--- alias: - e/acc category: Ideology created: 2026-06-19 location: San Francisco Bay Area summary: Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) is a Silicon Valley techno-optimist movement that emerged in 2022 advocating the unrestricted acceleration of artificial intelligence and technology, defined against effective altruism's AI-safety 'doomerism,' and drawing on the accelerationism of Nick Land. tags: - Concept - EffectiveAccelerationism - Accelerationism - ArtificialIntelligence - SiliconValley - Transhumanism updated: 2026-06-19 --- Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) is a techno-optimist movement that emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area technology world in 2022, holding that the unrestricted acceleration of technological progress, above all artificial intelligence, is a moral and even cosmic imperative. Its name parodies and opposes [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/), whose AI-safety and existential-risk concern it casts as a "doomer" brake on progress. The movement draws its intellectual ancestry from the right-[accelerationism](/concepts/accelerationism/) of the philosopher [Nick Land](/people/nick-land/) while presenting itself as a thermodynamic account of life and intelligence as entropy-maximizing processes.[^1][^2] ### Origins and Beff Jezos E/acc first surfaced in late May 2022 in writing by four pseudonymous accounts, "Based Beff Jezos," "bayeslord," "zestular," and "creatine_cycle," with the foundational essay "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets" appearing on July 10, 2022. The essay framed e/acc as a first-principles physics of "technocapital," a ladder of emergence running from thermodynamics through life and natural selection to memetic and capital selection, whose acceleration the movement holds to be a cosmic good. The "Beff Jezos" account belonged to Guillaume Verdon, who earned a doctorate in quantum machine learning at the University of Waterloo and worked at Google's X moonshot lab on TensorFlow Quantum, and who founded the startup Extropic AI, maker of thermodynamic computing hardware, on a 14.1 million dollar seed round announced in December 2023.[^1][^3][^5] Forbes reporter Emily Baker-White identified Verdon as Beff Jezos on December 1, 2023, using forensic voice analysis. The movement spread through social media as a counter-tribe to the AI-safety wing that had grown out of the [Rationalist Community](/concepts/rationalist-community/) and the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/), labeling its opponents "doomers" and "decels," turning the question of whether to accelerate or restrain AI into an open factional war inside the technology industry. Verdon's persona sparred with [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/people/eliezer-yudkowsky/) on Twitter, and a related debate pitted the e/acc advocate against the rationalist Liron Shapira in a September 2023 audio space.[^2][^6] ### Andreessen and the Techno-Optimist Manifesto The venture capitalist [Marc Andreessen](/people/marc-andreessen/) became the movement's most prominent backer, publishing his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" in October 2023, which declared technology an unalloyed good and named "existential risk," "sustainability," and "tech ethics" among its enemies. Andreessen, Garry Tan, the head of Y Combinator, and other investors adopted the e/acc label in their social-media biographies, aligning it with the same anti-regulation, pro-defense, pro-technology politics documented across the [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/) network. The e/acc and effective-altruism camps are mirror outgrowths of the same transhumanist and rationalist milieu, divided over whether superintelligence is a deliverance or an extinction risk.[^2][^4] The manifesto did not use the term "e/acc," but it named Nick Land among its "patron saints," and the press treated it as the movement's establishment charter. The intellectual debt to Land runs through his account of capitalism and technology as an autonomous, self-augmenting intelligence, which e/acc inverts from Land's bleak determinism into a pro-human optimism. Land's own accelerationism descended from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit he ran at the University of Warwick in the 1990s before moving toward the neoreactionary right.[^4][^7] [^1]: "Effective Accelerationism and Beff Jezos Form New Tech Tribe," *Bloomberg,* December 6, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-06/effective-accelerationism-and-beff-jezos-form-new-tech-tribe [^2]: "'Effective Accelerationism' and the Pursuit of Cosmic Utopia," *Truthdig,* on the movement's ideology and its relationship to Nick Land's accelerationism. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-accelerationism-and-the-pursuit-of-cosmic-utopia/ [^3]: "Guillaume Verdon," on the Beff Jezos persona, the Google X background, and Extropic AI; contemporaneous reporting, 2023. [^4]: Andreessen, Marc. "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," Andreessen Horowitz, October 16, 2023. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ [^5]: "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets," beff.substack.com, July 10, 2022, on the technocapital ladder of emergence. https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets "Extropic Announces $14.1 Million Seed Round," *The Quantum Insider,* December 5, 2023. https://thequantuminsider.com/2023/12/05/extropic-announces-14-1-million-seed-round-building-entropy-computer-for-generative-ai/ [^6]: Baker-White, Emily. "Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite's 'E/Acc' Movement?" *Forbes,* December 1, 2023; and "Effective Accelerationism and Beff Jezos Form New Tech Tribe," *Bloomberg,* December 6, 2023, on the "doomer" and "decel" framing. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-06/effective-accelerationism-and-beff-jezos-form-new-tech-tribe [^7]: "What Is Nick Land's Philosophy of Accelerationism, Really?" *Aeon,* on Land, capitalism as autonomous intelligence, and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick. https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really