In a world of programmable capital and labor—crypto and AI—traditional political spectrums fade into obsolescence; combinations of hardware and software are now our most consequential political configurations. Few have articulated the dynamics of this age with such clarity as Vitalik Buterin, who in 2013—at nineteen—founded Ethereum. Since then, he has written extensively on technology's societal role, steering Ethereum beyond rug-pulls and meme-coins to become one of the world's most progressive experiments in internationalism.

MY TECHNO-OPTIMISM introduces a framework, d/acc, that charts a path between technology’s most rancorous cynics and its most reckless techno-fetishists. It is, at once, both an incomplete gesture and an actionable philosophy: "acc" stands for "accelerationism," while the "d" may represent multiple dimensions: defensive, democratic, decentralized, and directional. Along these axes, Buterin maps the emerging landscape of bio-weapons, nuclear power, AI, quantum computing, and misinformation onto our right to determine not just their development but our own evolution.

In this context, cryptography—the science of securing information—becomes our de facto skin, the means of safeguarding everything that defines us: our likeness, our intellect, our life savings, the words and ideas that constitute us. Innovations like zero-knowledge proofs may prove as transformative for human freedom as The Rights of Man. Unlike Silicon Valley’s more bombastic voices, Buterin champions technological development as a force for democratic empowerment rather than as a tool for a small elite.