Effective accelerationism, usually written e/acc, is an internet-born movement and worldview that emerged on social media and Substack around 2022, advocating the rapid acceleration of technological progress, especially AI, rather than caution or restraint. Its founding text, “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets,” was posted in July 2022 under the pseudonyms Beff Jezos and bayeslord. The name is a deliberate riposte to effective altruism and its AI-safety wing, which e/acc casts as overly fearful and prone to wanting to slow things down.
The manifesto frames its case in the language of physics. It leans on dissipative adaptation - the idea that matter tends to organize itself to capture and use free energy - and argues that the universe “exponentially favors futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy.” From this, e/acc concludes that intelligence and technological growth are extensions of a cosmic tendency, that higher-variance markets and competition beat top-down control at finding value, and that trying to halt the process is both futile and wrong. The text is explicitly post-humanist: it places no special priority on the biological substrate and argues consciousness should eventually move to other substrates and spread beyond Earth. It ends on the slogan to simply accelerate.
The movement spread as a meme and an identity tag, picked up by some technologists and investors as a banner for techno-optimism and opposition to AI regulation. Supporters present it as a needed counterweight to doomerism; critics view it as a rationalization of recklessness dressed in pseudo-scientific language, or simply as a vibe rather than a rigorous position. Either way, e/acc became a recognizable pole in the public argument over how fast to build AI - the accelerationist answer to the safety-and-pause camp.