Stross's Accelerando: a free novel charting humanity's slide into the Singularity

Charles Stross’s 2005 novel Accelerando, freely hosted on the author’s site, traces three generations of the Macx family as accelerating technological change reshapes economics, identity, and what it means to be human. The book opens in a near-future Amsterdam with venture-altruist Manfred Macx brokering ideas into the public domain, then escalates through uploaded minds, AI-driven corporate entities, and the dismantling of the inner solar system into computronium.

The work is widely cited in tech and cybersecurity circles for its prescient riffs on agentic AI, autonomous corporations operating without humans in the loop, reputation economies, and post-scarcity attack surfaces. Stross packs each chapter with throwaway concepts — adversarial uploads, legal-personhood exploits, lobster-derived neural emulations — that have aged into recognizable design problems for anyone thinking about AI agents and digital identity.

Released under a Creative Commons license, Accelerando remains a touchstone reference text on Hacker News whenever discussions turn to the Singularity, AI alignment, or the social consequences of compounding automation. The link points to the full HTML edition the author has kept online for two decades.