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

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.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Nadia Asparouhova: I think maybe the first thing to point out about it is that it’s not really a coherent ideology. It’s almost like an umbrella term that covers a lot of these smaller subcultures that have formed in tech since the backlash in the mid-2010s, where tech went from being supercelebrated and supported under the [Barack] Obama administration and during this time where it was sort of coming up with the software boom, to suddenly having this turn where it was seen as tech having a negative influence on politics and on society. And I think that caused a lot of whiplash for technologists, where they went from being widely celebrated to widely reviled, and they sort of, you know, kept their heads down for a little bit. E/acc emerged from the sort of ashes of that as a response for people in tech to say, hey, actually, I’m really proud of what I’m working on. I think tech has good things to contribute to the world, and creating more 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. We should be excited to build more things and do more things.

Meghan McCarty Carino: It sounds like it’s kind of taking a tech-optimist viewpoint to sort of the next level, kind of a tech utopian view of the future.

Asparouhova: Yeah, I would say it’s broadly techno-optimist, but with a clearer-eyed view than maybe what people are familiar with from the 2010s. I think back then, they were still trying to figure it out. Tech was still very much a business industry whose success was tied to the creation of startups and the financial success of startups. You saw people, sort of, you know, ham-fistedly applying software to every problem that society is facing and expecting that it would solve every single problem. And that backfired a bit. Whereas now I think, having come through the other side of the backlash, people in tech are aware of, let’s say software specifically, its limitations, but I think the concept of tech has now expanded so much to be so much more than that. Tech is more of a belief, a social belief that, yeah, like we can create a better future together and to not take any existing challenges or priors for granted or believe that they are immutable.

McCarty Carino: How big has this subculture become, and who are some of those sort of leading figures in it?

Asparouhova: It’s hard to say, I guess, how big it is, since I think it’s a widely felt sentiment. Originally, it started with a tweet from a pseudonymous Twitter account in 2022 from someone named Beff Jezos. And I think a lot of the early excitement around e/acc was pushed forward by anonymous Twitter accounts, and since then, I think some of the bigger names of people that got excited about it and started to take on this banner were Marc Andreessen, who’s a prominent venture capitalist, Garry Tan, who’s a Y Combinator president. I mean, I would actually say that the label of “e/acc” probably peaked last year because now it’s given way to just sort of a much more widespread confidence that you see in tech, throughout the tech industry, that was not felt even a year or two ago.

McCarty Carino: I first became aware of this movement around the election of Donald Trump, just sort of seeing this upswelling of memes and videos and enthusiasm for this kind of utopian tech future. Was the election a big moment?

Asparouhova: Very much so, yeah. And I think it really represents this sort of capstone after, yeah, I mean, almost a decade now of doom and gloom in tech. It’s really interesting to sort of contrast it with previous administrations and just sort of like how tech’s relationship to politics has changed over time. But I think going from the Obama era, enjoying a very favored position with the government, but never really doing anything to earn that position, necessarily, it was sort of just everyone was excited about tech at the time. It hadn’t really been time tested or battle tested, to then having to face a much more hostile administration. Now, it feels like everyone has sort of come back together. There’s a lot of feeling of excitement and celebration in tech that’s finally it’s getting a seat at the table in government.

McCarty Carino: From the outside, it sort of looks like, you know, the promotion of a kind of unfettered advancement of technology. I’m curious if there’s any sort of place for regulation, government regulation or self-regulation of the industry among that community?

Asparouhova: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because I think tech gets sort of unfairly painted as libertarian or anti-government, and I don’t, I’m actually not even sure if it ever was. Tech sees government as a potential partner. I think that’s true even now, especially now. Tech is a potential partner to be able to create more opportunities for progress, innovation, development of whatever kind. They see government as a way to help unblock some of the barriers that make it harder for people to experiment with things and try new things. And so they don’t want to get rid of government. They want government to just be better and more aligned with these sorts of collective social interests. It is really about trying to make the government more efficient and better. It’s not about trying to get rid of it.

McCarty Carino: And so what is it about the election that seems to have energized this community so much?

Asparouhova: I think this is the first time where people just feel like they have a seat at the table, where, yeah, they have someone who is willing to listen to what tech has to say and who seems aligned with tech’s interests. Tech is often thought of as being historically Democrat, and then some people have talked about maybe a more, like, rightward shift in recent years. I don’t actually think that’s the right way to characterize it. Tech has never been perfectly aligned with Democrats or Republicans. It’s always been a bit of politically homeless, I guess. But yeah, I think this is the first time where it feels like, OK, we can actually have a place in the administration. You’re seeing people that are, you know, legitimate and, you know, well-respected tech players who are getting more involved in government. And I think that’s flipped now, from seeing the government as something that is always getting in the way of tech to actually being open and interested to hear what tech has to say, and so hopefully they will learn how to use that responsibility well and enact some interesting changes.

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