🇪🇺 eu/acc AMA: How can we save Europe?
👋 Hi Product Hunters!
I'm here today not to launch a product, but in a way for something much more interesting: to talk about eu/acc 😊
For the last decade, I was digital nomading and living in different places all around the world. While the places where I lived abroad, like Asia and America, were getting more ambitious and modern every time I visited them, Europe, and especially Western Europe, started to feel stagnant to me.
Of course, that was one of the reasons why I left Europe in the first place. When I said I wanted to be an entrepreneur after graduating university, I was laughed at even by my university classmates who studied business! It was "safer" to get a job for a big corporation and get experience first. Then you could start a business later.
And when I finally had my own internet business that was making thousands per month, I remember telling people in Amsterdam, and they'd ask me "when are you going to get a real job?".
This was a stark difference from when I was abroad and told people what I did. People were excited, supportive and wanted to learn to do the same thing.
Every year that I came back to Europe the culture felt more stagnant, more pessimistic, and more normie.
Of course there was great things about Europe for me pulling me back: my parents and brothers live here, and when I ended up in Portugal during COVID, I loved the nature, the clean air and the laid-back coastal surf village life and ended up moving here.
And that brought me to an interesting point: seeing where the rest of the world was going, as a European, while seeing Europe slowly getting worse. It became harder and harder to build a startup here. And we started seeing this in losing any lead we had in technology in the last decade. The big tech and AI companies are now all in the US and China, there's very few left in Europe:
The insane regulation that the EU brought upon everyone I think directly caused this:
VATMOSS
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Digital Services Act (DSA)
Digital Markets Act (DMA)
ePrivacy Regulation
The AI Act
...and many more
Which all had good intentions, but made it very difficult to comply as a small or medium business owner. Sure if you're a billion dollar corporation, you can hire bookkeepers and lawyers to comply. But if you're a one-man or small startup?
Last year around April, the data finally started showing what I felt for over decade, Europe was in fact struggling and for the reasons that I felt in my gut:
https://x.com/levelsio/status/1784943280171467260
I felt we had to at least try do something to change the mindset in Europe. I started eu/acc, European Accelerationsim as an offshoot of e/acc, Effective Accelerationsim, a similar movement by Beff Jezos in the United States. Out with the pessimism about the future, and in with optimism about technology and the future. And in particular in eu/acc's case: draw attention to the problems of Europe and propose practical ways to fix them.
eu/acc is a movement to deregulate and save Europe
Thousands of people have now crowdsourced tens of thousands of ideas of which the most important ones have now become part of the official eu/acc manifesto on euacc.com
And it hasn't just stopped there: eu/acc's ideas are part of Mario Draghi's European Competitiveness report which was presented to the European Commission in September 2024 and implemented in January 2025 by Ursula von der Leyen as the European Competitiveness Compass.
Of course that's just reports. We need actual action and laws changed to make Europe a great place for people and business again. And to guarantee its economic future.
One of the most important components is not regulation, but deregulation: remove regulation that makes it impossible for tech entrepreneurs, startups and companies in Europe to do business and compete with the rest of the world.
Because Europeans are highly skilled, highly educated, they have great ideas, and many are actually ambitious. They're just stifled by regulation and as a consequence a culture that has slowly become so risk-averse that it's been starting to self-sabotage its future.
Europe can be great, so let's make it that again! 😊
Today I'd love to answer your questions, and I'd even more love to hear YOUR ideas on how to save Europe!
-A proud 🇪🇺 European
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Replies
Well-thought-out idea! You’ve accurately explained the problem.
As with any system, over time it becomes entangled, messy, and inefficient. In the private sector, this problem is addressed through market forces and recessive cycles, which remove underperforming companies.
In the public sector, however, this doesn’t happen. The system simply prints more money or takes more from the private sector. This creates the conditions for political polarisation between extreme pragmatists and virtue signallers. As a result, reasonable pragmatism doesn’t succeed; it is simply sabotaged by the virtue-signalling cohort.
This is why, in the West, we see growing domestic conflict between rationalists and idealists. Pessimistic attitudes stem from a form of cynicism that includes aspects of Stoicism. People feel they have no control over their lives, and those who lead often fail them. This drives the cynical attitudes we see today.
As most on here will be developers, you can think of this problem in terms of addition and subtraction. Politicians won’t solve this because they do not subtract anything. Compliance. Red tape and costs are always compounding over time, the only reason the system continues despite this upward curve is that historicity private innovation has been able to mitigate the productivity lag and friction from the public sector.
The solution is to make the government a more nimble entity that applies the forces on itself as it imposes onto others. That means if a public sector body is failing or not being used it should be subject to the same forces in the private sector.
Ultimately the only real solution is for the democratic system to be changed and improved upon. In the west we are electing inexperienced politicians, whose first job is to be an MP. It’s a highly flawed and demotivating way of being governed.