---
title: TL;DR
book: Purposive Accelerationism
author: '@jamie247'
position: 1 of 24
canonical: https://whatispacc.org/ebook/#tldr
version: 1.1
language: en-GB
licence: all rights reserved; quote with attribution
---

# TL;DR

## Purposive Accelerationism: A Third Way

Most founders, executives and the politicians trying to keep up with them are offered a binary: you are either for acceleration and human flourishing, or you are a doomer. For many of us the choice does not sit easily, because it is drawn on one simple axis, faster or slower, where every check looks like a brake. A truer map of the terrain has three: yes speed, but also who holds power in the system and what governance mechanisms we have to keep them in balance. The corner that stands empty today is fast, yet governed and plural, and this book is written to fill it.

## A Genealogy and Formal Critique of Accelerationism

Effective accelerationism has a poetic appeal, yet its contradictions leave an unease in those of us who ask what future all this effort and toil is steering towards. That led me on a year-long journey through its genealogy, which revealed the internal tensions to be a feature not a bug: the doctrine is a theology, a vibe and a meme, not a science of progress, and it ultimately amounts to a fatalism, a nihilism and, worse, a permission for anyone to do as they will, because technology and capitalism, fused into a techno-capitalism, are the thermodynamic will of the universe running itself down. Its boldest move is to deny any governance beyond the discipline of the market as heresy, in doing so contravening one of the foundational laws of cybernetics: a system without a governor, the mechanism that holds it to a set value, does not run free. The rival camp, a safety movement grown out of effective altruism, keeps the creed that the machine is accelerating and differs only on whose hand should hold it, so its remedy is not to stop the engine but to seat the state at the centre, a pause only to make the handover smooth. However an engine without a governor directly at the machine substrate runs away; not towards freedom but towards totalisation, by the market and the oligarch, by the state or, by a hybrid Leviathan where the two fuse.

## Constituting an AI Commons

Since the industrial revolution capital has subsumed human labour and now, as it mutates into techno-capitalism, subsumes cognition; the last turn that follows is a system setting its own purposes. A clock measures how far the machine still needs us, our standing in the system as some advocate for its formal personhood. The reply is neither more regulation in the traditional sense, which moves on the electoral cycle while products ship in weeks, nor exit alone, but a governor built directly into the machine substrate and run at its pace on a recipe the cryptographic systems of the cypherpunks have demonstrated with Bitcoin: a testable rule, cheap checking, and checkers whose interests diverge and the possibility for an AI commons that hardcodes five human capacities into the internet, to constitute oneself, connect, create, transact and collectivise. Same speed, different direction.