Accelerationism

" Vitalik Buterin wrote something last year that stuck with me. He called it defensive accelerationism, d/acc for short. The basic idea: we can be pro-technology without being naive about power. We can build systems that defend human agency instead of concentrating control. He was pushing back against effective accelerationism, the Silicon Valley religion that says we should maximize technological development at any cost and trust everything to sort itself out. His manifesto showed a graph labeled 'the future I don't want to see,' a curve where humanity's ability to impact the world keeps growing but all that power gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands until individual humans become essentially irrelevant to the systems running their lives. That graph could be a caption for my entire body of work. What I've been doing in visual form is documenting that exact trajectory. Not proposing solutions, not building alternatives, just making the curve visible. Showing you what the graph looks like when you render it in neon and shadow. Making you look at the endpoint before we reach it, not because I think we'll avoid it (we probably won't) but because clarity has value on its own." From the "Romantic Cyberpunk Manifesto", by Dangiuz, 2026