At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” …

When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It’s like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” …

On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”

  • @Shitgenstein1
    link
    English
    171 year ago

    In its reaction against both EA and AI safety advocates, e/acc also explicitly pays tribute to another longtime Silicon Valley idea. “This is very traditional libertarian right-wing hostility to regulation," said Benjamin Noys, a professor of critical theory at the University of Chichester and scholar of accelerationism. Jezos calls it the “libertarian e/acc path.”

    At least the Italian futurists were up front about their agenda.

    “We’re trying to solve culture by engineering,” Verdon said. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system."

    Reading Nudge to engineer the ‘Volksschädling’ to board the trains voluntarily. Dusting off the old state eugenics compensation programs.

    • @bitofhope
      link
      English
      181 year ago

      The fuck do they mean “solve culture”? Is culture a problem to be solved? Actually don’t answer that.

      • @selfMA
        link
        English
        131 year ago

        even more horrifying — they see culture as a system of equations they can use AI to generate solutions for, and the correct set of solutions will give them absolute control over culture. they apply this to all aspects of society. these assholes didn’t understand hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy or any of the other sci fi they cribbed these ideas from, and it shows

        • @200fifty
          link
          English
          111 year ago

          It’s like pickup artistry on a societal scale.

          It really does illustrate the way they see culture not as, like, a beautiful evolving dynamic system that makes life worth living, but instead as a stupid game to be won or a nuisance getting in the way of their world domination efforts

          • David GerardMA
            link
            English
            81 year ago

            remember that Yudkowsky’s CEV idea was literally to analytically solve ethics

        • raktheundead
          link
          fedilink
          91 year ago

          The ultimate STEMlord misunderstanding of culture; something absolutely rife in the Silicon Valley tech-sphere.

          • @gerikson
            link
            English
            101 year ago

            These dudes wouldn’t recognize culture if unsafed its Browning and shot them in the kneecaps.

            • @Soyweiser
              link
              English
              51 year ago

              Now im wondering, does the ma deuce have a safety? This is important information if I have ever have to defend my atoll from the E/acc smoker attack

              • raktheundead
                link
                fedilink
                51 year ago

                Apparently not; some soldiers appear to have bodged their own safeties by doing things like jamming an expended case underneath the trigger.

      • @froztbyte
        link
        English
        91 year ago

        Don’t have to have Culture War when you can just systemically deploy the exact culture you want right from the comfort of your prompt, amirite?!

        (This is a shitpost idea but it’s probably halfway accurate, maybe modulo the prompt (but there will definitely be someone also trying that))

          • @gerikson
            link
            English
            8
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            The best use case for Urbit is marking its proponents as first up against the wall when the revolution comes.