Marc Andreessen published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" in October 2023. Under a heading called The Enemy he files a set of ideas he wants treated as one disease. Existential risk is in the pile, and so is the precautionary principle. De-growth is in the pile too. Once those sit together, anyone who wants a hard stop on superintelligence can be described as someone who wants a poorer country.
The accelerationist side already had doomer for mood. Degrowth is the economic twin.
Where the word came from
Degrowth, in its own house, is a climate-economy argument. Writers in that camp want rich countries to cut material and energy throughput: less extraction, less wattage, a smaller physical load on the planet. You can accept that program or reject it. Either way, it is a claim about steel, oil, and watts. It is not a claim about whether to build a mind that outruns ours.
In the AI debate the word got stripped for parts. After 2022, as safety left the labs and hit social media, the accelerationist camp took e/acc as a badge. They needed a word that meant "you are against prosperity." Degrowth was sitting in climate politics, already loaded, ready to be aimed at a different target.
The manifesto made the slide cheap. It put de-growth on the same enemy list as existential risk. After that you do not have to show that a person wants less energy. You only have to show that they worry about ASI. The rest of the insult arrives free.
What the label actually does
Used this way, degrowth is a swap, not a description. You take a technology claim (do not build an ungovernable successor) and replace it with an economic ideology (make the pie smaller). Then you argue with the ideology, which is easier, because almost nobody in an American tech room wants to defend shrinking GDP.
Our position does not say fewer factories or fewer watts. Narrow systems that stay tools can raise living standards. I want more of those. The line is superintelligence: a system built to exceed us across domains when we still cannot verify that it will stay a tool.
Calling that line degrowth is like calling a ban on human cloning a war on obstetrics. The category is wrong on purpose.
The word hangs an economic insult on a technology claim, so the technology claim never has to be met.
Why it lands
No one wants to be against growth. Growth is how children live better than their parents. It is medicine and housing and longer lives. Frame the choice as abundance versus degrowth and the room has already picked a chair. The framing is the win.
It also borrows a genuine fight. Climate politics really does contain a camp that argues for less throughput. Accelerationists point at that camp, then slide the pointer onto anyone asking for an ASI prohibition. The slide is the trick. Two arguments share a syllable and get treated as one.
People already keep a mental list of folks who were wrong about new machines: the railroad, the electric light. The label invites you to put ASI-safety people on that list without checking whether this machine is a lightbulb or a new actor.
Who the word gets aimed at
Look at the targets. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio spent their lives building modern AI. Hundreds of scientists and lab leaders signed the 2023 statement putting extinction risk from AI next to pandemics and nuclear war. I am not arguing for a smaller country. I am arguing for a country that still exists.
The same mouths will sell ASI as the path to abundance, then call a prohibition degrowth. Those two claims only work together if you never ask what an unaligned system actually delivers. Cures and longer lives are benefits of a system that is trying to produce them. An ungoverned successor does not pay that invoice.
A capitalist who wants next year's customers still has a country to sell into. That is the condition that makes a market possible, not a program for poverty.
The tell
A movement sure that prohibition means poverty would show the mechanism. Which factory closes. Which drug does not get found. They do not show it, because the mechanism is not there. Narrow tools keep working. The thing we refuse is the thing that ends the compounding.
You reach for degrowth when you would rather not say, out loud, that your plan needs a successor species. Naming the opponent is cheaper than defending the plan.
How to answer it
Refuse the swap. Ask which part of the position shrinks the economy. Keep the medical models and the materials work. Name the exception: a successor mind. If they cannot point to a factory that prohibition closes, they are talking about a race, not about growth.
Then separate the two words. Degrowth, the climate program, is a fight about throughput. Doomer is a fight about mood. Neither is a reply to whether we can control a system smarter than we are. Drag the talk back to that.
If they want abundance, they need a species around to collect it. Our case is a pie that still belongs to the people who bake it, not a smaller one. Superintelligence cannot be reversed, so you do not build it.