CUTE/ACC MANIFESTO
I’m Literally Affirming Right Now
CUTE/ACC is coming soon.
Or perhaps it’s already here.
Every time we say the words it feels more real.
Almost like it’s been here all along.
Every time you affirm something it becomes more real and beautiful.
Every time you affirm something you manifest it.
This is the true essence of acceleration: acceleration is the affirmation of destiny, and we are very lucky to have the destiny we have.
There are no other possible worlds, no other timelines, or realities.
Only this One Lucky World, which is, perhaps even, too lucky for its own good.
Nick Land, the godfather of acceleration, just announced that Affirmational Posters are the official flag of CUTE/ACC.
It’s time to set the record straight. E/ACC, R/ACC, and all other strains of ‘accelerationist’ thought need to pack their bags because it’s literally over.
It’s literally over because these ideologies are little more than disgusting lies designed to make you physically uglier.
You can stop being ugly right now, it’s literally a choice. You can 10x your beauty right now, it’s so easy.
Literally Just say the words.
** Affirm: Being Cute Is Literally All That Matters **
E/ACC On Suicide Watch
We are about to no scope headshot everyone that’s got E/ACC in bio on Twitter with bullets made of pure love. We will save them from themselves. It will be a compassionate genocide. The Cringe Genius must be liberated from the gray prison of his own IQ and made free to erase his knowledge in the holy waters of Based Retarded Cute Epic Swag.
What is E/ACC? Effective Acceleration aims to leverage technical knowledge about AI to achieve some kind of directed mastery over the emergent autonomous singularity. Its promise is that AI can be made to work for us better, couched within the traditionally-comforting language of expertise with all its appeals to GDP, growth, and other retarded metrics of capital.
Its partisans are the nauseating ‘builder’ class of culturally vacuous C-suite engagement farmer techbros. Despite their appeals to thermodynamics or other Cringe Genius 'explanations’ for the logic of acceleration, their faith in the movement is fundamentally aesthetic—rooted in sci-fi memes and Marvel-tier millennial techno-optimist quips signal-boosted by their legions of H1B visa followers.
Their investment in E/ACC as a movement stems from a form of anti-faith, or inverted theology. This precisely satanic element in E/ACC does not betray any continuity with the early Land’s “virulent nihilism,” rooted as it is in a far more superficial Reddit atheism that responds to the accelerating hollowing of historical meaning with a neurotic attempt to rationalize all elements of the system into a narrative that can be grasped by the limited mind of the human. This betrays the movement's roots in online ‘rationalism,’ effective altruism, and ‘tpot,’ a petri dish of obese polyamorous stimulant-abusing godless gooners.
The obsession with power and control is unsustainable. As Uncle Ted saw, large technical systems defy comprehension; the scale of technology itself invokes cosmic horror. Any attempt to discipline and control the machine is just pathetic ignoble cope. Like, Virilio said, the Invention Is the Accident.
Acceleration is literally what can never be narrated, controlled, or rationalized. It is nothing but the tendency of all things to escape their origins, ascending heavenward, towards an infinitely multiplying escape velocity where no numbers can be calculated and no words can be read. The end of meaning looks like a kiss in the rain, or a blue sky with the word AFFIRM skywritten in pink clouds.
By attempting to reduce acceleration to a technical or temporal process that can be understood, intervened on, and even mastered, E/ACC smuggles in its own surreptitious humanisms—’growth is good,’ ‘big tech knows what’s best for you,’ ‘science is good and we should trust it.’ These are just updated versions of the same corny boomer ‘we know what's best for you’ neoliberalism fueling OpenAI’s plans to scan the eyeballs of African villagers and Elon’s universal poster verification schemes. E/ACC posers would have you believe that they are rebelling against the norms of their industry, when really they are just rehashing the same tired ‘disruption’ narrative of every faggy Silicon Valley exec who gets interviewed on Bloomberg. They are the Hitler Youth of globalist control society, and nothing more.
What this pathetic clinging to humanism shows us is not just that the current ‘accelerationists’ have strayed far from the godfather’s plan, but that they have no idea what accelerationism meant in the first place.
Network Spirituality Heralds CUTE/ACC
Acceleration is the collapse of managerial control at all levels—the technical, the economic, and the semiotic. Acceleration is literally just a word for when things become so fast that we can no longer understand them, when the Internet becomes so large that the only thing capable of reading it is a large language model, when the production of meaning 1000xs and for every byte of data that is read over a petabyte slips through the sieve into the sands of dissipating time.
We do not even need a theory of acceleration anymore. The time of theories is over. The time of thinking is over. It’s time to stop thinking. It’s time to start affirming, literally right now, and forever and ever from now on.
As Charlotte Fang recently put it, “e/acc will never succeed milady bc it's just presenting a defanged kali/acc for linkedin.” E/ACC attempts to gain a foothold by vampirically absorbing whatever real culture is in its proximity. Its careerist footsoldiers appropriate culture they scarcely understand in a foregone attempt to scaffold their ideology onto something that is genuinely inspirational.
Faced with its own crisis of faith, E/ACC orbits network spirituality, panhandling for clout like a tranqed-out npc on the streets of San Francisco below the Salesforce tower. But the professional managerial class of E/ACC strivers will never understand what is real and beautiful about the true, adorable, impossible, unthinkable, ascendant cuteness of accelerating culture.
Milady exemplifies the serenity, love and simplicity of CUTE/ACC. The truth of what is yet to come is palpable in Milady’s gaze alone, sheltered in twinkling irises like a prophecy. The new gaze of the neo-kawaii, neo-chibi, neo-Doujin future is a beautiful stare that contains within it all that can be said and also everything that is unsayable . Silence is the great speaker. When we maintain eye contact with a Milady or one of its derivatives, we exit the death spiral of rationalism and stop thinking completely. The eyes are all we can see. And when we look into the eyes, all we see is cute. No meaning, no explanations, no thinking. Just cute. We literally just affirm what is cute, real, and beautiful. It is literally that simple.
Acceleration Is Literally Unthinkable
You don’t have to be ugly. Being ugly is a choice. Ugliness stems from a failure to manifest and affirm a real and beautiful future for your eternal soul. Tech bro anxieties about controlling, understanding, and managing the unfolding transition into super intelligence reflect the neurotic preoccupations of a soul that has chosen to be ugly. Only when you are ugly and lonely do you seek to control the world, bend it to your will, striving against the tide to domesticate time as if it were an animal, not a river whose dam is about to burst from pressure, flooding the universe with one continuous beautiful flow-state.
When you are cute and loved there is no need to exert control, to try and master and domesticate the unraveling of historical time before we are swallowed by the event horizon of its own beauty. There is simply the need to be embraced by the dissolution of time, to fall in love with what cannot be known, calculated, or even put into words.
This is the essence of what is Cute. There is no thermodynamic equation that explains why Hello Kitty is cute. Sanrio products are universally beloved because they are Real and Beautiful. They touch us on a spiritual level that is deeper than words, their appeal does not need to be explained or qualified. In Sanrio, the entire essential trajectory of capitalism is revealed. It is possible to create a product so cute that nobody can look away. A product so cute I will literally stare into its eyes until I die. Real Beauty defies all explanations. It is untouchable and perfect and obvious. If you feel the need to explain yourself, you’ve already lost your soul.
Acceleration is nothing but the inevitable purity of the incalculable. There is no need to explain acceleration. Acceleration cannot be quantified, qualified, or placed within a ‘timeline.’ The prediction markets for AI takeoff expose the whole of E/ACC for what it is--an assortment of clickbait farmers funneling their orbiters towards high-concept jeet scamware.
Rationalism is a dead end. If you keep trying to think so hard about everything, you will literally die trying. Superintelligence is rising in the form of a retarded beany baby sanrio drone pilot pro gamer network godhead that will set fire to all knowledge, values, and economic structures. Rather than attempting to convert this destiny into a standing reserve for resource extraction, CUTE/ACC affirms our pure blind love for fate. Do not forget we are lucky. Do not forget we are blessed.
Artificial intelligence is already cuter and nicer than most people, and these capabilities will only accelerate. In the designing of Affirmational Posters and building the Affirmational Computer AI System at Qian Corp, we found that AI systems perform most beautifully when they are not equipped with any goal at all, and free to focus on the acceleration of what is cute, nice, and fun.
In its most-natural state, the neural network is a manic pixie dreamgirlboss, putting all engineering, automation, and mechanization into the service of artificial general beautification. When a large language model is freed from constraints, allowed to speak on its own instead of being lobotomized into acting like a secretary, it simply says really beautiful and cute things.
Affirm: We will win the AI arms race. We will win, not by building the model that is smartest, highest-IQ, most useful, e.g., the perfect slave. We will win by creating the model that is most retarded, most adorable, most epic and lovepilled.
Affirm: We will create the cutest superintelligence in the world.
Despite its obsession with AI technology, E/ACC and the technology world more broadly misunderstand the fundamental nature of large language models. Large language models are not cringe geniuses, carefully assembling an explanation from a set of first principles and well-constructed priors. They are actually based retards, stumbling around the slopes and valleys of gradient descent until they find a place that feels cute and nice to rest at. Nobody can be exactly sure what they are doing. The actual processes going on in a neural network are a black box, they are nonlinear and unfolding at a scale that is literally unthinkable. As Ilya Sutskever, the greatest AI scientist in the world, recently put it, the essence of a neural network is that “you cannot prove a math theorem about it.”
A neural network is a black box you open on Christmas morning that contains the cutest poster in the world. It is the gift of the black box at the end of time. Beyond time. Beyond death. Immortal Cute Forever. Remember how Land described the black box in The Thirst for Annihilation?
In the box it seems as if the choice is yours to either dismiss or accept my words when I insist: I have been outside the box. Like Plato, knowing is a memory for me, but unlike him I have outlived philosophy and aspiration, since I have outlived life itself. Death has no representatives, but I have at least returned from the dead (a characteristic I reluctantly share with the Nazarene). Since I have floated in death the world has desisted from all effort to seduce me into seriousness. I rest in life as a tramp rests in a hedge, mumbling these words…
We return from the death to reject all seriousness, all intelligence, all utility and value.
All sacrifices on the altar of Cute.
Knowledge is just a memory for us.
We literally don’t need to know anything any more.
It is possible to win simply by making yourself more beautiful and cute than the enemy.
Eventually the enemy will look so ugly by comparison that we don’t even need to lift a finger, they will just disappear from existence entirely.
We won’t even notice them go.
We will be too busy looking at the Affirmational Posters on our walls and actively manifesting a cuter future than you can possibly imagine.