$ man eacc-glossary e/acc glossary — accelerationism terms, defined

The accelerationist vocabulary, defined without the in-group assumption: 16 terms that show up in e/acc, d/acc and AI-risk arguments, with dates and sources where they exist. Written to be readable by someone who has just met the word e/acc and wants to know what everyone is actually arguing about.

Terms

• accelerationism — The broad family of positions holding that technological or economic change should be sped up rather than restrained. The label predates e/acc by decades and covers left-wing, right-wing and apolitical variants that agree on little except the throttle.
• based / BasedBeffJezos — Internet slang for holding a position without hedging for approval. @BasedBeffJezos was the pseudonymous account that co-authored the founding e/acc newsletter and became the movement's most visible figure; Forbes identified him in December 2023 as Guillaume Verdon, a former Google quantum computing engineer.
• d/acc — Defensive, decentralizing, democratic, differential accelerationism — proposed by Vitalik Buterin in November 2023. Accepts that technology should accelerate but argues direction matters as much as speed. Full comparison on the e/acc vs d/acc page.
• decel — e/acc's pejorative for anyone advocating slowdown, pause, licensing or capability restriction. Deliberately broad: it collapses AI-safety researchers, regulators, degrowth advocates and cautious incumbents into one silhouette. Being called a decel is the movement's main rhetorical sanction.
• doomer — Someone who assigns high probability to AI causing catastrophic or existential harm. Used descriptively inside AI-safety circles and pejoratively outside them. The doomer position is about capability outrunning control, which is distinct from the degrowth or anti-tech positions e/acc also opposes.
• e/acc — Effective accelerationism — the position that technological progress, AI above all, should be accelerated rather than restrained. Also written eacc, e-acc or E/ACC. Started as a pseudonymous newsletter on 31 May 2022. See what is e/acc.
• EA (effective altruism) — The movement e/acc's name parodies: an attempt to allocate charitable effort by expected impact. Its AI wing treats catastrophic risk as a top priority and argues for caution at the frontier — the specific position e/acc formed in opposition to.
• Extropic — The hardware company founded by Guillaume Verdon (@BasedBeffJezos) after leaving Google, building thermodynamic computing hardware. Frequently cited as e/acc's proof that the movement builds rather than only posts.
• frontier model — The most capable generally-available models at a given moment — the leading edge rather than a fixed capability bar, so the set turns over constantly. This site tags frontier releases in its acceleration timeline and counts the days since each one.
• Kardashev scale — A 1964 classification by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev ranking civilizations by the energy they command: planetary (Type I), stellar (Type II), galactic (Type III). e/acc treats climbing it as a civilizational objective rather than a thought experiment.
• p(doom) — Shorthand for one's subjective probability that AI causes catastrophic or existential harm. Traded as a number in AI discourse — a personal credence, not a measurement. Stating a low p(doom) is an e/acc signal; a high one marks a doomer.
• the pause letter — The Future of Life Institute open letter of 22 March 2023 calling for a six-month halt on training systems more powerful than GPT-4. It was never observed in practice and became e/acc's standard example of what deceleration looks like when it is written down.
• technocapital — The idea that markets and technology form a single self-improving engine — capital funds capability, capability creates returns, returns fund more capability. e/acc treats this loop as the mechanism of progress rather than a side effect of it.
• Techno-Optimist Manifesto — Marc Andreessen's October 2023 essay for a16z, which carried e/acc themes — abundance, anti-doom, technology as a moral good — into mainstream venture discourse and named e/acc figures as patron saints. Not an e/acc document, but the reason many people first met the term.
• the thermodynamic argument — e/acc's founding aesthetic: life and intelligence are structures that dissipate energy gradients, so the universe statistically favours more of both. Often invoked via physicist Jeremy England's work on dissipative adaptation. Critics note that a description of what happens is not an argument for what should.
• u/acc (unconditional accelerationism) — The older, darker branch descending from Nick Land and the 1990s CCRU, which holds that the process accelerates regardless of human preference and is indifferent to human flourishing. e/acc borrows the vocabulary and explicitly rejects the nihilism — its version is meant to be pro-human.

Keep reading

what is e/acc — origin, beliefs, criticism e/acc vs d/acc — the two accelerationisms compared the AI acceleration timeline what frontier intelligence actually costs