A former Google engineer and the founder of stealth AI startup Extropic, is behind the Twitter account leading the “effective accelerationism” movement sweeping Silicon Valley.
At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.”
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When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It's like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.”
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On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”
In its reaction against both EA and AI safety advocates, e/acc also explicitly pays tribute to another longtime Silicon Valley idea. “This is very traditional libertarian right-wing hostility to regulation," said Benjamin Noys, a professor of critical theory at the University of Chichester and scholar of accelerationism. Jezos calls it the “libertarian e/acc path.”
At least the Italian futurists were up front about their agenda.
“We’re trying to solve culture by engineering,” Verdon said. “When you're an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system."
Reading Nudge to engineer the 'Volksschädling' to board the trains voluntarily. Dusting off the old state eugenics compensation programs.
even more horrifying — they see culture as a system of equations they can use AI to generate solutions for, and the correct set of solutions will give them absolute control over culture. they apply this to all aspects of society. these assholes didn’t understand hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy or any of the other sci fi they cribbed these ideas from, and it shows
It really does illustrate the way they see culture not as, like, a beautiful evolving dynamic system that makes life worth living, but instead as a stupid game to be won or a nuisance getting in the way of their world domination efforts