Accelerationism, Decelerationism, and Bitcoin \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Accelerationism, Decelerationism, and Bitcoin

7579 sats \ 23 comments \ @kr 18 Nov 2023 bitcoin

There seems to be a growing divide in the tech community over the pursuit of technological advances and the risks they pose.

A few recent examples:

SpaceX is pushing the frontier of space exploration while getting pushback from Fish & Wildlife Service biologists over launch impacts on quail eggs and land crabs.
I’m hearing some top tech CEOs that believe OpenAI’s decision to fire Sam Altman stem from the board’s concerns about AI risks.
Even in Bitcoin, there are pretty strong voices pushing for both protocol experimentation and protocol ossification

I’m trying to wrap my head around this debate, but don’t yet have a clear understanding of what each crowd believes.

As far as I can tell, the largest movements seem to be:

the “e/acc” or effective accelerationism crowd that believe accelerating tech progress will solve society’s problems
the decelerationism crowd that believes slowing down tech progress will solve society’s problems
and then there is the effective altruism crowd which i think is part of the decelerationism crowd but i don’t really know enough about it to be sure. the only times i’ve heard that phrase used were in conversations about SBF and Sam Altman.

Would love it if someone on here could steelman these competing ideologies and really break down the different ways they see the world.

As a side note, I also wonder how to categorize Bitcoiners using these frameworks.

There are certainly a number of Bitcoiners advocating for more tech progress, both within and outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem, but there is also a cohort of Bitcoiners that dislike new tech and long for traditional architecture, agriculture, culture, and a stable, reliable Bitcoin without new features.

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1637 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 18 Nov 2023

This is a great post and an important issue to dig into.

Here's an attempt to steelman the degrowth people, who overlap greatly with the deceleration people -- I don't think they can reasonably be treated separately, given the forces at play. Note that this isn't a definitive steelman, because I think this is a big tent group. But it's one particular type of steelman.

The capitalist system, whose most foundational (or perhaps only) axiom is that profit must be produced above all else, is doing great harm to the world because its basis in economic calculation renders invisible things that are non-economic, or that poorly fit into a property rights paradigm.

For instance, when a beautiful drive has been ruined for hundreds of millions of person-hours, this loss is unseen. What is seen is the advertising revenue. The suffering of billions of creatures in the factory farm system is also unseen -- it's worth nothing. The only relevant factor to the system is the profit that can be realized by selling chickens. The turmoil that climate change will wreak on billions of people, most of them poor, is likewise irrelevant. Even property ownership, in this case, won't protect their interests.

For all these reasons, the system must be reformed or changed; since this system is a natural expression of the pursuit of profit and growth, and an expression of technology, we need a new set of foundational assumptions, and we need to turn back the dial on the state of civilization, including its attitudes toward growth and technology.

385 sats \ 0 replies \ @_b_o_n_e_s_ 18 Nov 2023

I think some may argue this, for sure:

we need to turn back the dial on the state of civilization, including its attitudes toward growth and technology.

But I think others in this group are suggesting:

as a consequence of

using oil and warming the planet, or
using plastic for everything and having low sperm counts, low population growth, or
using chemical fertilizers and producing food with no nutritional value, and chemical pesticides and killing insect populations which are base for so much of our natural ecosystems, etc etc

we will experience the impacts of not accounting for all inputs and be forced to evolve, so let's consider alternatives now.

I think there is a difference between these two positions.

228 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Nov 2023

Good steelman

1472 sats \ 2 replies \ @davidw 18 Nov 2023

Generally, I think it can be summed-up that the world is going through immense change, the likes of which we have not seen before. For our generation or others. Included is a bunch of new tech, good and bad.

This follows a period of immense stagnation, where it seems on the surface many technologies have been suppressed and held-back for years or decades. Perhaps for either the cost-benefit to make sense, or for the moment to cause maximal societal impact.

The reaction we see ‘just stop oil’, ESG hysteria and the call for regulations, is natural. We as humans don’t like change. Especially not of this magnitude. Not to mention, lobbying gets done by incumbent companies with outsized influence or a headstart already. Trying to build a moat and prevent further disruption.

The best we can do, is be open to change and to keep experimenting with new things in my mind. Stick to our values, on privacy and inclusion and transparency. If so, it will be easier for us, than others in society. Those without a critical eye, who are resistant to change are going to find these next 5-10 years ever more challenging to navigate, I believe.

Centralised systems & honeypots are likely to keep failing and leaking data. Hacks, attacks, leaks, downtime… it’s going to be never-ending when SHTF. Soon after, people will be demanding decentralised tech, for fear of being burned ever again. We’ve had peak fiat.

That’s my 2 sats.

467 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 18 Nov 2023

yeah good points, it seems like really big changes have been mostly constrained to software over the last couple decades though.

there’s a good book called the rise and fall of american growth which makes a case that a lot of the zero-to-one changes in america happened 50-100 years ago, and that recent paradigm-shifts have been much less frequent.

it covers things like:

cars
sewage systems
electric lighting
air travel
television

however, i think you’re right that we are on the cusp of a lot of new changes that will affect both our digital and physical worlds with AI, Bitcoin, 3D printing, biotech, etc…

597 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 18 Nov 2023

100%.

My favourite quote from the diamond age novel is:

now nanotechnology has made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it.

We may be a little way off that right now, but an abundant future is not beyond us.

Think of all the product & engineering resource that has been wasted on changing button sizes, or text copy for a 7% conversion gain. Or to fund the advertising suction cup.

Imagine those gains being redirected to open-source propulsion systems or something of the like. How many work hours that would save for people worldwide. We’ve been sooo inefficient with our talents for the last 20 years. And so it certainly feels like an inflexion point.

All these rumours of being able to harness gravity, fusion power or weather. There’s untold potential on the other side of these changes.

I hope we as bitcoiners continue to be open to building on the cutting edge of other verticals also. I do see some disengaging and wishing certain shifts were not happening. But we need cutting edge hardware as well as software. Not just building novelty or nostalgic products. (As much as I value those).

946 sats \ 0 replies \ @ratiotile 18 Nov 2023

I tend to think technology generally expands the range of our capabilities rather than being good or evil in and of itself. Although not all technology is created equal in that regard.

Nuclear energy also comes with nuclear bombs.

The internet is a repository of information which can be used to advance and democratize our collective knowledge, but also to algorithmically manipulate us, spy on us, and waste our time. You can use it to give yourself a near-free better-than-college education or you can use it, like more people do, to trade in your mental health for quick dopamine hits.

"No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell."

Therefore, like the quote in @davidw's post, what should be done becomes more important than what could be done, in light of technology's increasing power to do more and more.

Regardless, I don't hold much stake in the deceleration crowd since it seems to me that what can be built, will be built, whatever regulations we may collectively put in place in one time/place now may not be honored in another time/place. It's very possible that calls for deceleration won't slow down the people we'd want it to anyway.

So I think your only real option is to determine what future you want to live in (as opposed to other competing visions), decide what you can do to implement technology in a way that supports that future, and then build it and fight for it. Otherwise, by merely asking everyone to "just stop", you're really only giving up control of how it gets built to someone else's idea of what it should be -- someone who may not listen to your call to "just stop", and who may have radically different views than you on what to build with it.

731 sats \ 4 replies \ @erby 18 Nov 2023

Life is like a pendulum that swinging back and forth. In the momentum of moving from one side to the next is where progress happens. I believe this is a health way for anything to evolve. Stability on one side, and change on the other.

54 sats \ 3 replies \ @kr OP 18 Nov 2023

well said. i guess the growing divide is a signal that we’re somewhere in the middle today… which direction do you think the pendulum is moving?

739 sats \ 2 replies \ @erby 18 Nov 2023

I believe most of this is coming from a point of Centralization vs Decentralization. The internet has disintermediated the control structure of the past and we are witnessing the breakdown happen.

54 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 18 Nov 2023

i see, and do you think there is a clean overlap between acceleration/deceleration and centralization/decentralization?

or is it more accurate to illustrate these ideas on a 2x2 chart where there are spectrums between each extreme?

835 sats \ 0 replies \ @erby 18 Nov 2023

I think you're on the right path with the 2x2 chart, but I'm not sure if it can be simplified so easily. I personally believe that technology is always going to propel us forward (acceleration) and the way society reacts to the changing technology is either going to be progressive or conservative (depending on how the particular technology effects the population).

101 sats \ 1 reply \ @Louferlou 19 Nov 2023

There are certainly a number of Bitcoiners advocating for more tech progress, both within and outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem, but there is also a cohort of Bitcoiners that dislike new tech and long for traditional architecture, agriculture, culture, and a stable, reliable Bitcoin without new features.

I know some of these Bitcoiners and as far as i can tell they are certainly not in favor of a slowdown of progress, they are perfectly aware that they rely of the greatest prosperity of others to be able to live their own life as they intend to. They understand, at the opposite of the more left minded people advocating for a global "degrowth", that their way of living would be incredibly hard without all the technological comfort that a capitalist economy can bring.

They are just asking to be left in peace, this is a way of life they want, they just aspire to not be bothered by some statist or taxe collector or other parasite. They are fond of a more local and "free association" way of life. They want to be free, but not at the expenses of others. Thanks to the overall wealth of the society from which they profit, as their simple way of life now allow them to afford the incredibly cheap products that capitalism can produce. It's as simple as that.

For the Bitcoin part though they are not alone to not willing to "add new feature". In the same way that the cohort of Bitcoiners you try to describe in the quote, people advocating for ossification are just asking those who want to change the code to be left alone. We don't want your new features because we don't need them and even think they will harm Bitcoin, but they don't forbid you to fork the code and "innovate", you are free to do it.

To conclude putting "conservative" bitcoiners in the same bag that people being against innovation is completely wrong, it could almost be interpreted as a extremely dishonest argument in order to try to discredit people you disagree with. Bitoiners are pro free market, more than any other people on earth. They welcome any competitor who wants to compete with there product, but they despise and fight the true malicious competitor who try to destroy their product from the inside.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 19 Nov 2023

appreciate the nuance, i think you’re generally right

588 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Nov 2023

I definitely used to be in the "e/acc" camp and I would love to be back in that camp. What I've seen the past few years is massive tyrannical coopting of a wide range of potentially great technologies. It's caused me to pause and my enthusiasm for technological progress to wane.

I'm now most excited about technologies that build up parallel capacities to the status quo systems that have been captured. It's not the same kind of progress I used to get excited about, because it's a bunch of recreating the wheel exercises, but we needed a bunch of new wheels before we could move forward.

1119 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 18 Nov 2023

One of the fundamental principles of Bitcoin is storage. Of value, or energy, of time.
The other is decentralisation. Reducing dependence and attack surfaces.

With those in mind, I do understand why different people in the community want to stick to traditional ways of doing things. To operate their life based on organic sound principles. Those tried and tested from history. If we all did the same, would the world be a better place? Most probably. ——-

Retooling vs Pure Innovation

In Bitcoin I see we are 80% focused on spinning-off the existing system but in a more decentralised manner. Copying what has worked for years now. Nostr clients replicating current social media & use cases, for example. LN payment processors providing fiat-like checkout experiences. This is great to onboard new users. But could we build bigger? I believe we have bigger brainpower than this.

I hope we can challenge the status quo more and build completely new experiences with sound principles.

Some crazy ideas:

Shipping packages to city lockers, via Lightning. Why do we need physical addresses in 2023? Coordinates + blocktime = commerce.
Geoarbitraged purchases. Minimizing import & sales taxes.
Tiered Nostr IDs, with single login. A software wrapper to interface with centralised IDs like Signin with Apple. Moving away from one identifier for all.
Powerful Wifi routers, extenders & satellite dishes that can be provisioned for mesh networking.
Pooling computing resources and data storage for zaps.
Recycle centers that instantly weigh, filter and onboard/pay people with Bitcoin.
Peer to peer personal security/travel/chauffeur services. G4S but for sovereign individuals.
3D printable chips & electronic circuitboards for IOT at home, with guides & supplies (for kids too).
Illuminating clothing with zaps (ultra low power Bluetooth).
Private healthcare, microbiome or genetic analysis kits with provable privacy.

953 sats \ 0 replies \ @clr 18 Nov 2023

I think it's not about tech, but about whether particular technologies centralize power or distribute it.

e/acc promote tech that gives power to Silicon Valley types, the State and VC bros/bankers at the expense of everyone else. Usually they are dismissive of or hostile towards technologies that empower the individual like Bitcoin and Nostr (technologies that they cannot capture).
Decelerationists maybe feel like everything is happening faster than they can comprehend and want a break. They forget that we need tech to fight against entropy; for the individual and species survival.
Effective altruism is the ploy that the e/acc crowd uses as a justification to accumulate more power. Who would dare oppose them if they have a 'scientific' method that maximizes the 'common good' (in theory, of course; individual freedom be damned).

486 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinosphere 19 Nov 2023

This is, at it's core, a political stance.

You either want all of society to revert, back to days that seem brighter than they are today, or you want it to fail forward fast, hitting a wall and crumbling to the point where something better must rise out of the ashes... And quickly.

The Isaac Asimov classic "Foundation series" was precisely about a galactic empire's struggle of this issue over millennia. But of course we mere humans want to see results within our lifetimes. I choose bitcoin as my accelerationist weapon of choice to make society better. Seasteading would be another major tool I'd employ.

These are both also political tools, not mere technology. They force the world and everyone's behavior in it to transform. Hopefully for the better.

Decelerationists are luddites. Not only do I feel that there simply was not a time behind us worthy of reverting to, but getting back to it requires doing things like removing all the laws from the books that have been added since then. - Something politicians simply do not do under any circumstances. Only acceleration can ultimately remove laws from the books, although historically that was always a bloody undertaking. Hopefully with bitcoin that won't be the case this time.

230 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 18 Nov 2023

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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthwyrm 19 Nov 2023

As a side note, I also wonder how to categorize Bitcoiners using these frameworks.

I suspect Bitcoiners, a group largely dominated by libertarians and anarchists, find themselves opposed to team decel whose position necessitates large government / threat of violence to slow down AI development.

Some members here are also quite vocal against AI, but their stance differs from the decels. It's not a political doomer narrative. Rather, they raise the concern that AI tools will erode our ability to think and act for ourselves, and we are better off minimising our usage of it. They approach the issue from a self-sufficiency angle (classic Bitcoinism).

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @shado_op 19 Nov 2023

Historically, seems similar to the Industrial Revolution... Massive tech/political/sociological change in a relatively short time frame. Big movements in society both for, and against. (Most people dont realise there was popular resistance to change, it wasnt just a few malcontents!). From a historical perspective, there were good people and arguments on both sides.
But ultimately, change won. Imv, new tech will always win because we cant turn back time and un-discover something. The issue is how do we get involved, to do our bit, to make that change work for us all. Globally. And anyone already on Nostr, in these early days, has far more in common than we realise! Great debate, btw!

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @DiracDelta 19 Nov 2023

e/acc is fiat LARPing from people who spiritually feel there is something lacking in the fiat world, yet it is nothing other than a mimetic branch of fiat from mentally ill bitcoin deniers. Why do you wish to join in their delusion? Embrace the pain of embracing the truth, or face far greater pain.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 19 Nov 2023

Why do you wish to join in their delusion?

I haven’t said anything about joining anyone, just trying to understand these movements better