Trump’s election syncs up with tech backlash against gloom and guilt

Marketplace Tech

American Public Media

Technology, News

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in the tech sector in recent years — the feeling that so many of the advances in internet connectivity, social media and now artificial intelligence might have caused more harm than good, increasing the need for at least caution in the industry and even, possibly, government intervention. But lately a backlash to the backlash has been brewing among techno-optimists. Their movement is called effective accelerationism, a play on the effective altruism community, and its supporters argue that unrestricted technological progress is a force for positive change. It’s received more attention since Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nadia Asparouhova, a writer and researcher who’s been following the rise of the effective accelerationist subculture, often shortened to e/acc.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A Silicon Valley subculture wants to unleash the power of technological progress without constraints.
0:09.2	From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. There's been a lot of doom and gloom in the tech sector in recent years.
0:26.7	The feeling that so many of the advancements in internet connectivity, social media, and now artificial intelligence, might have caused more harm than good, bringing the need for at least
0:40.0	greater caution in the industry, and at most government intervention. But lately, a backlash to the
0:47.6	backlash has been brewing among techno-optimists. It's a movement called effective accelerationismelerationism, a play on the Effective Altruism
0:56.3	community. And its supporters believe unrestricted technological progress is a force for positive
1:02.6	change in the world. It's gotten more attention since Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
1:09.0	Nadia Asperova is a writer and researcher who's been following the rise
1:13.2	of the effective accelerationist subculture, often shortened to EAC.
1:18.7	I think maybe the first thing to point out about it is that it's not really a coherent ideology.
1:23.5	It's almost like an umbrella term that covers a lot of these smaller subcultures that have
1:28.5	formed in tech since the backlash in the mid-2010s, where tech went from being super celebrated
1:36.2	and supported under the Obama administration.
1:39.2	And during this time where it was sort of coming up with the software boom to suddenly having this turn, where
1:45.4	it was seen as tech having a negative influence on politics and on society.
1:50.0	And I think that was caused a lot of whiplash for technologists, where they went from being
1:54.7	widely celebrated to widely reviled.
1:57.9	And they sort of, you know, kept their heads down for a little bit. EAC emerged from the
2:02.6	sort of ashes of that as a response for people on tech to say, hey, actually, I'm really proud
2:08.1	of what I'm working on. I think tech has good things to contribute to the world and creating more
2:13.4	things is good. Building more things is good. And we shouldn't be afraid of that. We shouldn't be reflexively afraid of the future.
2:20.3	We should be excited to build more things and do more things.
	...

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