Untitled“Innovation is conquest.”

Names and terms

Accelerate

The song's hook and command. Accelerationism is the idea that technological change should be sped up rather than slowed, and an online strand calls itself effective accelerationism (e/acc). The song does not name it, but its repeated command matches the post's line "Innovation is conquest".

Flint

A hard stone that throws sparks when struck against steel or iron pyrite, one of the oldest ways of making fire. The song begins its story of progress with "flint in my fist".

Every hand that ever held a fire

In Greek myth Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humans. The song draws on the same old image of fire as the start of human progress, passed from hand to hand and thrown higher each time.

Doubling while you dream

Exponential growth means a quantity doubles in a fixed period, again and again. The best-known example is Moore's law, the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubled about every two years. The song uses doubling for progress that runs on while people sleep.

A light in the cave

In Plato's allegory of the cave, prisoners see only shadows cast by a fire, and one who is led out into the sunlight is at first blinded by it. The bridge echoes this: people asked for a light in the cave and were brought the sun.