e/acc is leaderless

init

Welcome to the e/acc substack.

Some thoughts.

e/acc has no leaders. It is designed to be robust to the attack vectors prevalent in our world. Journalism, mob rule, cancellation, and capture by simple-minded and virally memetic partisan extremist ideologies, etc. We respect anonymity.

e/acc is not right or left wing. We don’t want to see the world spiral into oblivion. This is not the accelerationism your friends on reddit are worried about. We’re optimistic about the future of technology and civilization, and we want others to feel the same.

There are very good reasons to believe that the memetics of the fashionable intellectual doomer era have been harmful to individuals, culture, and progress. We align with accelerationism from the perspective of recognizing the awesomeness of the forces guiding our world, of the civilizational thermodynamic process we’re a part of.

There is a robustness to the current system which individuals and small groups are unlikely to be able to disrupt. This requires a certain acceptance on the part of the technocratically inclined. You are always in a competition with someone else. The system is smarter than you. Excessive risk aversion comes with more than just opportunity costs — you have adversaries. There are a lot of interesting technical arguments to be had here, but we probably don’t agree with your modeling framework. Utility monsters are boogeyman found in scary stories written for children, and we’re all adults here.

We are lucky to witness history from this vantage point. And it’s true that this moment in history might be very important. As we move forward in time, our power over the universe increases. What happens in the next century could frame the future of our entire corner of the universe.

Whether we get panopticon driven techno authoritarian lock-in for a thousand centuries or more is not exactly up to any one person or group. It might just happen. But we can try to fight it by building technology in an open way, allowing the world to equilibrate at each iteration. And we must fight. We can avoid falling for the psychological trap of simple control mechanisms (“ban the scary thing”). We can build decentralized and robust modern game theoretic safety equilibria.

This future requires a radical reimagining of what it means to be human, of what society looks like, and how we coordinate ourselves.