E/acc is Silicon Valley's response to all your negativity

• Get ready to hear a whole lot more about effective accelerationism – (e/acc).
• The obscure theory has a simple mission: fight against those slowing down tech's progress. 
• Guillaume Verdon, an e/acc leader, believes now is the time to spread an "optimism virus."

If you aren't overflowing with dopamine at the mere thought of technology, AI, and innovation yet, there's a guy in Silicon Valley who wants to change that for you in 2024.

Meet Beff Jezos (no, that's not a misspelling).

Beff Jezos is several things. For one, he's an ex-Googler and physicist whose real-world name is Guillaume Verdon. More importantly, he's a founding member of the effective accelerationism movement.

E/acc, as it's known online, represents an obscure but growing movement that has made progress — specifically accelerated technological progress — its moral mission.

To date, the movement has won over well-known figures in technology from billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. Many of e/acc's proponents are venture capitalists, founders, and engineers who would happen to benefit financially from technology's accelerated progress.

In an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast released last week, Verdon described his ambitions for e/acc: to have a "viral optimistic movement."

"We're pushing for entropy, novelty, disruption, malleability, speed," he said.

Silicon Valley has, of course, always been defined by its urge to innovate as fast as possible. It was Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg who made the "move fast and break things" mantra so popular.

So why the need for e/acc now? In Verdon's view: Enemies of progress seem to be everywhere now, so it's time to fight them.

"We're trying to bring balance to the force, the forces of constraint versus the entropic force," he said. "We created this movement to bring balance."

E/acc's enemies

Silicon Valley leaders have grown increasingly vocal in recent years about forces — mostly social or governmental — that they see as being detrimental to growth and optimism.

Take Elon Musk and one of his main bugbears: the "woke mind virus."

Since his takeover of Twitter, now known as X, the billionaire has been vocal about this catch-all phrase and his quest to eradicate it.

Though Musk hasn't quite explained what he means by the "woke mind virus," it's clear that he thinks of it as something antithetical to progress, or his version of it.

In an interview with Bill Maher last year, for instance, he described it as anything that is "anti-meritocratic and results in the suppression of free speech." Elsewhere, he has folded in corporate focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as part of the "woke mind virus." He has also suggested his progressively-minded daughter, who he says refuses to see him, has been infected by the virus.

The self-described free speech tsar said "the woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters," just a month after taking charge of Twitter.

Now — Elon Musk has distanced himself from the e/acc movement, telling its fans that we "need to be carful [sic] with this stuff." But it's very clear that e/acc is a fan of Musk, and derives some of its philosophies and attitudes from his.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an investor in Musk's deal to acquire X, meanwhile penned a 5,000-word missive to address another kind of mental virus that he thinks has gotten in the way of progress this decade: "pessimism."

In his techno-optimism manifesto, published in October, Andreessen suggested pessimism was an enemy facilitated by institutions through initiatives like "sustainability," "tech ethics," and "social responsibility."

"Our enemy is stagnation. Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness. Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism. Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition," he wrote.

E/acc's first big hurdle

One area of technology where e/acc adherents are trying to push forward is AI.

Worries from academics, ethicists, journalists, and regulators about the safety of AI could kill something as significant as open-source AI, they claim. They refer to these collective doubters disparagingly as "decels" — wanting to decelerate progress.

In a post on X on Thursday, Andreessen, who at one time put "e/acc" in his bio, called out the "AI safety movement" for attempting an "astroturf" tactic in their attempt to get open-source large language models banned.

Andreessen dinged Anthropic, whose Claude model rivals GPT-4 and which describes itself as an "AI safety company," for imposing what he saw as restrictive use terms on researchers and developers.

It's unlikely that the e/acc movement will just linger on AI, however.

Andreessen and co. have grown tired of what they saw as growing negativity towards progress, exacerbated by the pandemic, multiple wars, an economic crisis, and political uncertainty.

Expect 2024 to be Silicon Valley's year of the e/acc positivity virus.