Who Is BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?
▻https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/12/01/who-is-basedbeffjezos-the-leader-of-effective-accelerationism-eacc/?sh=80470f87a13f
ndreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen says @BasedBeffJezos is a “patron saint of techno-optimism.” Garry Tan, who cofounded the venture firm Initialized Capital before becoming CEO of Y Combinator, calls him “brother.” Sam Altman, who founded OpenAI — the company that finally mainstreamed artificial intelligence — has jokingly sparred with him on Twitter. Elon Musk says his memes are “🔥🔥🔥.”
Andreessen, Tan, and several dozen other Silicon Valley luminaries have also begun aligning with a movement that “Jezos” claims to have founded: “effective accelerationism,” or e/acc. At its core, e/acc argues that technology companies should innovate faster, with less opposition from “decels” or “decelerationists” — folks like AI safety advocates and regulators who want to slow the growth of technology.
At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”
So just who is the anonymous Twitter personality whose message of unfettered, technology-crazed capitalism at all costs has captivated many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful?
Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.
In a wide-ranging interview with Forbes, Verdon confirmed that he is behind the account, and extolled the e/acc philosophy. “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.”
At its core, effective accelerationism embraces the idea that social problems can be solved purely with advances in technology, rather than by messy human deliberation. “We’re trying to solve culture by engineering,” Verdon said. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you engineer ways to incentivize certain behaviors via gradients and reward, and you can program a civilizational system."
He expects computers to eventually solve legal problems too: "At the end of the day, law is just natural language code for how to operate the system, and there’s no reason why technology can’t have impact there in terms of social problems.”
Not everyone agrees that engineering is the answer to societal problems. “The world is just not like that. It just isn’t,” said Fred Turner, a professor of communications at Stanford University who has studied accelerationism. “But if you can convince people that it is, then you get a lot of the power that normally accrues to governments.”
E/acc is also a reaction to another Silicon Valley movement: effective altruism (or EA). While it was originally focused on optimizing each person’s ability to help others (and is known for some of its most famous adherents’ willingness to engage in fraud), EA has also become a hotbed for people concerned about whether AI might become sentient and murder humans — so-called “doomers” that Jezos says “are instrumental to forces of evil and civilizational decline.”
“We’ve got to make sure AI doesn’t end up in the hands of a single company.”
Guillaume Verdon
“If we only focus on the end of the world, bio weapons, [artificial general intelligence] ending us all, then … we might engender our own doom by obsessing over it and it demoralizes people and it doesn’t make them want to build,” Verdon said.
#Accelerationisme #Jezos #Religion #Intelligence_artificielle #Silicon_Valley
