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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

> Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology

Is this even a thing?

This article paints with such broad strokes that I think you could use the same approach to find “proof” that Silicon Valley has any ideology that you don’t like.

I mean “Silicon Valley” is both the home of DEI maximalists and the home of anti-woke crusaders like Elon Musk. It’s both the home of e/acc and the home of AI doomers. Find nearly any policy debate and you’ll find SV, like most other places, passionately divided.

It’s the mainstream media version of calling HN hypocritical.

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The way I see it, what binds Silicon Valley together into a single ideology is the belief that everything should be running software and that the rest of society should conform to software defined rules. AI doomers and e/acc both deeply believe in the power of AI and disagree on how to approach that power.

In SV the question isn't, "Should we introduce self driving cars on the road and how will that impact safety?" instead it is "How can we get the disengagement and accident metrics of self driving cars below that of the average human driver?". The assumption is always that more software and more data collection will result in better products.

I don't really consider the DEI v anti-woke debate worth having. The anti-woke crusaders are all twitter addicts hooked on rage-bait and either these people are very rare in actual companies, or they keep their heads down at work. The DEI "movement" as experienced on the ground is simply the yearly corporate training that tells you not to say slurs at work and some fluffy PR speak on company hiring pages.

Yes it's a thing. That they disagree on implementation details doesn't mean they aren't part of the same apparatus. "Anti-woke" and "DEI" maximalist at tech companies both believe in the power and autonomy of the companies as an end, they just disagree about the representation among those holding power within them.

AI doomers and e/acc I'm less clear on. E/acc is just straightforwardly very fascist. AI doomers seem to have much broader ideological underpinnings, but still seem overall aligned with the more moderate strain of the "technoauthoritarianism" we're talking about.

So sure, not everything fits into it, it's not all-pervasive. But that doesn't mean we can't talk about trends and inclinations.

Can you give me examples of E/acc-ers being fascist?

As mentioned in the article, Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto" cited Marinetti - one of the coauthors of the original fascist manifesto - as one of his inspirations

Marinetti was also the author of the Futurist Manifesto. The Fascist Manifesto that he co-authored advocates an ideology that is quite different than that practiced by fascist Italy and especially fascist Germany, so was arguably not advocating fascism as we know it today. He also opposed the anti-Jewish racial laws of 1938.

His futurist political beliefs were ultimately silly IMHO, but I don't think it's fair to cast anyone who quotes his futurist writings as a fascist, let alone casting the entire movement in which the person who quoted him plays some prominent role as fascist.

The claims of fascism almost all ultimately go back to Nick Land and his stupid writings. The guy is just fashionable nonsense/cultural marxism for the tech-bro. There's almost no other ring wing representation at all within critical theory, and Land is marginalized within those communities. I wish that Mark Fischer had captured the same kind of cultural capital that Nick Land has before he killed himself, because I expected Mark Fischer to be beloved from the "AGI now"/E/acc-ers crowd.

I don't care how unpopular what I'm about to say is becasue it's true, but most "E/acc-ers" are ultimately looking for a world like star-trek, though even they admit it'll look most closely to DS9. I know of almost none who serious advocate for any kind of fascism.

No I don't feel like quibbling about the definition of fascism or the extent to which tech accelerationism is right wing. It's not a novel observation or unique to me, I'm sure you can find some primers if this is the first you're hearing about it.

This is the first time I've seen the claim, and given the lack of substantiation, I'll dismiss it.

You're on another comment in this thread quibbling about the definition of fascism. Dismiss what you want but I'm feeling ok about my initial read on this question.

Does quibbling about the definition of fascism make me a fascist too?

What is E/acc?

To my understanding it’s mostly a twitter meme pretending to be a philosophy. Basically, the EA people started worrying more about AI risk than about malaria, so some people who think that AI is cool and that there should be more of it took the “Effective” from EA but replaced the “Altruism” by “Accellerationism”. The latter is actually a weird alt right fringe idea by a guy called Nick Land that doesn’t really overlap that much with “Yay tech! Yay AI!”, but the twitter people didn't read it so no matter. And, well, the word sure sounds like “wanting the tech to go faster” so it felt like a nice way to oppose the luddites from EA while hijacking their acronym.

Ofc the “same acronym means 2 opposing standpoints” thing got confusing within hours, so they renamed it to e/acc and there ya go.

There’s nothing particularly effective about e/acc, they only needed the E to annoy the AI doomers.

It does overlap a lot. Accelerationism is a cosmismist viewpoint and rejects the orthogonality thesis. In other words, it favours the construction of ASI even if it means the extinction of the human race.

You have to understand that critical theory exists to find criticisms of opponents and ideologies, whether they exist or are simply a figment of the ideologues' imaginations.

My guess is "acc" means accelerationist. No idea about the "E".

Also, for completeness, looks like DEI is very standard and means "Diversity, equity, and inclusion". I didn't know that one either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

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