P/ACC

The most powerful men in tech are no longer simply building companies. They are building a politics without politics: strip out every constraint, let the engine run, and call the result freedom.

An engine without a governor does not run free; it runs away, and a runaway has to come down somewhere. Effective accelerationism says it comes down on liberty. The evidence says it comes down on totalisation, by one of two routes. The state — as fear of the machine becomes the oldest argument there is for Leviathan, and securitisation declares the emergency that suspends the rules and fuses the frontier labs with the executive. Or the market — as everything is converted into the cost of compute and nothing keeps the standing to refuse it: Autopoietic Capital, a system that serves nothing but itself. The second road is the more dangerous, because it advertises itself in the language of liberty.

Purposive Accelerationism is the third reply. Keep the speed. Rebuild the governor. Write it into the constitution of cyberspace, in code, so that no single hand — not the state's, not the market's, not the brilliant founder's — can close around the whole.

As Pope Leo XIV asked: acceleration in the service of what?