e/acc (Effective Accelerationism)

About

E/acc is an acronym for the phrase Effective Accelerationism, which is an ideology and movement that draws from Nick Land's theories of accelerationism to advocate for the belief that artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) will lead to a post-scarcity technological utopia. The name is also a play on Effective Altruism. E/acc communities on X were primarily fostered on Twitter Spaces, with e/acc manifestos being shared using the newsletter platform Substack.

History

Accelerationism is an ideology primarily derived from conservative British philosopher Nick Land's theories about capitalism and societal collapse. Early camps in "/acc" communities on Twitter were comprised of "left/acc," "right/acc" and "u/acc (unconditional/acc) teams on Twitter.

The earliest known reference to e/acc or effective accelerationism is from May 31st and June 1st, 2022, with Twitter users @zetular, @BasedBeff and @creatine_cycle taking credit for "inventing a new philosophy with the boys" (seen below).^[1][2]

On May 31st, "swarthy" or @zestular published a Substack newsletter defining effective accelerationism at length, defending the concept from "misconceptions" about it being the same as effective altruism or right/accelerationism.^[3] On July 10th, 2022, Beff Jezos and Bayelord posted another Substack article detailing various tenets of e/acc.^[4]

Online Reactions

In consecutive months, e/acc ideas and their proponents gained moderate virality on Twitter. Some discussions around the ideology revolved around people weighing the benefits and risks of AGI as proposed by e/acc proponents. Other discussions revolved around people criticizing the notion of e/acc as irrational heresy.

On June 19th, 2022, Twitter^[5] user @Andr3jH posted a tweet joking about their proposition for the e/acc flag, gathering over 200 likes in 10 months (seen below, left). On July 28th, Twitter^[6] user @utsu__kun posted a tweet about e/acc as well (seen below, right).

On October 16th, 2022, Twitter^[7] user @bryancsk posted a tweet about e/acc, gathering over 170 likes in six months (seen below, left). On October 17th, Twitter^[8] user @growing_daniel also posted a tweet about e/acc, gathering over 200 likes in six months (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References