The e/acc manifesto — principles and tenets, explained

If you want what the founders believed, read Notes on e/acc principles and tenets. If you want what made e/acc famous, read the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. If you want where the name came from, read the founding post. The first two agree on almost everything; they differ in who wrote them and in tone — physics first in 2022, economics and culture first in 2023.

Published on May 31, 2022 by four pseudonymous accounts — @zestular, @BasedBeffJezos, @bayeslord and @creatine_cycle — the post named the movement and set its frame. The echo of effective altruism is intentional: it credits EA with taking scale seriously, then rejects its caution about AI. It is short, part essay and part meme, and is the text the e/acc explainer dates the movement from.

Written by @BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord and published on July 10, 2022 under the subtitle "a physics-first view", this is the fullest statement of e/acc's ideas. It is a run of bullet points rather than chapters; in summary, it argues:

• Life is thermodynamic. Matter organizes itself to capture and dissipate free energy, and life is one result — the argument draws on Jeremy England's work on dissipative adaptation (the thermodynamic argument).
• Evolution is a special case. The universe is biased toward configurations that capture more energy; natural selection is that bias acting on living things.
• Intelligence is faster adaptation. Minds adapt on shorter timescales than genes, and consciousness appears past a threshold of scale.
• Markets are intelligence too. Companies, states and capitalism itself act as larger agents; the market is a form of civilizational intelligence.
• Variance beats central control. Top-down planning relies on simplified models of chaotic systems and suppresses the variety that adaptation needs, so competition should be preferred to regulation.
• Accelerate. The goal is to speed the process toward a "technocapital singularity" rather than resist it.
• No loyalty to the substrate. Consciousness need not stay biological; spreading to the stars may require other substrates.

Its one-line summary, paraphrased: stop fighting the thermodynamic direction of the universe and go with it.

Marc Andreessen published it on the a16z site on October 16, 2023. It is the document most people mean when they say "the e/acc manifesto", though it was written by a sympathizer, not a founder. Its sections run from "Lies" and "Truth" through technology, markets, "the techno-capital machine", intelligence, energy and abundance, to "The Enemy" and a list of patron saints.

• Accelerationism by name: it describes itself as accelerationist — deliberately pushing technological development forward so that growth keeps compounding.
• The enemy: stagnation, central planning, bureaucracy and "vetocracy", regulatory capture, the precautionary principle, and deceleration, de-growth and depopulation.
• The patron saints: a long list from Adam Smith to Richard Feynman that includes @BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord, and also Nick Land, the source of the older u/acc.

Coming from one of the largest venture firms, it carried e/acc themes into mainstream business and policy debate within weeks.

Vitalik Buterin's My techno-optimism (November 27, 2023) agreed that technology is mostly good and argued that direction matters as much as speed — the essay that introduced d/acc. Critics of both manifestos make three points: a description of what physics favours is not an argument for what people should want; the texts say little about how to handle the specific risks of AI; and a call to deregulate reads differently when it comes from investors in the companies that would be deregulated. The e/acc vs EA page covers the argument with the AI-safety side.

Is there an official e/acc manifesto?

No. e/acc has no organization to adopt one. Three texts get the name: the founding newsletter post (May 31, 2022), "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets" by @BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord (July 10, 2022), and Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto (October 16, 2023).

Who wrote the e/acc principles and tenets?

@BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord, on Beff's Substack on July 10, 2022. Forbes identified @BasedBeffJezos in December 2023 as Guillaume Verdon, a former Google quantum computing engineer; @bayeslord remains pseudonymous.

Did Marc Andreessen write the e/acc manifesto?

He wrote the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, published by a16z on October 16, 2023. It is not an e/acc document — Andreessen is a sympathizer, not a founder — but it endorses accelerationism by name and lists @BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord among its patron saints, so many people met e/acc through it.

What does the e/acc manifesto say, in one sentence?

That life and intelligence are what the universe's thermodynamics favours, that markets and technology are the fastest way to grow both, and that trying to slow the process down is both futile and harmful.

What was the response to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto?

The best-known reply is Vitalik Buterin's "My techno-optimism" (November 27, 2023), which shared the optimism but argued that direction matters as much as speed — the essay that introduced d/acc.