Accelerationism, Entropy and Dangerous Nonsense

Accelerationism is an attempt to incinerate everything that humans value on the Altar of Stupidity.

Accelerationism, also known as Effective Accelerationism or "e/acc" is an ideology that finds its roots in the Silicon Valley and has grown louder in recent years. In a nutshell, it advocates that technological progress is necessarily always positive and must be accelerated at all costs. Its influence is becoming particularly troubling at a time when the development of a technology, Artificial General Intelligence, threatens to wipe out everything that humans value in this world.

But is this ideology as dogmatic as it sounds from my single sentence description? Let's take a look at the website effectiveacceleration.tech, a manifesto of sorts, and find out what their arguments are.

Effective Acceleration means accepting the future.

The force of technocapitalistic progress is inevitable. Technocapital is an inexorable physical process.

"Accepting the future". This formulation is interesting, it seems to imply that Accelerationism is a philosophy of acceptance and non-action (spoiler alert: it is not, it recommends specific actions).

Effective Accelerationism is a belief, rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, that the universe itself is an optimization process creating life which constantly expands. The engine of this expansion is technocapital. This engine cannot be stopped. The ratchet of progress only ever turns in one direction. Going back is not an option.

What does the second law of thermodynamics tell us? One formulation of this law establishes the concept of entropy as a measure of disorder of a system, and states that entropy in a closed system can only increase. A classic illustration is that, even though the laws of physics perfectly describe both the process of a glass shattering into pieces and the process of shards spontaneously reforming into a glass, this second case is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics¹.

According to this law, disorder in the cosmos can only ever increase, ultimately leading to the Heat Death of the Universe, when every useful bit of energy has been dispersed as heat and nothing can ever happen again. In case some confusion remains with this concept, try and replace the word "entropy" with "disorder" in what follows.

So this manifesto makes an analogy between this physical process and "technocapital". Technocapital is the engine of the increase of entropy. The increase of entropy is inexorable. Therefore, technocapital is inexorable.

The laws of physics tell us that the universe exponentially favors the existence of futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy, and convert that free energy to even more energy. All life emerges from this processes. Life replicates to consume free energy and convert it to entropy. Evolution is only one special case of this general principle, and it is only the first.

Interestingly for an ideology that is so focused on the concept of entropy, e/acc seems to miss the point that entropy only increases depending on which system you look at. The entropy of the universe taken as a whole may inexorably increase, but this is not the case for every subpart of the universe. Take the example of humans from the middle ages building a monument. Their work overall generates entropy by turning food (low entropy energy) into heat (high entropy energy). But this conversion is not what matters to humans in their acts. What matters to them is another conversion: the transformation of a pile of stones (high entropy), to a neatly organised monument (low entropy). Even though when looking at the sum of both processes, food consumption and construction work, the overall entropy has increased, the entropy of what matters to humans has decreased. It is easy to see that what is of value to us, humans, is the low disorder system, not the high disorder one. In that regard, the whole history of humans can be rephrased as a struggle to lower the entropy of the things we care about, in exchange for an increase in the entropy of things we do not care about.

The second critical system that must be understood on this principle is technocapital. Technocapital is a form of intelligence that is above the individual human. As individual humans, we are cogs in the technocapital metalifeform. It is this metalifeform that is creating the artificial intelligence singularity; technocapital dynamically morphs the meta-meta-organism such that all utility in the environment is captured and utilized towards the consumption of free energy and the creation of entropy, as dictated by basic physics.

This is a very contrived way of saying that life considered as a whole increases entropy, by eventually turning all the environment into heat.

I think it is time to take a break and call out the obvious absurdity of this text - although it must not be that obvious given the number of supposedly smart people who endorse this nonsense.

So, the entropy in the universe increases inexorably. Sure. Now, please explain to me what that has to do with the way humans should act? Ever heard of Hume's Guillotine? I think not. But there is no need to summon such philosophical tool to cast a light on the quackery of this ideology. Instead, let's point out the tautology of its dogma by rephrasing it in a way that prunes out all the embellishments - all the while staying true to what they mean, let’s not build a strawman.

"Opposing technological progress is a project to decrease the entropy, but it is futile because entropy only ever increases".

Let me tell you something. Humans - apparently at the exception of e/accs - do not care about the concept of "entropy". This concept is a tool that we invented to try and understand our universe. Humans care about the likes of love, suffering, beauty and joy. Now, it may or may not turn out (and it does not matter the slightest to this argument), that trying to increase love and decrease suffering are not the quickest way to increase entropy. It may be that pursuing technological progress while disregarding love and suffering is more effective in that regard.

But again, why does it matter? Why arbitrarily decide that the rate at which entropy increases is what humans should optimize for? Should we apply the same reasoning to other invariants of the laws of physics? The universe is continuously expanding, does that mean that the goal of humanity should be to accelerate the expansion of the universe?

So at the heart of accelerationism is a childish confusion between what is, "entropy always increases..." and what ought to be, "...so we must increase entropy faster".

e/acc is not an ideology. It is not a movement. It is simply an acknowledgement of the truth.

Again, a misunderstanding of simple concepts. An acknowledgement of the truth is when you state the second law of thermodynamics, and you STOP THERE. When instead you continue your sentence, arbitrarily stating that this way the universe is implies a way humans should act, this is called an ideology - actually a dogma. And, with all due respect (joke), Accelerationism is a rather stupid one.

I don't think there is a need to read and scrutinise much more of this nonsense. Let's close on that excerpt, which perfectly illustrates the subtitle of this post:

Rather than fear, we have faith in the adaptation process and wish to accelerate this to the asymptotic limit: the technocapital singularity. We have no affinity for biological humans or even the human mind structure. We are posthumanists in the sense that we recognize the supremacy of higher forms of free energy accumulation over lesser forms of free energy accumulation. We aim to accelerate this process to preserve the light of technocapital.

Allow me to rephrase this: “We do not care about humans, we only care about increasing entropy, even if it means the end of humans”. Do you know what is a very effective process to quickly increase entropy? Fire.

Accelerationism is an attempt to incinerate everything that humans value on the altar of Stupidity.

1. This is only probabilistically true. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the process of shards of glass spontaneously reorganising into a cup is possible, but astronomically unlikely.