A former Google engineer and the founder of stealth AI startup Extropic, is behind the Twitter account leading the “effective accelerationism” movement sweeping Silicon Valley.

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.”

  • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

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

    “It’s like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.”

    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.”

    “Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” he said. Of the Jezos persona, he said: “If you’re going to create an ideology in the time of social media, you’ve got to engineer it to be viral.”

    Guillaume “BasedBeffJezos” Verdon appears, by all accounts, to be an utterly insufferable shithead with no redeeming qualities

    • GorillasAreForEating@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      “Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” h

      old and busted: paperclip maximizer

      new hotness: entropy maximizer

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      “As measured in terms of its energy production and consumption”

      That’s so extremely fucking insane, jesus. We are already dealing with those issues at the “low” end and they want to fucking accelerate it? Christ these people are the fucking worst

      • locallynonlinear@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I had kind of the same thought. Woah, maximize long term energy production??? How novel, let’s get our best people right on that, thanks for mentioning it, gosh didnt occur to anyone.

        I wonder when it finally occurs to them that the monetary system is literally a proxy for energy production and consumption, and their entire philosophy might as well read: “make more $$$.” I’ll have to ask the stupid question again, what material difference is there between e/acc, ea, and delusion?

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I mean my personal thoughts on it are nuanced. We can’t exactly just stop everything, and there’s a clear (and valid) demand for some cases of energy use

          But we also have some extreme problems already, and we reaaaaally need to get a handle on those too. Just headlong running into using more and more is fucking insane

          • locallynonlinear@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yes, I agree. My personal thoughts are also that long term energy maximization is synonymous with regulatorial systems and dealing with the complications of energy use. Paradoxically long term maximization is defeated by any naive short term abuse. Only a naive understanding of physics supports the idea that you can simply, just produce and use more energy just like that.

            Which is why theae takes don’t mean, anything. It’s a revelation to want money and do stupid without consequence.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          There’s a subtype of goldbugs that want “hard money” to be represented by something more universal than gold, like energy. It’s why they convince themselves Bitcoin is worth something. Maybe this joker is one of them.