To accelerate or not, is that the question?
techno-optimism and its discontents
Who says philosophy is dead?
In a recent article, Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and later cofounder of the largest venture capital firm, penned the Techno-optimist Manifesto. While amply critiqued by the NY Times and others as a new religion of technology, this appears to be more of a philosophy with a strange nod to an underground philosophy that welled up in the virtual minds of certain edge lords and first bubbled to the surface of twitter around 2016 creating a subgenre of philosopher anons armed with memes that took the gutters of thinking by storm.
What’s the difference? You believe in religion, philosophy is something you have to demonstrate through language.
I’ll try and explain but bear in my mind I’m not part of any limited hangout and I don’t have a twitter/X account.
The gist of Andreessen’s Manifesto is a life affirming statement that can be best facilitated through the medium of technology and free capitalism. Seems straight forward enough whether you agree or not. However, in his list of Patron Saints he includes, along with a host of free market economists and scientists, the enigmatic and controversial Nick Land, a philosopher most notable for being the godfather of the accelerationsim movement.
What is accelerationism? Back in 2017 the Guardian wrote a background piece on the movement which traced its origins back to the 60’s French leftist philosopher Gille Deleuze and his writing companion, Feliz Guattari. They first coined the phrase in their book Anti-Oedipus when discussing the “Capitalist Machine” stating,
But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist "economic solution"? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.1 (emphasis added)
In this paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a different path than the one Samir Amin, the Marxist economist, proposes. Instead of withdrawing from the world economy, they encourage their readers to accelerate the process that has already been put in place. In other words push techno-capitalism to its limit. To break it? Or to see what happens next? The answer to the acceleration will largely fall on where one finds oneself on the politico-economic spectrum.
For Andreessen and other Silicon Valley mavericks, the product of acceleration is an optimistic one. He clearly states in his manifesto,
We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns.
Furthermore, this will have a human benefit. Andressen goes all in saying,
We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.
And the new engine to push this forward is AI.
We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.
But, lest you think this is some adoption of a right leaning interpretation, the manifesto attempts to distant itself from a political position, at least outwardly, by stating,
Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.
What is this new brand of accelerationism? Well, returning to list of Patron Saints of the Techno Optimist manifesto, the first two people listed are the X/twitter handles, @BasedBeffJezos @bayeslord. These two collaborators are considered the philosophical founders of a new movement started in 2022 called Effective/accelerationism, more commonly known as e/acc.
In their own manifesto, e/acc lays out their agenda which is to unleash the power of technology and capitalism in order to “usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness.”2 In other words, to accelerate humanity to the “singularity” a concept first introduced by the Google engineer Ray Kurzwell who is also a Patron Saint of the Techno-Optimist manifesto.
Largely a product of their posts on twitter, e/acc has gained momentum, creating an acceleration 2.0, that lead to the recent “doxxing” of the Beff Jezos by Forbes. Not to worry, the unmasking has lead to a recent podcast on Lex Friedman so the e/acc movement could actually experience a further acceleration on an entropic scale.
Every good philosophy needs a nemesis and piecing together the memes from their two X accounts, it appears their rival is another older movement called Effective Altruism with deep ties in the tech mecca as well. For those doubting my ability at frog cryptography of meme artifacts, just the name of the two movements is a hint at e/acc’s motivation.
Effective Altruism, also known as EA, is no stranger to fame and its founder, William MacAskil, was featured in an article in the New Yorker shortly after the release of his best selling book, What We Owe the Future. The book helped popularise a concept known as “longtermism”, which is the idea “that future people, however distant, have equal moral value to people alive today.”3 One of the proponents of this idea is the English philosopher Nick Bostrom who is most famous for his 2014 book Superintelligence which stated that the greatest challenge of our time is whether we can control super intelligence (ie, AI) or will it have detrimental impact to our species, a book recommend by tech titans including Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
While EA’s reputation has been bruised of late and one of its largest contributors recently convicted of fraud, it has appears to have been a major influence on limiting the advance of AI for ethical reasons. The ethical and philosophical battle between accelerationists and altruists appears to have been played out with the recent firing and rehiring of Sam Altman at OpenAI due to apparent conflict on the direction of the company between Altman and the Board.
The two e/acc accounts show they are clearly on the side of Altman and the push for the next phase of AI and GPTs while those opposed to it they affectionately call decels for their hindrance and supposed safeguards.
So what side are you on? Are there any other sides out there? Are both sides barking at the wrong fence?
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that philosophy is alive and well. In a world where new technologies are emerging, new words and expressions are being created, people need a way to make sense of it and then form a life around it that is affirming and wholesome.
In a recent New Yorker article on the rise of philosophical counseling as a new form of therapy, the journalist follows Lydia Amir who is speaking at conference of philosopher counsellors. She states,
“[Pyschotherapists"] cannot offer you ideals. They cannot offer you a world view,” she said. She suggested that philosophy alone was capable of sparking transformation by exposing people to many viewpoints and increasing their capacity to assess them rationally.
The ability to form a worldview and assess it rationally continues to be a function of philosophy. People like Nick Land and Nick Bostrom are contemporary philosophers whose insights into the tradition of systems thinking and ability to use terminology have created communities around their ideas. Going back to the roots of acceleration, Gille Deleuze said philosophy was the ability to create concepts. His philosophy was one of building worldviews with concepts that could withstand scrutiny.
With the advent of AI and other technologies, new concepts will continue to emerge and be assessed by a community interested enough to read and debate these ideas. Instead of one homogenous position, it will like splinter into a multiplicity of groups on both sides of the spectrum in the same way “acceleration” has become a term for everyone from far left Marxists, to the alt right to the techno optimists.
What seems most important is for humans to keep asking questions, to keep thinking through ideas, and keep challenging existing structures. If we give up that function and outsource our intellect to chat bots we may be accelerating to a future of mind numbing consumerism with no goals, no dreams, no visions.
Many ancients warned that the invention of writing would destroy our memory but two millennia later books, with writers such as Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Cervantes, have become one of the most cherished and valuable contributions of humanity. Perhaps software and the invention of coding language will leave a similar mark on the destiny of humanity on this planet and leave a landmark and testament to our innovation that nobody anticipated. Only time will tell.
Anti-Oedipus, p. 238-239, University of Minnesota Press
https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism
Hmmm -- AI; what does the future hold?