Why e/acc is Failing: 3 Reasons You’re Calculating AI Risk Wrong
e/acc is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.
We spent the last two years worshiping at the altar of Effective Accelerationism. We put the "thermal" emoji in our bios. We screamed "Accelerate" at every GPU cluster and every $10 billion seed round.
It felt like a revolution. It felt like physics.
It’s actually a cope.
The movement is failing because it treats the future like a mathematical certainty. It isn't.
1. You are confusing Speed with Velocity
In physics, speed is how fast you are moving. Velocity is speed with a direction.
e/acc is obsessed with speed. It demands we remove the "brakes." It argues that because evolution moves toward higher complexity, we should just floor the gas pedal and let the "thermodynamic god" sort it out.
This is lazy.
If you are driving at 100mph toward a brick wall, "accelerating" isn't a strategy. It’s a suicide pact.
We are currently accelerating toward a digital monoculture. We are building massive models that feed on the same scraped data, optimized for the same engagement metrics, funded by the same three venture capital firms.
When you accelerate a monoculture, you don't get evolution. You get fragility.
I’ve seen this before. In the 2000s, we accelerated global finance. We removed the "friction" of regulation and local banking. We got the 2008 crash. We didn't lack speed. We lacked a map.
If your "philosophy" can be summarized as "faster is better," you aren't a visionary. You’re a passenger.
2. The Hardware Delusion
e/acc advocates love to talk about the Kardashev scale. They talk about capturing the energy of stars.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, we can't even upgrade the power grid in Northern Virginia fast enough to keep the data centers humming.
The biggest lie in the accelerationist movement is that software will solve physical constraints. It won't.
You are calculating risk wrong because you think the bottleneck is "alignment" or "safety code." It isn't. The bottleneck is copper, transformers, and cooling.
I talk to founders every week who think they are building the "God Mind." They aren't. They are building a very expensive way to burn coal.
If we accelerate intelligence without a massive, radical overhaul of our physical infrastructure—nuclear power, grid decentralization, material science—we don't reach a "post-scarcity" utopia.
We reach a High-Tech Stagnation.
We will have AIs that can write a symphony in seconds, but we won't be able to build a high-speed rail line in a decade. We will have digital gods trapped in a crumbling physical world.
e/acc ignores the "boring" stuff. It ignores the permit process. It ignores the supply chain. If your movement requires a "magic" breakthrough in physics to work, it's not a movement. It's a prayer.
3. The Fragility Trap
The e/acc crowd believes that more intelligence always leads to more stability.
They are wrong.
History shows us that as systems become more complex and "intelligent," they become more brittle.
Think about your own life. When you use a "smart" home system, you are more efficient. Until the Wi-Fi goes down. Then you can’t turn on your lights. You’ve traded resilience for optimization.
Now, scale that to the entire global economy.
If we automate the "middle" of every industry—law, medicine, coding, logistics—with a centralized intelligence layer, we create a single point of failure.
If a single model update or a solar flare can take down the world’s ability to diagnose disease or route cargo, we haven't accelerated. We’ve surrendered.
I’ve spent the last year looking at how companies integrate these tools. They aren't building "new" things. They are hollowing out their internal expertise to save 20% on payroll.
They are becoming fragile.
True acceleration requires redundancy. It requires local "dumb" systems that can survive when the "smart" system fails. e/acc hates "dumb" systems. It wants total integration.
That is a recipe for a systemic collapse that no LLM can predict.
Nobody is worried about the Horizontal Plateau.
The risk isn't that we change too fast. It's that we stop changing entirely because we’ve outsourced the "struggle" of creation to a box that can only look backward.
We are accelerating into a room full of mirrors. We see ourselves everywhere, optimized and polished, but we aren't going anywhere new.
The people who win the next decade won't be the ones screaming "e/acc."
Stop calculating "X-risk." Start calculating "Stagnation-risk."
Which "boring" physical technology do you think is more important for the future than the next GPT update?