If you’re as online as your average VC, you might have noticed the founder who once sported photos of bored apes on X now has a new profile badge of honour: “e/acc”.
Don’t feel left out by not knowing; the mysterious abbreviation simply stands for “effective accelerationism”, a techno-optimist vision of the world that encourages faster innovation and deplores anything that might slow down progress.
This subculture has been inspired by Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the influential VC firm Andreessen Horowitz — specifically his 5,000-word manifesto from October, which shouted out to everyone from Prometheus to Nietzsche.
“Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die… It’s time to be a Techno-Optimist. It’s time to build. Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism.”
And, in Europe — a continent that’s known for a much less voracious appetite for risk among investors and policymakers — this rallying cry is intoxicating.
“He [Andreessen] is a very famous tech luminary and public figure and I think one of the things that was attractive [about the manifesto] was that in the AI space, there’s a lot of doomerism about AGI taking over the world,” says Peadar Coyle, cofounder of London-based AI audio generation startup AudioStack and card-carrying member of the e/acc community.
“The whole e/acc thing is, I think, a kind of a reaction to that… Technology can be a fundamentally positive thing and I think a lot of the journalistic press, and the tabloid press in particular, forgets that.”
Do you believe in magic?
Coyle sees effective accelerationism as “a general sense that technology can solve a lot of our problems, in the sense of social problems, problems like climate change etc.”, and as a way of banding together with his fellow innovators.
Another European entrepreneur who’s found inspiration in the e/acc movement is Arturo de Pablo, the Madrid-based founder of an AI startup that’s still in stealth mode.
“I believe in an abundant future with technology,” he says. “The problems are going to get real, but we can solve them.”
He uses the example of the EU’s legislation on AI that will attempt to put guardrails on the companies that develop powerful new AI models, calling the regulation “complete nonsense”.
“You can’t stop the creation of more powerful models, regardless of regulation. As long as we keep investigating and researching, we'll find the solution along the way,” he says.
“Effective acceleration is the concept of, ‘Go and build it. Don't think about regulation, don't think about safety. Just experiment, just play and build new models, new technologies, because we will find out how to control this later on.’”
There’s an element of religiosity to comments like this: a kind of faith that we needn’t worry about the possible downsides of technology, as technology itself will inevitably serve up the solutions. The e/acc movement follows in the footsteps of “Effective Altruism” — a philosophy around the best ways to “do good”, made famous, and then infamous, by its own spiritual apostle Sam Bankman-Fried.
And, like every religion, e/acc needs a gospel.
“We lift our mobile phones and we order a cab, that's magic. We get food delivered, we have robots. In less than a year, we produced a Covid-19 vaccine,” says Coyle. “These are magnificent, magnificent, magical, positive things.”
Lessons from the past
When asked about some of the more negative collateral impacts that society has seen from technology — be it social media’s impact on kids’ mental health, or Big Tech’s alleged misuse of personal data — the effective accelerationists like to look to history for lessons.
“Did we have these attitudes towards General Electric in the 80s, or the Ford Motor Company in the 50s or 60s?” Coyle asks. “There is a wee bit of ‘whataboutism’ there… but why should we be treating them [Big Tech companies] differently than we were treating their predecessors?”
Coyle believes there’s an element of defensiveness from journalists that explains this hostility towards technology, as companies like Google and Meta have upended the media and advertising industry: “The media can see their business models being attacked and their power being attacked.”
De Pablo looks back on the birth of the internet as a way to see today.
“The internet was the revenue of the working class, right? Because people from nowhere could actually start learning cool things and building things,” he says. “AI is creating a similar moment now and we are stopping that momentum and trying to regulate it instead.”
A European way
Some might argue that the gulf between the working classes and the economic elite has never been greater than in the modern age of the internet, and some in Europe’s e/acc movement do want to see more of a balance between risk and opportunity.
“The EU does take it slower at times, but it's also more thoroughly regulated and I think this is actually a strength. Say what you want about the EU’s AI Act, but it brings regulatory clarity on how to behave,” says Erik Kannike, chief strategy officer at Estonian defence tech startup SensusQ.
He’s trying to coin a new iteration of Andreessen’s techno-optimist movement — European Acceleration, or eu/acc for short — which takes issues like data privacy seriously, while calling for smarter regulation.
“With GDPR, implementation-wise there's many things that could be done better. When you build a startup — definitely compared to the US — you have to spend more time thinking about how you store personal information,” he says. “But in the end, that's a good thing, right? The fact that you are able, as a citizen, to have an understanding of who has your data.”
This isn’t to say that Europe should be smug about its track record on innovation, according to Hannike. He believes there’s a huge amount to be improved, including more political support for nuclear power, greater digitalisation of public bureaucracy and greater access to capital, all with the aim to make it easier for young, innovative startups.
The gulf in opinion between members of the e/acc movement in Europe, on issues like the AI Act, shows that Andreessen’s big, techno-optimist vision might never truly take hold in Europe in the way it can in Silicon Valley.
And, in a world where the accelerating pace of change often feels dizzying, some people might just find that reassuring.
