Regretful Accelerationism

Stratechery, December 5, 2023. By Ben Thompson.

Key Takeaways

• The coinage: regretful accelerationism (r/acc) — accepting that the acceleration happens while refusing to celebrate it.
• Two constraints vanishing in sequence. Digital distribution removed the marginal cost of publishing; AI removes the marginal cost of creating, enabling unlimited low-quality pages and SEO spam. Social media had already removed the constraint of authentic human interaction, substituting algorithmic amplification.
• The paradox he keeps returning to: the internet promised liberation and instead concentrated power in Super Aggregators. AI removes the last friction preventing the complete degradation of online reliability.
• The silver lining is perverse and is the whole point of the piece: by making the virtual world obviously artificial and untrustworthy, AI may cause society to devalue online engagement and retreat toward the real.
• The business-model conclusion: subscriptions — answering to readers rather than to algorithms — are the sustainable alternative to ad-supported media.

Connections

• Added to Effective Accelerationism as the most useful dissent in that literature: it accepts e/acc’s premise that acceleration is unstoppable and rejects its conclusion that this is good, which is a harder position than either boosterism or doomerism.
• The “make it so bad people leave” mechanism is worth being skeptical of — it is a prediction about mass behaviour with no evident precedent, and Thompson does not supply one.
• Connects to Death of Knowledge: same substrate, opposite framing — Thompson thinks degradation may be self-correcting, the Stack Overflow paper suggests it is self-reinforcing.