accelerationism" and turning it into a tech-bro feel good huddle is almost too on the nose. Nick Land is now just one more CEO promising the future. This is, at once, exactly what the CCRU warned us about and brought about. The lemurians are in full force, the time is nigh! http://www.ccru.net/index.htm http://www.ccru.net/index.htm

PheonixPharts 3y ago

"Years of gloom"? For my entire career in tech, anything that isn't the most extreme of optimistic view points has been relegated to unnecessary and destructive pessimism. Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". We had a very necessary correction in this industry but people couldn't handle it and just completely lost their minds on AI. I say this as someone who works in AI very close to the metal (i.e. not just calling an API all day). While these tools are very impressive, when I talk to people outside of my area it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore. Even the AI "doomers" are, by my view, extreme optimistic because they don't see, or maybe just don't want to see, how much all of the public discourse on this subject is largely smoke and mirrors to drive yet another tech bubble. Personally I think this is just mass hysteria created by the increasing awareness of the fundamentally unsustainable nature of industrial society. Reading this article is like listening to some hallucinating maniac on the streets of SF scream at you about things that really aren't there.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
The view from outside of tech is very much "We went from having no AI to having ChatGPT overnight! Imagine how soon the future will be here, we could have a breakthrough for AI at breakfast tomorrow and talking companion robots the day after that!" And the doomers just add on "and the week after that we'll all be dead!" I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit.
- orand 3y ago
  > I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit. Unless you explain this statement, most people here are likely to dismiss everything you have to say on the topic of AI.
  - spencerflem 3y ago

hot_gril 3y ago

"Bezos admits that his initial announcement was a bit of a 'shitpost.'" Honestly how I feel about anyone mentioning "accelerationism." It's not an ideology or movement, it's just a way to act sophisticated about trolling online.

5cott0 3y ago

the only thing they've accelerated is the posting

nickpinkston 3y ago

I agree with most techno-optimism, but e/acc is a pretty braindead version of it unfortunately. Nadia's article here seems like a much more reasonable version of this philosophy that embraces political solutions instead of naive pure tech ones. By contrast, "Beff Jezos" (Guillaume Verdon) says he wants to be a "cultural engineer" [1, Lex podcast], but when recently challenged by Lex Friedman and Connor Leahy [2], he comes across like a dorm room libertarian who has an immature idea of what he's saying, not someone with something new to say, which I think is at least partially him trying to maintain a kayfabe [3] for the e/acc community (like a nichy techno Trump) and partially him actually being a true believer. My critique [4] of e/acc, Jezos, Andreessen's thread is essentially that these philosophy-esque ideas are actually (unlike what they believe) not very ambitious in that they in practice advocate for: "don't touch the system, it works for me", and never mention (or seemingly talk about) how this tech can actually have massive impacts for regular people, or how we can use the gov't and broad prosperity and access to tech (and tech-enabled hyper-democracies) to further accelerate the best version of our vision for the future. These guys are like the Underpants Gnomes of futurism: Step 1: Build superhuman technology without any safeguards. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit for me. I at least expect "Profit for everyone" at step 3, but taking a try at Step 2 is what really would impress me. [1] Beff on Lex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU [2] Beff v. Connor Leahy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zxi0xSBOaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zxi0xSBOaQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe [4] https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947 https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947

m00x 3y ago

I've been in e/acc since the beginning, so I'll add a bit of context of how I interpret the ideology. The core belief of e/acc is that we can solve our problems not by austerity, but by growth. Instead of limiting births and limiting technological progress, we can instead find solutions to support more people and push humanity beyond its boundaries. Historically, it's the mindset that worked the best for countries, but it does have a limit. Recently it got very culty and I since distanced myself from it. I don't think now is a good time to judge it since many people have their own understanding of it. You can just slap (e/acc) on your Twitter username and somehow become a voice for the "movement". I don't think people should take it so seriously, it's just a way of thinking and everyone has their version of it. Just like effective altruism, people will use the label for their own agenda.

seltzered_ 3y ago

It's worth noting that Nadia Asparouhova is married to Delian Asparouhov ( https://foundersfund.com/team/delian-asparouhov/ https://foundersfund.com/team/delian-asparouhov/ ), a partner at Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. She previously wrote https://nadia.xyz/climate-tribes https://nadia.xyz/climate-tribes last year and there were critiques of her essay such as https://twitter.com/cognazor/status/1607509056499101696 https://twitter.com/cognazor/status/1607509056499101696

mlsu 3y ago

Any article about e/acc that does not mention cryptocurrency is missing something fundamental. It smells funny, because it is. People in e/acc claim to be "building" something fundamental that will change the world, change the future, etc. They are the heroes of the story. But if you are actually building something, you are silent. Why? Because you're BUSY! Just like cryptocurrency: if crypto is going to revolutionize payments, and make things seamless and interoperable, and, and and... then why do you have to spend hours a day blabbering on about it? The answer, of course, is because talking is easier than building, and with talking, it's all about you. Talking about cryptocurrency and then getting rich for talking is a lot easier than actually building it to make it useful. Likewise with this e/acc stuff. Most of the LLM startups are basically worthless appendages on the original tech. A pump and dump for VC money that just wants to be part of the next thing. Just like sh&tcoins were a worthless appendage on the original tech, and were similarly pumped. I'll give them this, LLM are a lot more useful than crypto. What's kind of sad about it all is that I actually think a proactive movement to build is a good idea. Let's build! How about with light rail, walkable buildings, bike lanes -- yknow, the things that actually improve people's lives? instead of "quantum qubit agentic neurographic models" or whatever else is being shilled?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

RobotToaster 3y ago

Are we talking about the same accelerationism that Nick Land professed?

nyssos 3y ago
Yes and no: e/acc twitter is fundamentally unserious and so has no problem simultaneously endorsing both full-blown "capital is an awakening alien god that will kill us all (and that's a good thing)" Landianism and conventional "AI will help us cure cancer" techno-optimism. What they really believe, if anything, is anyone's guess.

kibwen 3y ago

Accelerationism is just rebranded Futurism, which was an early incarnation of the 1920s Italian Fascist movement. If Marc Andreessen is on board, that's a dead giveaway that it's shit.

llm_trw 3y ago

>The outcome of the U.S. presidential election not only shocked legislators, who set about searching for answers from tech companies they believed were partly to blame for Donald Trump’s victory; it also marked the turnover of the Obama administration, which had enthusiastically supported tech’s optimism. The fact that blame is required for the result of an election is kind of mind blowing. It's a throw away sentence yes, but it's also a very nice summation of the attitudes the Wests mandarins. Trumps first victory happened because Obama threw the working class under the housing repossession bus. Trumps second victory will be because Biden threw the working class under the inflation bus. Blaming tech is a very easy way of those people not having to look at the mirror and facing the desolation they have created.

advael 3y ago

The whole AI risk vs accelerationism debate strikes me as an intra-bubble squabble between two groups of people who want to define an overton window about the tech industry that focuses on the tech part Personally, I don't think the widespread negative turn public opinion of the tech industry has taken has all that much to do with the tech. It's way more about the industry part. The business models of tech are defined by our current economic moment, one of rising inequality and governments that are increasingly complicit in supporting profit over human well-being. I don't personally think technology can be inherently good or bad, but what we do with it matters, and what we're doing right now is, in aggregate, reinstating a feudal society wherein the whims of powerful rentiers increasingly screw with people's lives. As far as I can tell EA and e/acc are just a distraction from this reality

cyanydeez 3y ago

wat.. do they know in the non IT realm, accelartionism refers to far right nazi groups believing the only way to bring back far right ideals is to accelerate conflicts with mainstream politics? ... and it's generally working, to the detriment of stability.

casebash 3y ago

EA here: "Discussing the risks and opportunities in front of us intelligently, e/accs believe, is a sign of a flourishing civil society" Except e/acc has made a massive contribution to lowering the standard of discourse. Beff talked intelligently on Lex and they are much more reasonable on Twitter Spaces, but on the Twitter timeline itself 90% of their posts are some combination of trash/propaganda/insults. "Rather, their moral vision is one where more people — including and especially those who consider themselves hands-off today — actively engage with emerging technology and identify concrete plans for its development and stewardship, rather than reflexively backing away from what they don’t understand" Again, e/acc seems to be all about "build, build, build!" which stands in stark contrast to taking a step back and thinking carefully about the impacts of what you're doing before you do it. "Discussing the risks and opportunities in front of us intelligently, e/accs believe, is a sign of a flourishing civil society." Again, this isn't accurate. E/acc is very much not about balance and also very much not about about discussing risks intelligently vs. almost always criticising the people making the claims instead of engaging in discussion on a technical level. ... Criticism aside, this article paints a picture of e/acc which, while not representative of the movement as it exists, is something which it could choose to grow into.

hughesjj 3y ago

Was this article ai generated?

atleastoptimal 3y ago

The problem is that from 1980 to 2000, and even 2000 to 2010, there was a reliable "upgrading" on a regular basis of the average person's quality of life due to tech. Since then that upgrading has halted, and whatever benefit marginal improvements in consumer tech has bequeathed most people has been overshadowed by inflationary pressures on housing, cost of living, etc. which make it seem things are only getting worse. This draws anyone to one of two conclusions: 1. Things are just going to keep getting worse or stay the same. Preserve what we can, don't be a bad person, etc 2. It's up to us to make things better, our dreams a reality, etc 2 is a much more attractive general ideology for young people, and anyone not well situated financially.

Astraco 3y ago

I'm tired, boss