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

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.”

Shitgenstein1,

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.

bitofhope,
@bitofhope@awful.systems avatar

The fuck do they mean “solve culture”? Is culture a problem to be solved? Actually don’t answer that.

froztbyte,

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))

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

use case for urbit found

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

The best use case for Urbit is marking its proponents as first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

rip_art_bell,
@rip_art_bell@lemmy.world avatar

Nerd rapture goofiness

sailor_sega_saturn,
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

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.

froztbyte,

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…

swlabr,

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.

m,
@m@blat.at avatar

@swlabr As a ten year veteran of the SRE mines I’ve always tried really hard not to do this, but I did once leave a job partly as a result of the CTO justifying a decision with “But it says here in the SRE book that that’s the way they do this at Google!” and completely ignoring my protestations that god no, that certainly wasn’t how we did it at least in my bit of SRE.

swlabr,

Oh GOD that is kafkaesque. It’s been too few jobs since leaving the G for that to happen to me yet, but I’m sure I’ll get there one day.

m,
@m@blat.at avatar

@swlabr To be fair to the authors, they found that pretty horrifying too.

grumpybozo,
@grumpybozo@toad.social avatar

@m @swlabr Tangential technical q: would not an SRE which came from the SRE mines be better referred as “refined ore?”

m,
@m@blat.at avatar

@grumpybozo @swlabr We're more of an exclusive ore, I like to think.

gnomicutterance,
@gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    swlabr,

    “I used to work for a small search engine company”

    s/search engine/ads/

    grumpybozo,
    @grumpybozo@toad.social avatar

    @swlabr Well, both, it’s just that the search engine is so small in comparison.

    swlabr,

    true, tho google wants you to think the sizes are the other way around.

    sc_griffith,
    @sc_griffith@awful.systems avatar

    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

    naevaTheRat,
    @naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    That not a cult quote strategically placed after all the cultish babble quotes mwah perfect journalism

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    the wonderful thing about this story is the effort Forbes went to to dox a nazi

    GorillasAreForEating, (edited )

    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.

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    i mean, probably. but also, nazis are just dogshit at opsec.

    GorillasAreForEating,

    update: Verdon is now accusing another AI researcher of exposing him: twitter.com/GillVerd/status/1730796306535514472

    TinyTimmyTokyo,
    @TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems avatar

    Reading his timeline since the revelation is weird and creepy. It’s full of SV investors robotically pledging their money (and fealty) to his future efforts. If anyone still needs evidence that SV is a hive mind of distorted and dangerous group-think, this is it.

    GorillasAreForEating,

    I still find it amusing that Siskind complained about being “doxxed” when he used his real first and middle name.

    Evinceo,

    I spent way too much time arguing that NYT didn’t dox Slatescott.

    gerikson,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    HN discovers this article, almost a day later (laggards): 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.

    GorillasAreForEating,

    lol, I just got lucky and happened to find out about the article about 20 minutes after it was published.

    skillissuer,
    @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    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

    sc_griffith,
    @sc_griffith@awful.systems avatar

    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

    hairyvisionary,
    @hairyvisionary@fosstodon.org avatar

    @sc_griffith @gerikson
    Buried in that piece is the probable typo but certainly pointed "On X, the platform formally known as Twitter"

    blakestacey,
    @blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

    my “not a cult” T-shirt has raised many questions, etc.

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