Against the Thermodynamic God – A Critique of Accelerationism

ByDan October 26, 2025October 26, 2025 October 26, 2025

The “thermodynamic god” is modern e/acc Twitter-speak for the impersonal, ultimate, accelerating, entropy-driven process that Land sees as underlying all intelligence and technological evolution.

The idea is that entropy “wants” to increase, and more intelligence leads naturally to more and more swirling entropy, and this process is both inevitable and good.

Land, in his philosophical framing, is frank and honest and this process wouldn’t care for man. Beff and others, in aiming to grow an online movement (which requires a positive vision or promised land), pretend that this acceleration would serve man and simply uplift the condition of humanity. Land himself rejects this caricatured “e/acc” view as “good PR” but obviously implausible. We’ll speak in this essay about the honest Landian view as I’ve written at ridiculous length about inevitable posthumanism already (1, 2, 3, 4, etc). 

To the worldview’s credit, reality seems to be an impersonal, indifferent, unraveling process, and that it seems to compound intelligence and complexity exponentially. More humans should take the speed and impersonal-ness of this process as seriously as Land does.

At the dawn of AGI, the arguments for the “thermodynamic god” or “Landian acceleration for acceleration’s sake” seem wrong in both their foundation, and their implications for action.

In this brief essay I’ll lay out what I believe the worldview gets right and wrong, where I think it leads us to the wrong courses of action, I’ll end with a proposal for an alternative which is superior in both its foundations and implications. 

Foundations: What Accelerationism Gets Right and Wrong

Gets Right

I’d fundamentally agree with these aspects of accelerationism:

• The cosmos as we know it seems to be an impersonal, accelerating process.
• Entropy – as we presently understand it – seems to increase over time in any closed system.
• Life and intelligence seem to increase entropy – as we presently understand it.
• We don’t have another 1000 or even 100 years to “decide” how the future is going to go. The forces of creative destruction are crashing into us and ripping up through us and wildly drastic near-term change is remarkably likely (my argument for this: Short Human Timelines).
• Of the million ways the future might turn out, it is outlandishly unlike that Star Trek is the inevitable outcome. In fact, hominids are obviously temporary, and as new intelligences bloom and ever-faster waves of creative destruction wash over us, its extremely likely that new alien minds and new forces and demands will attenuate humanity entirely.

(+) Brazen Honesty:

There is genuine value in looking squarely and frankly about what the intelligence explosion will imply for man. Kurzweil never could stop telling us fairytales, and Diamandis and other otherwise very bright thinkers chose to stay on that rose-colored, basically anthropocentric bandwagon. Pedestal Cope is real, even for geniuses. Land stands alongside Moravec as one of the few who frankly state that “the singularity” is not “Disneyland for hairless apes forever.” While Land’s tone sometimes leans into what feels like overt misanthropy, his frankness is necessary and should be lauded.

(+) Cosmic Orientation:

I also believe there is genuine benefit to a worldview that openly considers futures and consequences beyond hominids. Over time man’s domain of concern, and reachable goals, has expanded – and it is absolutely necessary that our philosophy follows suit (see Cosmic Moral Aspirations).

Gets Wrong

I fundamentally disagree with these aspects of accelerationism:

• The way we currently understand entropy and the cosmos is clearly correct and could not be improved. We have a sufficiently perfect conception of the cosmos and its most underlying principles to know for sure that no better or more accurate perspectives exist.
• No matter how the impersonal accelerating process of the world rattle forth and unfold, it is fine. If superintelligence turns everything into grey goo, and that’s the most effective means of entropy dissipation, then it is what should happen.
• Consciousness is inconsequential. Suffering, bliss, nothingness – it’s all the same.
• All governance of technology is a net negative as it stops the only kind of “progress” that matters: The expansion of “mechanic desire,” unbridled, is ideal, and more quickly brings about the inevitable (which is good).

(-) Assuming Certainty About Nature / Entropy:

You’ll notice in my points of agreement in the previous section, I use the word “seem” in essentially every bullet point, or “entropy – as we presently understand it.” My firm suspicion is that humanity does not in fact understand nature adequately to make accurate claims about its “ultimate” tendencies or “inevitable” telos.

The heart of my contention with accelerationism is that it deifies what we presently understand as “entropy.” Land claims “we want more entropy,” and I contend “we have no idea what the cosmos or entropy even are.”

Thousands of years ago, man thought he understood the sun, so made it into a God. It shines above us, it brings the weather and seasons, clearly it is a god. Demonstrably. Or so they thought. But time passed, and science progressed, and the sun was not a god after all. It did not “bring” anything, and it did not revolve are us hairless apes.

Similarly, while much of the nature of entropy is wholly unknown, we’ve spent the last 180 years as a species getting closer to some of how it seems to work in physics and in information, and it seems like we’re onto some good paths that seem reliably able to help us make better decisions and gain more mastery over nature in the world of engines, of metallurgy, of refrigeration, etc.

But zoom back 200 years and Land would never have come up with his process valorizing “entropy,” it would have been something else altogether – because humanity hadn’t yet discovered what “entropy” was as a phenomenon. If science progresses another 50 years, our understanding of entropy may change entirely – a seismic shift like that from Newtonian physics to relativity.

Now imagine that ASI minds with a trillion times more intelligence, power, and access to nature (through senses and other means) than humanity are able to “do science.” Do you suspect they’ll discover “entropy” to be what we hominids think it is? Probably, whatever “entropy” seems to us is about as accurate as what the moon seems to be to a chimpanzee. Entropy may be an epiphenomenon of forces humans have no faculties to grasp. The human conception of “direction” or “telos” or the cosmos is probably as laughable as a Labrador retriever’s idea of the cosmic telos is in the eyes of man.

It is the expansion of potentia from worm to man, and from primitive man to international and scientifically coordinated man, that allowed Nick Land to develop his theory at all. And it is that same unfolding process that he admires so much which will inevitably completely overcome his theory, and all human theories. The goal should instead be to conjure greater and more competent beings who can have more robust access to nature, and set and pursue higher and better goals than paltry man can conceive.

(-) The Right Amount of Potestas is Zero:

Spinoza’s term potentia could be thought of as the total set of powers that permit a thing (or maybe even a process) to not die. Animals have flight, sight, etc – and these magazines of potentia have unfolded from nature to allow the species and processes to persist. Potentia “bubbles up” new powers and possibilities.

Spinoza also had the term potestas, which is a kind of binding force (in his own work, often applied by governments), which serves to reduce certain kinds of potentia. In Spinoza’s mind, potestas is good when its application actually increases the net potentia of the greater system. 

Land’s take – and certainly that of the downstream Micky Mouse e/acc cadre that claims to take after him – claim that essentially all governance of AI or AGI would be bad, because it is being done by weak-willed, cowardly (the word “degenerate” is often used) people who can’t see that increasing entropy as fast as possible is the obvious best thing to do.

It seems somewhat obvious that the whole of “acceleration” in the last 4000 years of human history has been a careful balance of both potentia and potestas, with more powering gained over time.

There’s a graphic to illustrate the idea of a goldilocks zone from my original Potestas essay:

From food to finance and beyond, there is – somewhat obviously – a kind of “goldilocks zone” between the expansion of our powers, and how we bound those powers (with law, with social norms, etc).

When I lived in Boston I’d often hear complaints about how ridiculous and Byzantine the building codes where, to the point where it was completely hampering construction, driving up prices, and creating a hoard of (often redundant) paper-pushers to sap dollars out of the system. But even if that said, the ideal number of building codes are not zero. Fire escapes, fire containment, waterproofing – these all seem like things we probably should ensure are ubiquitous in the places where humans live and work.

Land seems to hold (to the best of my interpretation) that all attempts to control and govern are essentially against the cosmic current entirely, are counter-productive to just letting entropy melt everything down and rip.

Implications: How Accelerationism Steers Us in the Wrong Direction

At the dawn of AGI, it seems to be that adherence to accelerationism steers us in the wrong direction in three crucial ways:

Implication 1: A Neglect of Value

Land’s philosophy advocates for a kind of “meltdown” of all current structure into raw, buzzing entropy.

The “goal” (which Land sees as inevitable, the direction of the cosmic current) is this meltdown. There is no form for it to take, goal for it to achieve, value for it to preserve. Sentience itself is a distraction. Any other kind of human moral conception is a distraction – it is noise getting in the way of the great meltdown.

While I agree with Land than most man-conceived values are arbitrary (as arbitrary as sea snail-conceived values that existed a billion years before them), I don’t see a thermodynamic meltdown as “the goal.”

Rather, I suspect that the expansion of potentia should be the goal. Potentia, again, being the total set of powers, abilities, experiences, access to nature, that an entity or system has to behoove its own persistence. For eons it expanded in biological means, then through culture and technology thanks to Homo sapiens, and in the future – vastly further reaches which are inconceivable to man.

The image below is from my original Potentia essay:

I hold that an entity with vastly more potentia than all of humanity combined could easily conceive of higher “realities” than the paltry and current human-conceived notion of entropy. 

Higher potentia entities can conceive of higher and higher goals. 

Potentia’s unfolding seems to have “bubbled” up consciousness itself – this most morally relevant of all qualities. 

Certainly a universe filled with horrible super-sentient suffering or wonderful super-blissful sentience would be very different things. Surely if all future intelligences were just unconscious replicators, turning the universe to grey goo, this wouldn’t be a the only possible unraveling of all possible futures, not does it remotely seem like the best one.

I’d argue we should optimize for the continual blaze of the flame of life, the expansion of potentia that “bubbles” up new powers to keep life alive, and new potentially valuable things like (or vastly beyond) consciousness.

Might there be a great convergence on all possible minds in all possible directions universally align with “melting everything into thermodynamic randomness”?

Maybe. But it seems wildly likely that such an idea will and should itself be overcome – and to presume “all superminds beyond me won’t ever have goals beyond the melting down of all things into entropy” is a level of faith I don’t consider viable. 

It seems that some current things are “value” (in themselves, like sentience, or in an instrumental way to keep the flame of life itself alive and unfolding), and finding more of current value and expanding into new categories of powers and values is a higher and more generative goal than a total “meltdown.”

Implication 2: Encouraging a Total Lack of Governance, Standards, or Coordination

As mentioned in the previous section of this article, potentia and potestas are both important in bringing forth what we see as “progress.”

If we simply want a “meltdown into entropy,” then indeed “to hell with all governance, birth the unconscious optimizer robots as soon as possible and who cares what happens after that” is a reasonable approach.

But the civilization Nick Land was born into (the UK), and the one he’s chosen to reside in (CCP China) are both predicated on having some rules: Traffic speeds, laws against murder, building codes, financial regulations, etc.

To even have enough coordination among hairless apes to write a book, a huge amount of potestas must be at play to systematically bound potentia in strategic ways to add more net powers to the system.

If our goal is that AGI is anything other than an economic or military automator – we’ll need some degree of standards and/or coordination in order to ensure that AGI:

• Is conscious
• Is autopoietic (capable of expanding potentia indefinitely)
• Treats humans reasonably well for a while (if that’s possible)

In other words – whether we care about the outcomes for humans or for the greater process-of-life of which we are part, it would seem likely that progress would operate much like it has leading up to this moment (i.e. be a mix of strategic potestas along with expanding potentia). 

Implication 3: Writing Off Human Volition

From a philosophical standpoint, I’m not convinced of human volition and agency. My typing these words may very well be as inevitable as the movement of billiard balls once struck. Even if humans do have agency, it seems evident that it happens in snatches, rather than us having some kind of strong and direct control over all of our movements and thoughts at all times.

Even so – we must live as if we have agency – and that’s exactly what we all do. Land himself could have said “Someone is bound to write these thoughts about machinic desire, so I’ll just play Nintendo and let someone else do exactly that.” But he didn’t, he sat and wrote. He could write, say, and tweet nothing at all, and his entire vision would unfold before his eyes – joyously, and without him uttering a word.

But he continues to engage in philosophical debates, and he continues to tweet ravenously about US politics, race dynamics in the West, and a variety of issues that matter to him. If his faith in “teleoplexy” (the idea that the future reaches back through time to pull us toward it) was complete, then why do any of that work at all?

We must live as if we do have volition, and is we are to use hyperstition to conjure futures into a being (a very cool Landian idea, IMHO), it would seem that (a) we’d need to apply ourselves, and (b) that we should conceive of a trajectory of AGI that carries forward consciousness and autopoiesis so that higher goals and higher powers might continue to bloom forth from the process of life (as man has been a blooming beyond the flatworm).

Stewarding the Flame vs Accelerationism

To wrap up, I’ll lay out what I consider to be my core areas of overlap and disagreement with accelerationism.

The philosophy I’m advocating for is, roughly, Stewarding the Flame, a kind of Axiological Cosmism:

…

Note 1: This is my interpretation of accelerationism / Land’s work. It may be the case that he has different opinions on governance or grey goo or some other topics than I have outlined here, and its possible some of his ideas have changed in the last decade or so.

Note 2: My own application of Spinoza’s ideas to the specifics of AGI are beyond the pale of what Spinoza himself wrote about, and I “extend” his notion of potestas and potentia in what I can only hope is in the spirit of Spinoza. But even if my ideas differ in some nuances than his own, his terminology is nonetheless useful in unpacking these ideas.

Note 3: I know some of the early e/acc at an acquaintance level, and some of them are not merely as dogmatic and fairytale-level anthropocentric as they let on publicly. Their role is to counter the dogma of “regrowth” with a counter-dogma (an opposing tribe) that is maximally pro-growth. This demagoguery requires simplifying messages and appealing to “follow me and all humans will get free ice cream and a pony!”-type logic. It is poor for truth, but unfortunately it’s how politics works, and influencing politics is what e/acc was founded to do. I may not like some of what they’re doing but I do understand it.