The Idols of Acceleration - by AE Snow

The Democratic Futurist

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The Idols of Acceleration<br>Entropy, Evolution and the Politics of the AI Race

AE Snow<br>Jul 11, 2026

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William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, c. 1805.<br>What appears to accelerationists as the inevitable telos of a cosmic process marching toward singularity is, in fact, the outcome of a contested present, rooted in a selection environment that is shaped by humanity.<br>What is the selection environment for AI and how can it be changed? That is the question that really matters. It is also one that tech-determinists of various kinds would like you to believe is outside history and outside the grasp of politics.<br>Anthropic has recently articulated an ambiguous position with respect to the AI race. It claims that recursive self-improvement is closer than people realise, and that this could lead to a runaway acceleration. It also argues that the world should build the capacity for a coordinated slowdown if the risks become severe enough, even while emphasising how difficult such coordination would be. It would appear that a leading AI lab can be both an engine of acceleration and an advocate of restraint.<br>Anthropic occupies this position because the conditions that produced it remain open and contested in a way that stronger forms of accelerationism deny. Its ambivalence is therefore not incidental to the story. It is evidence of the several pressures acting within the selection environment itself. This doesn’t mean pressures toward speed are weak; on the contrary, the present selection environment is plainly weighted toward acceleration currently. But the existence of a strong tendency does not tell us how much room remains for choice, intervention or redirection.<br>The most comprehensive accelerationist story is designed to deny that such room exists by presenting a chain of necessity running from physics, through biology into capitalism and intelligence itself. Inspect the chain closely, however, and the locus of determinism keeps moving down the chain, until, at each stage, the argument becomes less cosmic, more historical and more amenable to intervention.<br>The singularity, if it comes, will not arrive as the conclusion of the average behaviour of the universe. It will arrive as a product of history – the choices being made at this very moment.<br>The universe has determined that you will subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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The Accelerationist chain

I should confess that I often enjoy accelerationist writing. It characterises technological development in a register usually reserved for myth, on a scale that makes ordinary politics seem parochial. It expresses both a comfort and an exhilaration at forces beyond our control: the double sensation of grandeur and annihilation.<br>But beyond the rhetoric there is a set of claims, and a politics being pursued through them in the here and now. Economic competition is where acceleration acquires its real coercive force; the appeal to physics and evolution matters because it makes that historically produced pressure appear natural, universal and beyond revision.<br>Effective accelerationism comes closest to stating this doctrine in its full form. Its founding arguments rely on an interpretation of thermodynamics. Other accelerationists emphasise different parts of the chain. Land foregrounds the autonomous logic of capitalism; contemporary AI-race arguments often begin only with economic or geopolitical competition. But across these variations, the same structure recurs: a local and historically contingent pressure is redescribed as the expression of a deeper necessity.<br>The accelerationist story is founded on the abstraction of competition as a universal contest that ends in artificial minds. At the level of physics, it is the competition for free energy among dissipative structures, propelling matter towards forms that are more complex and “better” at dissipating. At the level of biology, it becomes natural selection: evolution as a search algorithm that will eventually result in minds. At the level of civilisation, it becomes economic competition, driving those minds to build artificial ones capable of recursively improving themselves.<br>This structure of competitive discipline is recapitulated at every level as a single chain of necessity, each layer determining the next until the destination is reached. At each stage, however, the pressure that is supposed to compel the outcome turns out to permit a great many others, and the destination has to be smuggled in rather than derived. The processes it enlists—entropy, selection, intelligence itself—are mischaracterised, conscripted into what is really a secular theology wearing the branding of the natural sciences.<br>The Thermodynamic Will

Why did you invest in Nvidia? Thermodynamics. Why are you reading this essay? Thermodynamics. Why did the housing market crash? Thermodynamics....