2y ago

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?

www.forbes.com

At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” ...

When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It's like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” ...

On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”

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the wonderful thing about this story is the effort Forbes went to to dox a nazi
- I spent way too much time arguing that NYT didn't dox Slatescott.
- I highly suspect the voice analysis thing was just to confirm what they already knew, otherwise it would have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.
  People on twitter have been speculating that someone who knew him simply ratted him out.
  
  i mean, probably. but also, nazis are just dogshit at opsec.
He noted that Jezos doesn’t reflect his IRL personality. “The memetics and the sort-of bombastic personality, it's what gets algorithmically amplified,” he said, but in real life, “I’m just a gentle Canadian.”
uwu im just a smollbean canadian
Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.”
“It’s like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.”
Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”
“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.”
Guillaume “BasedBeffJezos” Verdon appears, by all accounts, to be an utterly insufferable shithead with no redeeming qualities
- “Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” h
  old and busted: paperclip maximizer
  new hotness: entropy maximizer
- you’ve got to engineer it to be viral.
  All this attention including the whole Andreessen thing and he doesn't go above 50k followers. As far as virality goes that is pretty bad.
  Also from his twitter: "We literally became a sufficient threat to the system that they felt compelled to attempt to neutralize me.
  The thing is, I am a man of belief. You can take everything from me. I don't care. I am going to keep going until I'm dead.
  You cannot stop acceleration."
  Sure buddy the system did that. Keep riding the wave, in five years we will all gather on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west.
- imagine huffing your own farts this hard cause you came up with BasedBeffJezos and posted garbage on Twitter that was so out of touch that monstrous every billionaire instantly agreed with it
  
  oh also, meta-ironic cult is also a term used by Remilia and some of the other Thiel death cults to describe themselves
  
  A fart-huff that hard qualifies as an Alvistime miracle.
- “As measured in terms of its energy production and consumption”
  That’s so extremely fucking insane, jesus. We are already dealing with those issues at the “low” end and they want to fucking accelerate it? Christ these people are the fucking worst
  
  I had kind of the same thought. Woah, maximize long term energy production??? How novel, let's get our best people right on that, thanks for mentioning it, gosh didnt occur to anyone.
  I wonder when it finally occurs to them that the monetary system is literally a proxy for energy production and consumption, and their entire philosophy might as well read: "make more $$$." I'll have to ask the stupid question again, what material difference is there between e/acc, ea, and delusion?
former Google engineer.
Of course. At this point whenever I read something with the phrase former Google engineer I'm just gonna assume they're doing something terrible.
- q: how do you know if someone's a former google engineer?
  xoogler's everywhere, a: AT GOOGLE WE USED TO HAVE A WAY TO...
  
  Ah fuck as a xoogler I do this. Everything I do is terrible (see my advent of code snippets) and I frequently refer to things that existed in the google ecosystem.
In its reaction against both EA and AI safety advocates, e/acc also explicitly pays tribute to another longtime Silicon Valley idea. “This is very traditional libertarian right-wing hostility to regulation," said Benjamin Noys, a professor of critical theory at the University of Chichester and scholar of accelerationism. Jezos calls it the “libertarian e/acc path.”
At least the Italian futurists were up front about their agenda.
“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."
Reading Nudge to engineer the 'Volksschädling' to board the trains voluntarily. Dusting off the old state eugenics compensation programs.
- The fuck do they mean "solve culture"? Is culture a problem to be solved? Actually don't answer that.
  
  even more horrifying — they see culture as a system of equations they can use AI to generate solutions for, and the correct set of solutions will give them absolute control over culture. they apply this to all aspects of society. these assholes didn’t understand hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy or any of the other sci fi they cribbed these ideas from, and it shows
  
  Don’t have to have Culture War when you can just systemically deploy the exact culture you want right from the comfort of your prompt, amirite?!
  (This is a shitpost idea but it’s probably halfway accurate, maybe modulo the prompt (but there will definitely be someone also trying that))
my "not a cult" T-shirt has raised many questions, etc.
HN discovers this article, almost a day later (laggards): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38500192
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
A particularly creepy doxxing by Forbes...
Oh no, are the tools developed by SV startups being used for stuff you don't like? How sad HN.
- I don't want to libel the author by claiming the piece was planted by Beff himself, but what's more likely, this writer who mostly covers what's trending on tiktok gets a big scoop using voice recognition on a twitter space and then writes a glowing dossier? Or beff got on the phone with a publicist and conjured a big reveal with a softball interview all while namedropping his new startup?
  extremely funny that they think this article makes him look good. also extremely funny that they think this is a big scoop
  
  @scgriffith @gerikson
  Buried in that piece is the probable typo but certainly pointed "On X, the platform formally known as Twitter"
- Oh no, are the tools developed by SV startups being used for stuff you don't like? How sad HN.
  tormenting the torment nexus. heh, how the turntables
- lol, I just got lucky and happened to find out about the article about 20 minutes after it was published.
That not a cult quote strategically placed after all the cultish babble quotes mwah perfect journalism
Nerd rapture goofiness

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