SILICON VALLEY IS a physical place, but it’s also a style of thinking, a state of being, and an ethos. Its reach has extended far beyond its origins south of San Francisco, beyond even Austin and Seattle, where it has displaced anyone who dares utter words that aren’t from a VC investment thesis or pitch deck. The trillion-dollar-plus market caps of the biggest tech companies exceed the GDPs of all but the richest countries. The Valley’s companies are ensconced in every single part of our lives—art, culture, commerce, politics, wars, and communications all run through their devices and apps. What if, though, the truth is that we haven’t Silicon Valleyed hard enough?
Adherents of “effective accelerationism,” a trendy new phrase passing itself off as an ideology, think that’s the case. It’s a worldview that began with a few anonymous Twitter accounts back in 2022 and has since taken off, culminating in a 5,000-word October manifesto from Valley oligarch and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen that generated enough online discourse that New York Times columnist Ezra Klein felt obligated to suspend his book leave to weigh in.
Fans of e/acc (pronounced “E-ack”) believe that speeding up profit-driven technological innovation is an inevitability—and
