disengage

English

Español

ALL HAIL THE ACCELERATIONISTS

Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sundar Pichai. Today’s oligarchs are not simple technologists or entrepreneurs. They are not altruistic visionaries, and they do not intend to use their wealth and power for social good. They won’t help you get rich with them. Instead of lending a hand as you attempt to climb the class ladder, they will ruthlessly kick you down to where you started, or lower.

With a quasi-authoritarian administration at their backs, these men and the ideology they’ve inspired will soon conquer the world. The implication of their presence by Trump’s side on inauguration day is clear: from now on, all who wish to govern must first win them over.

These men and their followers are ideologues, crusaders for an internet cult that utilizes lofty sci-fi ideas to mask their fundamental hatred of humanity. They are deeply anti-social, and view the most definitive characteristics of human nature, precisely those which make us human, as defects (1). To them, the human brain is best understood as a computer. Any deviation from optimal functioning, that is, 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 (2), who has given control of his every decision to a computer algorithm in a mad pursuit of immortality.

The oligarchs and their disciples in the tech sector are accelerationists. This ideology views technology as a cure for all human suffering and advocates for aggressive and unlimited technological advancement (3). It suggests that any difference between a computer and the human mind is a shameful mistake (4), 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 (5).

Naturally, an ideology characterized by hatred for humanity antagonizes the humanities. Artificial intelligence cannot feel as humans do, so art, literature, music, philosophy — the disciplines that make beauty from the messiness of human emotion — are the accelerationist’s enemy. In the accelerationist’s world, the arts and humanities are expendable and reduced to their bare economic functions. Here, one’s societal value can be boiled down to their usefulness to the tech sector. There is no art; only content.

Tech-billionaire, Facebook board member and prominent AI thought leader Marc Andreessen explains this in his infamous “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (6). In it, he advocates for an “accelerate or die” approach to technological advancement, and suggests that anyone who wishes to regulate AI should be treated as a murderer:

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. An AI world has no use for the arts. 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, as if pulled straight from science fiction, thousands of lonely people are renouncing human relationships altogether to “date” their chatbots (11), while eerie AI-slop floods nearly every communication channel, bringing us closer to an internet that’s mostly human-free, populated exclusively by bot-generated content (12).

With the data they’ve gathered from our addiction to their apps and the full support of the world’s most powerful government, the oligarchy is rapidly refining artificial intelligence with the promise of a civilizational jolt on the nuclear scale. Generative AI, while potentially valuable in 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 (13). 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), and erode the public sector until the institutions it encompasses collapse from within. 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. Across the Atlantic, their conquest is slow and ideological, fomenting support for far-right political movements like the AfD (15), Vox (16), and Brothers of Italy (17). 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.

There is nothing rational or moral about the oligarchs’ accelerationist ideology. It is fascism’s institutionalized hatred mixed with deranged sci-fi fervor. It is an internet cult for the ultra-rich, Heaven’s Gate for the 21st-century with the philosophical depth of a Captain America film. Were its proponents and practitioners not the wealthiest most influential people on Earth, the ideology would fade into obscurity, 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 (18).

DISENGAGE

And why shouldn’t we believe the accelerationist conquest will be successful? The 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 (19). 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 apps 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? What are the sociological consequences of a mass media ecosystem built on algorithms that favor outrage over compassion and hate over empathy (20)? Maybe, the answer to this question is all around us. In the arrival of fringe, once conspiratorial ideas — vaccine skepticism (21), the consumption of raw meat (22), the persecution of the so-called “white race” (23) — to the mainstream. In the lonely young men seeking online respite from their isolation, only to be guided to violent extremism (24). 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? The oligarchs do. The social consequences of their platforms’ design has facilitated their alliance with the state.

The destination of their project is clear. Musk, Altman, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page 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. They say it will take us to the stars (25) and free us from death itself (26). 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 the human species to pursue technological progress aggressively, dogmatically, and undemocratically.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe one day the oligarchs’ technology will indeed bring someone to the stars. But it won’t be you, and it won’t be me. Our planet will continue to rot, and our minds will with it. The data centers that power their apps and their AI chatbots use more energy and water than small towns (27). Curtis Yarvin, a writer associated with the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” movement, accelerationist, and noted friend of the Trump Administration (28), paints a chilling picture of what may be to come: 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 (29).

If that world sounds to you like a nice place, then carry on as you were. Enjoy the coming order whose emergence your complacency helped facilitate.

If not, then opt out of the accelerationist project. No one is forcing you to log on.

You can resist their data-mining. You can reject the invitation to their techno-authoritarian social experiment. You can deny the tech-bro platitude that AI dominance over every sector is inevitable and must be embraced. You can refuse to participate in their technology, to engage with their chatbots, to allow them to steal your valuable attention. Already, a movement is growing (30). 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.