Introduction

The philosophy of d/acc, or defensive/decentralization/differential/democratic acceleration, was proposed by Vitalik Buterin in a November 2023 blog post titled My techno-optimism. The post was a response to Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a capstone piece of the long brewing "effective accelerationism" movement.[1]

The intention of critical d/acc is to investigate this philosophy with special attention to the nuances and possibilities of its component parts. This is based off of the premise that the ethical intuitions behind d/acc are epistemically antifragile, meaning that interrogating, deconstructing and elaborating its categories on an open basis will embolden and make stronger its core insights. In this respect, this project hopes to offer d/acc as a prefigurative instance of its own pluralistic aspirations.

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[1] Both pieces should be contextualized in an atmosphere of intellectual movements like accelerationism, effective altruism, transhumanism, xenofeminism, etc., all of which seemed to have special immediacy in '22-'23 in the wake of the sudden ascendance of OpenAI with DALL-E and ChatGPT (backgrounded by the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried empire and the escalating persistence of the climate crisis).