E/acc rising

Michelle Santiago Cortés on identity labels for technologists.

The blue-check tech world cycles through principles and ideologies at the rate of the fast fashion market. As one season gives way to the next, effective altruism (EA) gives way to effective accelerationism, or e/acc. The effective accelerationism “manifesto” explains that the engine of technocapitalism “cannot be stopped” and that “going back is not an option.” It claims to be rooted in the second law of thermodynamics wherein “the universe itself is an optimization process creating life which constantly expands.” The accelerationist element comes in when it describes market forces and technology as the two things guaranteed to evolve beyond our comprehension. The solution? To throw ourselves into building systems of stewardship that ensure the survival of, not just human consciousness, but whatever consciousness might come of this continued expansion.  

E/acc calls itself a leaderless movement but the formerly anonymous @BeffJezos is its most recognizable figure. Under anonymity, @BeffJezos had been a prime vector of e/acc through memes, partially thanks to his 67.1k Twitter following, and canonical e/acc texts on Substack dating back to July 2022. But Forbes just revealed the person behind @BeffJezos: His name is Guillaume Verdon, a former Google quantum computing engineer and AI hardware startup founder. Verdon tells Forbes that he is “just a gentle Canadian” and that the intensity of his online persona, @BeffJezzos, is “what gets algorithmically amplified.” Nonetheless, his new offshoot of techno-optimism has found its way into the bios and display names of tech world celebrities like Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan in the form of a simple, “e/acc.”  

There is e/acc the non-ideology (so the canonical material insists) and there is e/acc the label to be found in Twitter bios and a growing cluster of internet profiles. You can think of it as a symptom of the very-online urge to embrace increasingly niche labels: There are at least seven forks or sub-labels within e/acc alone, each representing its own variance or nuance. This adds to an already dense ecosystem of techno-philosophical labels that include the much-publicized EA community, AI doomers (who think AI advancement will bring a tragic end to humanity), decels (de-accelerationists/de-growthers), safetycels (those who advocate for a safety-first approach to technological advancement) and many more. It’s hard not to laugh, when it’s all so easily compared to “Tumblr girls playing with new genders,” as one Tweet put it. Or as another Twitter user said, “pronouns for tech people.” If you ask me, the Tumblr girls had the more revolutionary and radical pursuit of the two.

Daniel Bashir, a machine language engineer who is also on the editorial board of The Gradient, a platform committed to thorough reporting on AI research, noticed the label appearing on more and more Twitter profiles a few months ago. “People who feel really aligned with the movement tie their identities very strongly to their statuses as ‘builders’ or founders,” he says. Based on the Twitter profiles sporting “e/acc” in the names or bios, many are the kind of followed-by-Grimes Silicon Valley blue-checks you’d expect. But many more are just regular users, hoping to perhaps group themselves in with the protagonists of technocapitalism, like Andreessen and Tan. “It's been interesting to see it grow from what seemed like a fairly small subculture to one with a very loud voice,” Bashir notes, adding that, “it seems like there are a lot of founders/builders out there who espouse the e/acc mindset.”

Adjunct Professor of Design and Media Theory Ruby Justice Thelot, told the Boys Club podcast that “identity labels are a really big part of it.” Thelot remarked that just like when you go to college and are likely to name your institution in your social media bios, people are moved to align themselves with broader communities or ideas that reflect well on them: “People want to be proud of the things they are doing and they want to be associated with a larger positive movement.” When it comes to actors in the tech world specifically, labels like e/acc are additionally seductive because they offer “a path to presenting this identity wrapper to say ‘we’re doing something really good and that we have a common enemy’.” In e/acc’s case, doomers and safetycels. 

Not all opinions need to become identities. Bashir questions the long-term utility of so many labels, “this is again a problem of slapping labels on different viewpoints that maybe sort of cluster together, and that's possibly also helpful for categorization, but I think people can also just have opinions on things without saying ‘I'm an effective pragmatist,’ whatever that means.” 

And so as labels and micro-ideologies metastasize, old terms become bloated and over-nuanced and new terms are introduced, without much change to the core ideas. That seems to be the case with e/acc, which presents as innovative and futuristic some of the dustiest of Western aspirations: Capitalism encoded as a force of nature, enshrined in technological development and sanctioned by the symmetry of progress and the certainty acceleration affords. “I think inevitability is a really key aspect of a lot of this thinking and, to me, it speaks to a very particular narrative of technological progress that feels kind of ahistorical,” Bashir adds. 

The use of these labels follows the very principle at the core of e/acc: As we move along the vector of growth and progress, forms–from terms like e/acc to consciousness itself–expand into unrecognizability. (As we speak, I suspect Grimes is carefully considering the many forks within the e/acc space, perhaps crafting her own sublabel, probably one that includes an “x” and some numbers.) If e/acc’s response to this growth is to launch itself towards building and “to maximize the probability of the technocapital singularity, and subsequently, the ability for emergent consciousness to flourish,” it might need a short-term strategy for the accelerating bloat of its namesake label.

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