The AI Evangelists vs. Hollywood
Silicon Valley's new ‘effective accelerationism’ argues that nothing should stop AI, entertainment be damned
To understand the current tech mindset is to understand Marc Andreessen, one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley history, with his firm a16z having invested in Stripe, X, Waymo, SpaceX and, of course, Facebook early on. It has $35 billion in assets under management across multiple funds.
Unlike tight-lipped Hollywood executives, Andreessen isn’t shy in sharing his opinions publicly — on X, where he is a frequent poster, and in podcasts and longform essays equally designed to provoke. His public persona has earned him millions of acolytes (and many detractors) — and helped make him billions.
So in October, when Andreessen published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” on — where else? — his own website (Andreessen is widely critical of many corners of media), the more than 5,200-word post mainstreamed an esoteric idea known up north as e/acc — or more formally, effective accelerationism.
In the Hollywood bubble, the piece barely made a ripple. But on X (Elon is a pal, ya know?) and in the tech circles that have lapped entertainment financially and culturally many times over, Andreessen’s pronouncements — on why society must embrace tech’s possibilities while sloughing off any potential pitfalls — echoed for weeks.
So what is e/acc? At first, it sounds like the old-fashioned “we’re making the world a better place” jargon with which Silicon Valley was once synonymous. But the undertones for Hollywood, at least for those hoping to preserve its current way of life and business, are ominous.
Still, writer and performer Adam Conover — a WGA board member who served on its negotiating committee in the recent labor negotiations — calls B.S. on AI fervor. “Most of the claims about what AI supposedly will or will not be able to do in the future are nothing but company marketing, done to boost stock prices, and repeated by a credulous media that doesn’t ask basic questions,” he says, while making it clear that his opinions were his own and not reflective of the guild. (The WGA declined to comment for this article, and a request for comment from SAG-AFTRA was not returned.)
He adds: “These techno-utopians are not just stupid, they're maliciously stupid.”
But not everyone agrees. Including the market.