'e/acc' – Silicon Valley's favorite obscure theory about progress at all costs
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Care to elaborate? I am completely unaware of these associations.
Though it has left-wing and right-wing variants, accelerationism argues that one should double down on capitalisim in order to destroy it.
It is obviously a niche ideology you rarely run into offline, and when you do it's generally young, mentally ill, or simply very damaged people who can't imagine life ever getting better without the world burning first.
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/uniting-for-total-collapse-the-jan...
They want to accelerate towards civil racial war in US.
Personally, it feels like a reaction to the failure of crypto (and not the recent failure; the decade-long fits and starts that keep handing them what look like wins, but that haven't actually amounted to their preferred world yet). All of those crypto bros that feel, deep in their bones, that crypto SHOULD work, if not for all of the 'luddites' holding it back, channel their energy into a more generalizeable set of principles that otherize anyone who would tell them to not chase progress, even if the only restriction is "don't do it AT ALL COSTS. Balance it with humanity."
And if your whole philosophy is "let the fire consume because fire is pure energy and how can producing pure energy be bad, in the long run?", then I imagine "accelerationism" is still a lot more marketable than "execution engine-ism", or "harvestism", or most other terms that could accurately describe the disposition.
> Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
> Land is also known for later developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment, which he named.
It’s all neo-fascism.
It's also not technology that's suspect. It's the choice of the word "accelerationism" which tends to be associated with people who wish to accelerate what they see as the inevitable collapse of the current social-economic-political system. There are people who believe doing so would usher in Communisim. There seem to be much more who believe doing so would usher in an era without "globo-homo" as they seem to like to use as short hand at the moment. You might enjoy this wikipedia section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Fascist_accele...
Then again, it could all be a massive coincidence that this is term they have chosen to use. I would expect they will certainly attract people who don't believe in coincidence, whether they want that to be the case or not.
IMO e/acc is just the SV version of Manifest Destiny and it's a self-serving philosophy for people who stand to gain billions and insulate themselves from the downsides the common-man cannot. Democratization means all citizens experience that equally - the good and the bad - but is that what's happening here?
Even when technology does get developed and shared among people quickly there's very, very good reasons we'd want to slow it down in the name of safety. Thalidomide anyone? What about chloroflurocarbons? I certainly agree that it's no good to keep technological power concentrated in the hands of the already-powerful, but to just claim that all efforts at promoting "safety" inevitability deepen inequality is facile.
The "e/acc" way of thinking is (IMO) Whig history coming from a freshman engineering major.
Most people are able to understand what is broadly meant by "technological development". It normally means stuff like camera phones and internet access and hearing aids, you're the first I've read whose mind immediately jumps to weapons of destruction. If someone noted that they'd been impressed with the technological progress of the 2000s, I wouldn't personally feel the need to smugly clarify that they don't have access to missiles, so their point is misguided. Perhaps their comment would have been clearer to folks like you with the addition of more qualifications and context to describe _exactly what_ kinds of progress is being talked about, but personally I found it very clear.
You're letting the political mask slip a bit with the inclusion of the Whig comment, by the way :)
I personally don't find someone saying "oh you know what was meant" to be a convincing argument, others may feel differently. The post made a massively overreaching claim about the universal positivity of technological development. If they meant "consumer goods should be adopted as fast as possible" then say that instead, especially if you're trying to build a life-philosophy on it. My core point is that "technological development" is an enormous concept, entailing all sorts of things. To say "more technology means more access to technology" paints over all sorts of dynamics which run counter or orthogonal to that. I'm merely pointing out one such example, there are many more if you think about it for a minute. Feel free to stay focused on the forest, but don't be surprised if you wind up unable to differentiate between a deciduous and an evergreen.
> You're letting the political mask slip a bit with the inclusion of the Whig comment, by the way :)
There's no mask, I wear my political convictions quite openly :)
If you're going to talk accurately and honestly about how technology changes the world, you need to be specific about which technologies you're referencing. We have a sort of informally agreed upon shorthand that when we discuss technology we are only talking about "the good ones."
They're saying (I think) that we need to be more rigorous than that. You can't say GPS has made the world better while ignoring cruise missiles. You can't say wikipedia makes the world better while ignoring the role of the internet in the rohingya genocides etc.
If you're using past technologies to predict the role of future ones, your thesis has to justify or at least account for the negative consequences as well.
Perfect, I literally could not have said this better myself.
There were more frequent genocides before the Internet than after. It was standard practice for conflicts in the ancient world: burn the cities, execute all the men, and take the women and children as slaves.
You might have a valid point about technology in general, but I don't think your specific examples support that point.
> Are you gonna have a committee of bureaucrats who never invented anything in their life come in and promise they will protect you from any possible downside?
This is such an absurd strawman that I almost didn't want to address it. Nobody is asking to live in the perfect nanny state, although if that's how you view everyone who disagrees with you no wonder you're into e/acc. It is both possible and extremely achievable for a government to collaborate with scientific experts to decide how and where to deploy different technologies. The fact that this process doesn't have a 100% hit-rate is emphatically not an argument for just abandoning the concept of industrial/technology regulation entirely. I personally enjoy not having industrial runoff in my groundwater or dangerous drugs available for sale in the pharmacy, and indeed believe that this type of prudence is a major contributor to the progress in human quality of life that you touted elsewhere.
edit: also how is this not it's own form of "doomerism"?? In one breath you make these wildly sweeping statements about human history and the unstoppable power of progress, and then here you state that it's basically impossible to ever make informed estimates about the consequences of our actions. It seems to me like you can only hold one of these two positions, consistently.
I mean that in order to regulate a technology you normally would develop it first, to see how it's used. EU (where I am unfortunately residing) just reached an agreement to regulate AI without any AI products originally developed here at all!
Previously they made practically illegal to develop other charging standards than USB-C.
This is "the strawman" I am talking about: regulating emerging tech into oblivion out of fear something bad may come out of it.
> the FDA
Same FDA that regulated insulin so hard they gave a practical monopoly to a producer who promptly then decided to jack up the prices? The drug prices in US are so high, buying trips to Mexico and Canada come out cheaper. This is what happens when you decimate competition.
You see a few dangers narrowly avoided by the FDA, like thalidomide, but you never see the millions dead because life-saving drugs stay tens of years in approval limbo or never get developed in the first place.
> Nobody is asking to live in the perfect nanny state
Are you sure? Because that is where the EU is clearly headed. Have you forgotten the pandemic and its unspeakable abuses? Can't you see the ever accumulating regulations? Can't you hear people asking more and more from the state to intervene while politicians are more than happy to promise anything for votes? That is why I am into e/acc.
Emphatically yes. The possible downsides are much smaller than the expected upside (as history shows) and we are really bad at predicting either in advance anyway (also as history shows). Finally, we really really really need those upsides to change our fate as a species currently one cosmic accident (meteorite, virus, nuclear escalation, etc) away from extinction.
Also even if the good guys stop, the bad guys will certainly accelerate - so in a competitive world there is really no advantage in voluntarily giving up technological development.
Yes? They are being used in the Ukraine conflict on both sides. While not SAMs, Hamas has missiles. Even North korea has a it’s own SAM system.
If the best examples you can come up with are Thalidomide and Chloroflurocarbons you aren’t really selling the danger. Both are chemistry technologies, something by which we have massively benefitted from on the whole, but can have uniquely hard to detect effects, most catagories of inventions don’t have the risks of novel toxiciy like chemistry inventions.
> Both are chemistry technologies, something by which we have absolute massively benefitted from on the whole.
But this is kind of my point. There isn't any such "thing" as "chemistry technologies", in reality it's only the individual technologies themselves which are "real". To talk about "the development of chemical technologies" you have to talk about both thalidomide and CRISPR together. Moreover, the history of this group of technologies (and the positive outcomes you refer to) are products not just of development but of the culture of safety and caution that e/acc wants to see undone. I can't see how a true empiricist could say "it's better to develop any chemical technology and release it to the public ASAP"; you've never had a true experiment and the whole problem space is full of edge-cases.
How is this not ad hoc justification at best, and "Hammer only sees nails" at worst?
Here's a Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufak...
> “Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
> It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
Maybe Varoufakis should try creating an Amazon instead of writing some book and running Greece’s economy into the ground.
We are serfs for even commenting here, by the way. This site is owned (and created) by the technofeudalists who founded YC, not by Mr Varoufakis. So what brings you here, serf on their property, if you don’t see any value in it? They are certainly not putting a gun to your head just like Amazon is not making you shop there.
Personally I think his track record is impressive, and I'd argue that helping to save an EU-level economy is at least as impressive as what Jeff Bezos has done with his life.
This is not only factually wrong, but also an ad hominem fallacy.
> We are serfs for even commenting here, by the way. This site is owned (and created) by the technofeudalists who founded YC, not by Mr Varoufakis.
We are. I don't like it any more than medieval serfs did, but I don't think you should get to blame me for it.
> So what brings you here, serf on their property, if you don’t see any value in it? They are certainly not putting a gun to your head just like Amazon is not making you shop there.
All of you fine fellow serfs have made this a fertile land for discussion, by plowing the fields of comment threads. Direct threat of violence is the most unimaginative way of exerting power and modern day feudalists avoid it in fear of awakening class consciousness after all.
It's not ad hominem to judge a critic's own track record in order to measure the weight of his words. Otherwise we'd end up listening to any little trust fund ideologues with no actual idea about how the world really works, like Marx.
Oh, and to address your earlier point:
> you fine fellow serfs have made this a fertile land for discussion
Yes, the community is where the value is. But we all congregated here and not on some free and open-source place somewhere else on the Internet. So there must also be some value added by the creators and maintainers of this place, value we recognized and built upon.
The lesson from history (and not obvious from first principles) is that it's hard to predict what technology will be good for. You have to invent it first, and let people try to use it to solve whatever problems they have in order to figure that out. Cheapness & convenience often enables new uses -- for instance, personal computers turned out to have a lot of uses that mainframe computers didn't because they were too expensive and inconvenient for regular people to fool around with.
"I can't imagine a good use for this tech, therefore it shouldn't be invented" is a perennially wrong argument.
> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
> If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum
> Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
-- Jean-Paul Marat
If we were a bit more cynical perhaps we would more accurately call those "obstacles to unconstrained profit and power".
In "The Religion of Technology" he argues that advancement through technology is completely meshed with religious myths (and not separated nor antithetical from religion), the redemption/salvation arc, attempting to become more divine through God-like powers we have gained through technology (nuclear weapons for destruction, AI for immortality).
It's a very, very interesting book from 1999 which feels much more contemporary than that.
We have to transition away from fossil fuels, but they are so intertwined with our lives it also means strong degrowth (count the times transporting was necessary to your activity today, or the number of times you touched a plastic or steel item, or just consider half your nitrogen came from an industrial Haber process column)
SV's philosophy is based on growth, and this is anathema. IMHO this is a half-conscious attempt to impose an alternative, or to shed future potential obligations.
It feels like we're in a Greek tragedy: everyone plays the role one was made to honestly play, and that makes the catastrophe inevitable.
Airbnb, same thing, but instead manipulating housing stock, causing affordability crises around the world.
Crypto is an attempt to take away monetary policy from democratically elected governments.
Twitter is a billionaire's tool to amplify far-right voices while censoring anti-billionaire sentiment.
These are just the most obvious examples.
But it's not only my personal opinions - Andreessen recently wrote a manifesto in which he cited the co-author of the fascist manifesto as one of his "patron saints".
You sound like Putin saying Ukrainians are Nazi because they vote for the west, reject his occupation and fight for their land. What?!
This is literally not true.
I think the reason a lot of us dislike e/acc is that they are also pushing back on insiders setting extremely prudent and well-reasoned limits on the negative externalities technocapitalists can unload on the rest of us.
This seems like an extremely dubious assumption, to me, especially given the extremity of the conclusions being placed upon it. Feels like a roulette player saying "well if I always double my previous bet then eventually I'll win back everything" and cracking open the family savings. Like in some extremely idealized version of the world what you're saying might make sense? But if you take even a cursory look at history it becomes abundantly clear (to me, at least) that the truth is more complicated.
I personally don't know any technology that overall was a net negative.
I agree, we could happen run across one in the future, but so far history is on our side. Also, don't forget that our species's default fate is dire. Statistically speaking our civilisation is highly likely to end where is began: on this planet.
Technology is the only change we got to change this dreadful default fate awaiting us.
To start, I think it's extremely difficult (if even possible) to assign "scores" to the outcomes of all technologies ever developed in human history. IMPO to be able to accurately/productively say "oh this has been a net positive or negative for humanity" you have to have all of history written down to begin with, which is a tall order. Anything else requires you to impute some data, so already the assessment has error bars.
Second, this is a massive survivor bias fallacy. Technologies with net negatives don't get promulgated precisely because we have a culture of safety and caution around technological development. If someone invents the InfantShredder 9000 it winds up sitting on the lab bench, because it would never in a million years get developed for serious release because it is unsafe.
> but so far history is on our side.
It is not, history is full of both blood and joy. That we haven't wiped out our species yet is an extremely low bar IMO.
> Technology is the only change we got to change this dreadful default fate awaiting us.
My personal cosmology is that death is natural, normal, and good. "Dreading" it is as silly as dreading rain. Biological systems die and their components are reused by the ecosystem: this is reality. I recognize that not everyone is on board with this, and that it's kind of a religious/spiritual take, so I don't want to belabor a useless point too much, but I do think it's worth bringing up at least once. We should aggressively pursue every quality of life improvement we can find, absolutely I support this. But should we pretend like we can somehow escape the ultimate confines of being a biological organism? I think that's delusional and distracting, personally. Much like my views on the Christian Heaven, this glorious techno-future promised by Sandhill Road strikes me as bait to get rubes in-line, rather than an actual ethical north-star. My preference is to find joy in impermanence, and focus on maximizing the human experience now, rather than play utilitarian games about possible futures; "a bird in the hand" and all that.
On the contrary, it's quite easy to judge the outcome of technological development for our species: it's about 4 billion years after first microorganisms emerged on our planet and we are having this conversation while thousands of miles apart, in the comfort of our homes, with our bellies full, well clothed, sheltered and without anybody trying to eat us. Nature left us naked in the freezing rain in a eat-or-be-eaten world. Everything else comes from technology. In a word: amazing.
> we haven't wiped out our species
We also understood the laws of the Universe and used them build rockets and supercomputers.
> My personal cosmology is that death is natural, normal, and good.
It's every individual's right to embrace a death cult. But as a civilization we can't. We have to evolve and grow beyond the tiny pocket of the Universe where we emerged, before some cosmic cataclysm (or ourselves) wipes us out. We owe it to our ancestors and our children.
> We also understood the laws of the Universe and used them build rockets and supercomputers.
Elsewhere millions starve and freeze. Elsewhen uncountable numbers of humans have suffered and died. You're free to look at your circumstances and say "worth it", but it's not clear to me why your satisfaction should be elevated to the level of universal truth, particularly when the book of humanity is far, far from concluded. I'm glad we have vaccines and the food-growing capabilities that we do, and I am emphatically in support of continuing to develop our capabilities. But making myths about the mystical capabilities of some vaguely defined "Technology" such that we are unable to even stop and ask "should we?" is religion masquerading as rationality.
> We have to evolve and grow beyond the tiny pocket of the Universe where we emerged, before some cosmic cataclysm (or ourselves) wipes us out.
We have to do nothing, we choose what we do. I choose to focus on reducing immiseration today, e/acc chooses to pursue what exactly? All I can find at the end of all this high-minded language about progress are aspersions on the motivations and purity of people who criticize the wealthy and powerful and who dare to ask that we stop dumping poison into the air and water. If we can't even resolve the (comparatively) simple issues around our climate and environment today I don't have a ton of hope for our future in the stars. But keep praying! Maybe you'll be lucky and get to be one of the Raptured.
Only millions out of 8 billions? But that is incredible progress! It used to be that not many millenia ago every single human on earth was starving and freezing. And everybody's fate was to suffer and die.
Today we have the lowest percent of humanity living in poverty ever. No, not everybody is saved, and technology has not create a paradise, but it is so much better than where we started from, we can't even compare.
> is religion, not science
And so is doomerism. I guess having fate in anything (even science and progress) can be seen like a religion. But my "religion" has delivered and is promissing to deliver more. What have other "religions" done for us?
> we can't even resolve the simple issues around our climate today
Actually we had the tech to avoid global warming since the 60's. It's called nuclear energy. It was fear and doomerism that prevented us from using it in the first place and brought us to our current situation. And now the same people who pushed us into this corner are trying their best to prevent us from finding solutions.
The manichaean straw-manning is not helpful (and is in fact one of my main points of contention here). There are clear positions between "doomerism" and "people who own tech firms should never be questioned". I'm occupying one of them, despite how you'd prefer to characterize what I'm trying to say. Please feel free to act as a religious zealot, but you have to understand that other people choose to approach science and tech policy in a more grounded fashion (ie. actually considering the material particulars around a given problem, instead of immediately kicking it up to some abstract ideology for a gut-check).
> It was fear and doomerism that prevented us from using it in the first place and brought us to our current situation.
Setting aside what I already have said about converting complex engineering questions into quasi-religious "us vs. the enemy" type statements, I would argue that it is in fact our policy choices around fossil fuel usage, as well as the wealthy oil execs who continue to insist on its harmlessness, that are actually the most "at fault" for bringing us here. Moreover, there are many non-nuclear options on the table. Some of these may (horror of horrors) require us to adjust the style of life we have grown used to in the last 5 or 6 decades. Rather than casting this as some kind of sinful violation of the historical march to progress, I think a more grounded historiography is that sometimes progress is a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of thing and that we might need to try a few options before finding the winning formula. Nuclear was a missed opportunity, for sure, and I support efforts to re-establish it as a long-term power source, but to chalk up and dismiss the entire movement for sustainability or nuclear alternatives as "doomerism" is just mind-killing, culture war nonsense. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys" in technology: there's just the tool, it's capabilities, and its costs. Sometimes the cost-benefit analysis is done poorly, sometimes it's not. Sometimes people agree on the costs and benefits, sometimes they do not. In any of these cases nobody is served by adding all this manifest destiny stuff on top of it, it only muddies the waters for people who actually have do the work of achieving technological progress.
> Today we have the lowest percent of humanity living in poverty ever
I'm excessively familiar with this point, it's the only actual empirical thing I seem to be able to find in all this e/acc discussion. Nevermind that this outcome is a product of the balanced and cautious tech development that has predominated throughout human history, what is the actual, concrete, actionable point here? That allowing VC money to do whatever it wants is going to accelerate this trend of progress? That worries about GHG emissions or concern that monocropping will lead to fragile foodsystems are somehow part of a "death cult"? Yes, humanity has made progress in history. Yes, much of this comes from technological and scientific development (as well as managerial, political, artistic, ethical, et.), but trying to extrapolate this one (very broad) observation into specific and practical recommendations for how to run a nationstate and economy I see lots of gaps that are filled in by speculation and (yes) political biases.
Here's what I believe: let's fund the sciences, let's make higher education accessible, let's share the bounty of our technological progress widely, let's make it easy for people to use their time contributing to genuine inquiry, rather than the bottom-line of a stock portfolio. If this is what you have in mind when you say "promote technological progress" then I'm 100% on-board, and we can move on to discussing how best to achieve these. But if you want to take the observation that we are no longer hunter-gatherers, and extrapolate it into the ideology that any novel invention anywhere ever is a "net good" and should under no circumstances be questioned or restrained then I'm not really sure what to say. It seems obvious to me that tools should be dealt with as they are, in the context that they operate it, but if you prefer to instead live in the world of myth and narrative that is your prerogative.
In what direction? Most of the world is only now slowly achieving the lifestyle of a middle-class Westerner in the 50s. If you think that these people are going to accept a downgrade from that, from their "dream", you are deluding yourself. One painful lessons communists learn was that human nature doesn't change and people are competitive and selfish.
> Nuclear was a missed opportunity
It wasn't the only one: GMOs and stem cells also come to mind.
> let's fund the sciences, let's make higher education accessible, let's share the bounty
I believe pretty much the same things, but we disagree on the means. I believe the way to get them is the only proven value-creation mechanism, the one that pulled mankind out of dirt: free-market capitalism.
> what is the [...] point here? That allowing VC money to do whatever it wants is going to accelerate this trend of progress?
The opposite, actually: that putting any brake on technological development (even if for completely great intentions) will delay that trend of progress to the point of endangering our survival as a species - simply because history shows us that technology is a net positive and we need every single bit of that progress to solve certain urgent civilization-ending dangers.
Well, at least on this[0] site I'm reading:
>We have no affinity for biological humans or even the human mind structure. We are posthumanists in the sense that we recognize the supremacy of higher forms of free energy accumulation over lesser forms of free energy accumulation.
I'm pretty sure that's what totalitarian groups always say? It's not an opinion that your race is less than ours, it's a FACT. These people are mad.
- Slavoj Zizek.
When you write a manifesto while tripping balls . . . .
Then last year when plans were made for multi-family homes in Atherton, Andreessen and his wife sent out a letter that multi-family homes where he lives "will massively decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and immensely increase the noise pollution and traffic".
Growth and "progress" when it's your environment and neighborhood being trampled on, government regulation and restraint when it comes to his neighborhood and property.
We can take this "movement" with the hypocrisy it is wrapped in.
Im very much in favor of yimby, but i understand personal preference as well. If someone in Venice Italy was against filling in canals, would you be similarly outraged?
I think there's a balance between not making every neighborhood a densely populated cookie cutter multi family dwelling and endless zoning permits that require you to file with dozens of environmental agencies with dubious impacts on environment.
But again, what does this have to do with e/acc or the article apart from being a lazy dunk on someone who has e/acc in their twitter profile
Vienna. Paris. I don't know about you, but they definitely feel less cookie cutter than most of California to me.
You mean the article where Andreessen's name is in the title of the article, right next to his picture?
(I am aware of the saying that sarcasm and subtlety does not carry through Internet posts. So to prevent mindless replies to the suggestion made - I am not necessarily saying to remove those restrictions, I am saying if I put an /e/acc hat on, it seems obvious to me this would be one of the demands for removing any barriers to AI acceleration).
If you believe that acceleration is critical, then you should be willing to take some sacrifices yourself in order to build or expand. If you start making exceptions, then you are saying that acceleration and growth itself is not inherently good, but only good in _some_ places when it impacts _some_ people.
You can apply this to literally anything. This argument is silly.
My point is that any project needs to properly balance the goals of the project with the freedom and autonomy of other people. This is not saying that the goals always triumph, or that autonomy always triumphs, but that there is a balance.
You asked what this has to do with e/acc -- if e/acc is claiming progress at all costs, build at all costs, but then imposes carve outs for the freedom/autonomy of only certain people (particularly it's adherents), it's a contradiction in the project.