Eoin McLoughlin

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MANIFESTO

With an extraordinary display of wealth and power, a new administration took charge of the world’s wealthiest country on behalf of its billionaire class. America’s richest men looked on proudly as Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States (1). Elon Musk of Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX; Sundar Pichai of Google; Jeff Bezos of Amazon; and Mark Zuckerberg of Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook; have aligned themselves with far-right populism, forming a new, ultra-powerful political class. Other members might include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and libertarian activist and billionaire investor, Peter Thiel.

Some have called them oligarchs. They are modern-day kings, powerful actors using their vast wealth and influences to guide the hands of politicians in their favor. The implication of their presence by Trump’s side is clear: from now on, all who wish to govern must first win them over.

These oligarchs are not simple technologists. They are not mere entrepreneurs. They are not altruistic visionaries. And they are not the industrialists of the Gilded Age. They will not donate to museums or schools. They do not intend to use their wealth and power for social good. And they will not help you get a job.

These men are ideologues, crusaders for an internet cult that utilizes lofty sci-fi philosophies to mask their fundamental hatred of humanity. They are deeply anti-social, and view the most definitive characteristics of human nature, precisely those which define the human species, as defects. (2) To them, the human brain is best understood as a computer. Any deviation from optimal functioning, i.e., emotions or biological necessities, are flaws which must be eliminated. Consider Silicon Valley’s obsession with personal optimization, time management, and maximum productivity. Or the transhumanist movement, led by the venture capitalist Bryan Johnson (3), who has ceded control of his every decision and consumption to a computer algorithm in a mad pursuit of immortality.

They adhere to an ideology called effective accelerationism, which views technology as a cure for all human suffering and advocates for aggressive and unlimited technological advancement (4). They suggest that any difference between a computer and the human mind is a shameful mistake (5), and so we must turn ourselves into machines. Rely on algorithms and artificial intelligence enough, begin to understand existence as a series of calculated probabilities, yeses and nos, ones and zeroes, and pretty soon you’ll start to think and speak like a computer. You may even begin to act like one.

Naturally, an ideology characterized by a hatred for humanity antagonizes the humanities. Artificial intelligence cannot feel as humans do. So art, literature, philosophy, music — the disciplines that make beauty from the messiness of emotion — are the accelerationist’s enemy. Thus, they promote a skepticism towards the humanities and reduce them to their bare economic functions. In the accelerationist utopia, the arts and humanities are expendable, and one’s societal value can be boiled down to their coding skills. Here, there is no art; only content.

Tech-billionaire, Facebook board member and prominent AI thought leader Marc Andreessen goes a step further in his infamous “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” (6) advocating for an “accelerate or die” approach to technological advancement, suggesting that those who wish to regulate AI should be treated as murderers:

“Any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder,” he writes.

Why pay human artists or writers when AI can do it cheaper and quicker? “Accelerate or die” implies total tech deregulation, the absolute domination of generative AI over every sector as quickly as possible. As the value of the arts is intangible and transcends profit, an AI world has no use for them. Already, the technology is gutting artistic industries and ushering in an era of widespread cultural impoverishment. Literary translators fear their ancient art form will soon be forgotten (7), quietly outsourced to machines that can work quicker, without pay, before the public has realized what’s happened. Hollywood actors have organized to prevent their likenesses from being used to train the technology that may one day replace them (8), and educators are fighting the intellectual impoverishment of a generation weaned on ChatGPT (9). Recently, OpenAI’s engineers have trained its image generation software to plagiarize the work of acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki, reducing an entire artistic style developed over decades into what amounts to little more than an instagram filter (10). Meanwhile, eerie AI-slop has flooded nearly every communication channel, bringing us closer to an internet that’s mostly human-free, instead entirely populated by bot-generated content (11).

With the data they’ve gathered from our addiction to their platforms and the full support of the world’s most powerful government, the oligarchy is rapidly refining this new technology with the promise of a civilizational jolt on the nuclear scale. Generative artificial intelligence, while potentially valuable to the fields of medicine and engineering, is on track to become an all-encompassing authoritarian tool, threatening to remake every level of human society and culture in the image of the oligarchic class.

Its mechanics are kept deliberately mysterious; it is not known precisely which videos, images, and texts are used to help generative AI models imitate human creation (12). The technology is undemocratic by nature, trained on inputs produced by artists, filmmakers, and everyday posters without their knowledge or consent. Artists and creators are not given the choice to opt out of the development of the technology intended to one day replace them.

And they will not stop with the humanities. The oligarchs are advancing the accelerationist agenda as a means to inflate their own personal wealth. In America, they will dismantle social welfare (13), make already faltering public education exponentially worse (14), fire federal workers until the spaces and institutions they operate collapse from within: namely national parks and open spaces (15), foreign aid, public transportation (16), and grant-funded research (17). Anything that serves the public interest, that provides any social utility beyond technological advancement and shareholder value for the oligarchs’ personal businesses, is vulnerable to execution. On the European continent their conquest is slower and primarily ideological, fomenting support for far-right political movements like the AfD (18), Vox (19), and Brothers of Italy (20), until each EU member state has fallen to Nazi-friendly autocracy. In the absence of radical, coordinated action on the part of the world’s governments, the unchecked forces of free market capitalism will inevitably facilitate their conquest.

Make no mistake. Despite the self-described “rationality” of the accelerationist project, there is nothing rational, nothing moral about the ideology driving the oligarchs. It is fascism’s institutionalized hatred mixed with deranged sci-fi fervor. It is an internet cult for the ultra-rich. It is the Millenarianism of the Digital Age, Heaven’s Gate for the 21st-century with the philosophical depth of a Captain America film. Were the proponents and practitioners of effective accelerationism not the wealthiest most influential people on Earth, the ideology would fade into obscurity. It would be worth mentioning only for the comedic value of its utter stupidity. Unfortunately, not only are their resources limitless, but they have now infiltrated the world’s most powerful government (21).

Why shouldn’t we believe the accelerationist project will be successful? Today’s oligarchs oversee a media ecosystem that transcends borders and language, which billions of people spend hours engaging with daily. The companies of Zuckerberg and Pichai alone are used by more than a quarter of humanity (22). The platforms that these men control form the very fabric of modern life. They are inseparable from our work, our leisure, and our social lives. We rely on Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, and Whatsapp to socialize and earn our livelihoods. We are also hopelessly addicted to them.

We spend hours each day scrolling their feeds because they are designed that way. Their profit model requires maximum engagement. The longer we use social media, the more of our data can be sold to advertisers, and the more money the oligarchs make. Profit is data, and data is attention. It’s unsurprising, then, that the algorithms that power their platforms should exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Where has all our time gone? The infinite scroll has so much to show us. We have all the world’s information at our fingertips, and what will we do with it? Probably nothing, because we’d rather rot in their manufactured misery than look away.

So, they have our attention. Now what? Should Zuckerberg or Musk change their platform’s architecture to favor content of a particular ideology, would we notice? What are the sociological consequences of a mass media ecosystem built on algorithms that favor outrage over compassion, hate over empathy (23) and reductionism over critical analysis?

Maybe, the answers to these questions are all around us. In the arrival of fringe, once conspiratorial ideas — vaccine skepticism (24), the persecution of the so-called “white race” (25) — to the mainstream. In the lonely young men seeking respite online from their isolation, only to be guided to extremism that results in horrific acts of violence (26). Or in the global rise of right-wing populism, capitalizing on societal divisions to sow fear and mistrust. For whom? Who do the conditions of this new world serve? Who wins the platform paradigm? Whether intentional or not, the political consequences of the platforms’ design has facilitated the oligarchs’ alliance with the state.

The destination of their project is clear. Musk, Altman, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Andreessen, Ellison, Thiel and the rest are playing God. They pitch their technology as a powerful liberating force, one that will bring unprecedented progress and prosperity, perhaps even bringing humanity to the stars (27), or freeing us from death itself (28). The oligarchs have chosen themselves as the drivers of civilization’s fate. They have decided, on our behalf, that it is in the best interest of our species to pursue unfettered technological progress aggressively, dogmatically, and without question. Of course, there will be consequences for the rest of us. The data centers that power their platforms and their AI chatbots use more energy and water than small towns (29). Our planet will continue to rot, and our minds will with it. Curtis Yarvin, philosopher of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” movement that forms the literary backbone of the technocrats’ operations (who was a guest of honor at Trump’s 2025 inaugural gala and whom Vice President JD Vance cited as a personal influence (30)), advocates for the replacement of democracy with corporate rule, commanded by a “CEO-monarch” who’d exercise unlimited control over society on the behalf of the billionaire class (31).

If this world sounds to you like a warm and welcoming place, by all means, carry on as you were. Enjoy the coming world order whose emergence your complacency helped facilitate.

If not, then opt out of the accelerationist project. We are up against modern oligarchs, demigods whose wealth and influence eclipse even the divine rights of a Habsburg monarch or a Roman emperor. In the face of such unprecedented power, resistance begins with the individual. And as it stands, no one is forcing you to log on. You can resist their data-mining. You can reject the invitation to participate in their experiment in techno-authoritarianism. You can deny the tech-bro platitude that AI dominance over every sector is an inevitability that must be embraced. You can refuse to participate in their technology, to engage with their chatbots, to allow their algorithms to harvest your attention. Already, a movement is growing (32). Join it.

Go outside, turn it off, delete your accounts. Your attention is data, and data is their profit. Don’t give them what they want.

Because this is the human world, and it’s all we have. Let it remain so.