e/acc Is the New Spontaneous Private Deregulation
Effective Accelerationism Is Extreme Progress at All Costs
Starting around mid-July I began seeing ‘e/acc’ around various social feeds and in peoples’ user names, but it wasn’t until I saw it on a laptop sticker that I took the time to research what it actually meant.
Turns out e/acc is shorthand for ‘Effective Accelerationism’. A recent Business Insider article written by Hasan Chowdhurry summarized it as a belief that:
“…in a technological age, the powers of innovation and capitalism should be exploited to their extremes to drive radical social change — even if that means completely upending today's social order.”
As a self-defined libertarian, driver personality, with some anarchism leanings, this sounds pretty f*&king great to me! After all, sidestepping laws and regulations that encumber traditional competitors or industries is how we’ve gotten a few incredibly life-changing services like Pay-Pal, AirBnB, and Uber. This earlier tamer version of making progress even if it meant bending a few rules was coined ‘Spontaneous Private Deregulation’ by Benjamin Edelman and Damien Geraldine in their April 2016 Harvard Business Review article entitled ‘Spontaneous Deregulation: How to Compete With Platforms That Ignore The Rules’. At the time, they were advising more traditional companies on how to compete with these new breed up “unsafe” competitors and focused on maintaining the social order that e/acc seeks to upend with it’s progress.
I would suggest that the more aggressive philosophy of e/acc was founded & formalized with the below Tweet on June 20, 2022 and the subsequent Substack post ‘Notes on e/acc principles and tenants’ published under the pseudonyms of Beff Jezos and Bayeslord. They self-described it as a “physics” and “first-principles” explanation of the movement and its importance.
Upon reading, you immediately get the sense that the authors are cognitive heavyweights and likely educated at an elite university (MIT is my guess). They effortlessly link thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, physics, consciousness, economics, and political science all in one unifying justification of e/acc as desired (and required) for continued progress of our species.
They acknowledge capitalism and it’s players (e.g., corporations) as meta-organisms with their own form of intelligence, which seeks to evolve, maximize efficiency of resources, and constantly experiment on how to out-compete other meta-organisms (companies) to ensure their survival. They move on to, rightfully, pointing out that top-down control (whether via government, regulation, or archaic management structures) is not fault-tolerant, slows the dynamic/adaptation malleability of the system, and ultimately discourages experimentation, adoption, and extraction of utility (the positive outcomes for people & society) from the meta-organism.
They end with a simple and logical ask: Stop fighting the thermodynamic will of the universe (progress and distributed control), you can’t stop it even if you try (no entity in history yet has), so you might as well embrace it and join us in our mission to accelerate human progress.
Right now it seems like most proponents are pro General Artificial Intelligence (GIA) folks, from CEOs down to front-line engineers and experimenters, who don’t want government regulation and fearmongers to slow development in the field prematurely (amen!). Something I also support as I believe this research & development is not only the next productivity unlocking development in our economy but also the main battle field in an arms race with China which has immense geopolitical & national security consequences, but I digress.
The moment an idea or philosophy catches the imagination and support of someone as powerful, influential, wealthy, and famous as Marc Andreessen (who recently added e/acc to his X handle and is spending most of his posting energy on it lately), it’s likely to have some staying power. Marc Andreessen is currently the General Partner of Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with over $35 billion of assets under management, who invests in technology companies at both early-stage startups and growth stage companies. In this role, he’s very likely to put his money where his mouth is and invest in founders & companies that share this philosophy. His influence, however, extends far beyond financial might. As the inventor of the web browser (Mosaic which became the more familiar Netscape) which went public and was eventually acquired by AOL; he experienced a journey that put him on the cover of Time Magazine and made him a hero to legions of engineers and future founders. For a demonstration of this, look at the spike in search traffic that occurred when he changed his X handle to include e/acc in early July from Google Trends:
Where e/acc goes and what becomes of it is unknown. As for right now, it remains an obscure philosophy with powerful proponents. Even as I write this, general interest in the topic is waining as demonstrated in the search traffic chart above. I believe, if nothing more than a thought experiment or contrast mechanism, it deserves a mention in future textbooks & classrooms across faculties from business, to philosophy, to engineering.
Perhaps as broader society comes face-to-face with the impacts to their daily lives from the recent breakthroughs in General Artificial Intelligence, Superconductors(?), particle-theory physics experimentation on the ‘God particle’ & ‘anti-matter’, CRISPR gene-editing technology & gene-drive, etc., ideas like e/acc in a simplified form will become part of the public discourse around the risks vs rewards of rapid experimentation and innovation.
In the end, the biggest practical outcome of this is that it could politicize a segment of the population who has yet to pick a side in a two-party system and whom have no clear home in either party. The party that supports unbridled capitalism has a major distrust of big tech, and the party where Silicon Valley folks mostly call home are regulation’s biggest fan boys. Where do proponents of e/acc call home?
I’ll close by saying I now consider myself an evangelist of this movement. It is hard to argue with the altruistic aims of e/acc, it’s battle cry of “leave us alone to experiment”, and relationship back to a free market of ideas & capital as the decider of if it’s risks & outcomes are of value or not.
Further Reading:
Business Insider Article on e/acc by Hasan Chowdhury: https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-tech-leaders-accelerationism-eacc-twitter-profiles-2023-7
Harvard Business Review Article on Spontaneous Deregulation: https://hbr.org/2016/04/spontaneous-deregulation
Marc Andreessen Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen
Andreessen Horowitz Website: https://a16z.com/
Original Substack Post By Beff Jezos, Bayeslord, and Creatine Cycle: