Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

is the baffler as smug and unreadable as it was in the late 90s/early 00s? to be frank all i ever got from them (or thomas frank solo) was a withering contempt for most of america, rather than any mournful concern.

haha to be frank see what I (unintentionally) did there?

nerds with power

shudder

This is the first Baffler thing I've bothered with in a while. I thought it had its moments back in its earlier incarnation -- there was an essay on cities and the "creative class" that I still refer to mentally sometimes. I think the internet has kind of made the sort of bullshit-skewering it specialized in more widespread and diffuse.

oh yeah, they had some good articles from time to time. there was one incredibly condescending and snide and yet fascinating one about gay pornography. unfortinately they also published ray carney's screed against tarantino and a lot of other worthless crap. and i always felt tom frank needed to have a few beer bottles smashed over his head.

Frank seems kind of worse to me now in his Harper's editorials. I always hated Lapham's and it feels like Frank is really trying his best to assume the mantle.

Anyway

In a widely covered secessionist speech at a Silicon Valley “startup school” last year, there was more than a hint of Moldbug (see video below). The speech, by former Stanford professor and Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan, never mentioned Moldbug or the Dark Enlightenment, but it was suffused with neoreactionary rhetoric and ideas. Srinivasan used the phrase “the paper belt” to describe his enemies, namely the government, the publishing industries, and universities. The formulation mirrored Moldbug’s “Cathedral.” Srinivasan’s central theme was the notion of “exit”—as in, exit from democratic society, and entry into any number of corporate mini-states whose arrival will leave the world looking like a patchwork map of feudal Europe.

Forget universal rights; this is the true “opt-in society.”

An excerpt:

We want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like. That’s where “exit” comes in . . . . It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years . . . [Google co-founder] Larry Page, for example, wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation. That’s carefully phrased. He’s not saying, “take away the laws in the U.S.” If you like your country, you can keep it. Same with Marc Andreessen: “The world is going to see an explosion of countries in the years ahead—doubled, tripled, quadrupled countries.”

Srinivasan ticked through the signposts of the neoreactionary fantasyland: Bitcoin as the future of finance, corporate city-states as the future of government, Detroit as a loaded symbol of government failure and 3D-printed firearms as an example of emerging technology that defies regulation.

The speech succeeded in promoting the anti-democratic authoritarianism at the core of neoreactionary thought, while glossing over the attendant bigotry. This has long been a goal of some in the movement. One such moderate—if the word can be used in this context—is Patri Friedman, grandson of the late libertarian demigod Milton Friedman. The younger Friedman expressed the need for “a more politically correct dark enlightenment” after a public falling out with Yarvin in 2009.

Friedman has lately been devoting his time (and leveraging his family name) to raise money for the SeaSteading Institute, which, as the name suggests, is a blue-sea libertarian dream to build floating fiefdoms free of outside regulation and law. Sound familiar?

The principal backer of the SeaSteading project, Peter Thiel, is also an investor in companies run by Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal, an original investor in Facebook and hedge fund manager, as well as being the inspiration for a villainous investor on the satirical HBO series Silicon Valley. Thiel’s extreme libertarian advocacy is long and storied, beginning with his days founding the Collegiate Network-backed Stanford Review. Lately he’s been noticed writing big checks for Ted Cruz.

He’s invested in Yarvin’s current startup, Tlon. Thiel invested personally in Tlon co-founder John Burnham. In 2011, at age 18, Burnham accepted $100,000 from Thiel to skip college and go directly into business. Instead of mining asteroids as he originally intended, Burnham wound up working on obscure networking software with Yarvin, whose title at Tlon is, appropriately enough, “benevolent dictator for life.”

I love this stuff, these guys are like comic book supervillains.

yeah i dunno, this seems discountable. it's not going to get much traction.

i still think we shd take these guys out before they acquire sentience

another school of thought says that they just need to experience a moment of humanity to temper their wild anti-humanist delusions

we could administer this cure from a safe distance thanks to their work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PspagsTFvlg

Been dismayed with The Baffler since it's new revival. Seems about as shrill as Adbusters these days.

OTOH, there's these guys to make fun of: http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/#

i still think we shd take these guys out before they acquire sentience

― coign of wantage (Noodle Vague), Thursday, May 22, 2014 6:35 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

100%

yeah i dunno, this seems discountable. it's not going to get much traction.

― display name changed. (amateurist), Thursday, May 22, 2014 6:33 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd be more willing to discount it if these weren't people with money, political fever dreams, and the ability to build & destory things

Yeah I'm not exactly alarmed yet but I am a little o_O

these people aren't good at building things that people actually need to survive so I dunno - the rhetoric is horrible and these people are frightening, at the same time they're woefully inept

fantastic article, thank you for sharing

A seafaring community of 10 plutocrats is probably going to do just fine. They can just take a private jet back to the US any time they need fresh virgins to feed on. They don't want the rest of us anyway.

Shouldn't that be Tlön, and holy shit we do not need techno-libertarians referencing Borges

I thought the setting up a new country idea sounded really good, hopefully it would end like jonestown

I am all in favor of techno-libertarian island

me too. preferably one that will be underwater in a few decades.

tru

im less worried about these creeps building their own bioshock dystopias than i am about them using their tremendous money and influence to undermine regulation and other democratic things (tm) at home

yeah that is a more serious danger

I wonder if we can convince them to relocate to Canada

I think their politics might go over well in, like, Edmonton

It should be fun to watch what happens when the VC money starts to dry up.

they all scramble for the surviving corporate monoliths

This Baffler article mentions Nick Land. That's kind of depressing, is he fully in that camp? I've only read some of his stuff but have liked work from his contemporaries.

isn't his own camp bad enough???

maybe! I'm out of the loop

yes, nick land is fully in

this is all a lil weird to me cos reading these dudes has been a minor internet fascination of mine for a long time

if anything, land's story is evidence against the thesis that an encounter with adulthood will chill these guys out: he was a philosophy professor in the 80s (?) and 90s, left for china at some point to be a journalist, was a pro-war neocon type in the early 00s and at some point during/after the 08 crash flipped to austrian economics, "race realism" (if you don't mind me using their euphemisms for a sec) and all the rest.

i feel super weird that even know this shit tbh

the connection with silicon valley utopian-supremacy is only one leg of the thing, there are linkages to a lot of weird old righty type scenes that have been left behind by contemporary conservatism, which have been kept alive in its most public face by association with ron paul. but also the remnants of european throne-and-altar type stuff

this isn't what I think of when I think of 'techno-utopianism' these dudes are just idiots

really the most salient through-line is hostility to democracy.

xp yeah this thread title is a little narrow & off from the corey pein article

feel like the broader 'apps with solve it'/obsessed with meritocracy and measurement/transnational professionalism stuff that permeates the valley and its politics is way more pernicious and worth countering than these dudes who cant help but marginalize themselves by being themselves

I feel like these guys make better bad guys than the republican party, at least their politics are internally consistent

idk i think their predilection for lingo and willingness to set up their own discursive zones is an important idea generator.

there's huge overlap with the PUA/men's rights scene, and *their* language and pop-psych antifeminism is reeeally short work way from being conservative canon

Definitely seems like there is at the root of a lot of it a bitterness stemming from a dissonance between the "meritocracy" these people have been sold on (in which their particular skillset is supposed to make them the fittest dudes) and the reality they grew up in, and the *other* reality they grew up in (having to attend high school and go on the dating scene and such) in which their supposed superior qualities didn't seem to help so much. I know this might sound like just a rehash of the "butthurt nerd" canard, but I think there's something about the combination of ego inflation AND deflation that they experience -- one world telling them they are geniuses and another telling them they are losers at the same time, that makes them want to remake the entire world in the image of the former.

Like you don't get this kind of worldview coming out of getting sand kicked in your face alone, it's more the rage that results from feeling entitled to alpha status and then getting sand kicked in your face.

yup

And to cross reference that with the "men's rights" stuff, it's not unlike "I'm a *nice* and *intelligent* guy and yet hot babes are not throwing themselves at my feet like they are supposed to. Therefore women are defective and dangerous and I must use 'techniques' to disarm and conquer them."

is there an app for that

i'm really skeptical of 'just a thwarted nerd' type explanations. some people just end up believing this kind of shit for reasons that aren't readily explicable. in many cases it doesn't appear to be true.

yeah 'chicks just didn't want him and he's not successful' doesn't explain peter thiel very well

will plain ole megalomania do.

i think it's a more basic failure to grasp that economic and social processes/developments/problems/etc are not governed by clearly delineated causal relationships. and that there is not a predictable utopia that is being stymied by the unpredictable urges of the irrational human heart.

the cliché explanation for this is that hey these dudes are coders and computers do what you tell them and garbage in garbage out etc etc. maybe it is more an incomplete understanding of the human soul? and the truth of the yawning black chasm of despair that is existence? that there is no app that can stave off the darkness forever? idk man

I deal with checks at my job all the time... they're still out there and don't seem to be going away anytime soon, despite the multitude of payment options out there

I feel like I always end up writing about 1 check a year, in recent years mostly to contractors for various home repairs. It's still a pretty easy way to move large-ish amounts of money around.

I always just go get a money order from Amscot if I have to send a check to someone.

theyre still used a lot in business, not so much retail

I still write checks for rent.. the management co. set up a payment portal which was free for awhile but then began charging a $2.50 'convenience fee' so I went back to mailing a paper check to inconvenience them

only use checks to pay rent and parking space rental, to two companies at the same address.

Finally stopped writing checks earlier this year -- I'd only been doing them for rent for a few years now and I was able to persuade my landlord to go with Zelle (whatever works, I figure).

I took a class in law school on negotiable instruments (which includes checks). We learned things like the laws and history around how checks clear, endorsing checks, liability for fraud, etc. A truly byzantine area of the law that developed over decades and felt held together by glue and wishful thinking. I hated and have mostly forgotten it.

The only check I write now is rent, but that gets handled by Bilt (credit card that earns points for rent).

every year or so I get a check for like $12 for a class action suit I have no knowledge of.

My rent is paid in cash directly to my landlord at the motel he also owns.

Used to go to the bank in our building and write a check for cash every week for spending money. That branch closed otherwise I would still be doing it.

Used to go to the bank in our building and write a check for cash every week for spending money. That branch closed otherwise I would still be doing it.

Our mortgage is serviced through one bank, and we both use another bank, so every month I write a check and electronically deposit it in the mortgage bank account because there is a fee to transfer funds between the two banks. This is a stupid situation, but I have talked to both banks about it, and they say it's the only way to do it without a fee. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Imagine being woken up at 4 a.m. by cars honking at each other. That's what some San Francisco residents have been dealing with for weeks, as the Waymos can be heard in this video honking and blinking headlights in a parking lot outside of their condo. https://t.co/2cVmDfUk4i pic.twitter.com/pkxNTT5vXd

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) August 13, 2024

very perfect for a tech guy to pick gray for his authoritarian color, dont want to get people too riled up over your movement with an actual color

― lag∞n, Saturday, April 27, 2024 3:50 PM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/nazis.jpg

https://lithub.com/bigoted-bookselling-when-the-nazis-opened-a-propaganda-bookstore-in-los-angeles/

Note "Silver Shirt Literature" in the store's sign.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-honduras-crypto.html

to save you time, here is the best line in the article:

Keller Easterling, the urbanist and architectural theorist, considers Próspera a city in name only, akin to “say, Mattress City.”

Próspera has become particularly well known for the zone’s experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards. The week of my visit, Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera, had a chip with his Tesla key implanted into his hand. On a previous trip he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities. Another time he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him “stronger and faster,” as he put it at a conference in Roatán that weekend.

https://t.co/zphvgcRGDy pic.twitter.com/dEiV99UEFk

— BuccoCapital Bloke (@buccocapital) September 3, 2024

gone now

I was going to post "The Limits to Growth was a huge deal" but my supervisor is writing a book about the history of models, so I may have a pretty skewed perspective on this

― rob, Wednesday, May 5, 2021 8:33 AM

Did that book ever come out?

Theoretically the limit to growth is the point at which the death rate matches the birth rate and population settles into equilibrium. In real populations explosive growth such as humans have achieved in the past century predictably leads to rapid population collapse, not equilibrium.

that is a completely literal observation and not especially here nor there, but yes

https://i.imgur.com/Ma2buFf.jpeg

Engagements require a witness?! Maybe when it's someone you met in a jacuzzi I guess.

.@ariellezuck on stage at @theinformation’s Women in Tech, Media and Finance conference says she looks for “rizz” (charisma) and “tizz” (autism — sufficient neurodivergence to pursue an idea!) when investing in founders pic.twitter.com/UHeOvalASm

— Erin Woo (@erinkwoo) October 8, 2024

maybe not the right thread, but I despise the word 'founder' in this context

I prefer "founder" as a verb pertaining to shipwrecks.

somewhat interesting memorial to WebVan, a corporate name I honestly haven't thought of in two decades

https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/rise-fall-bay-area-startup-webvan-19829522.php

Breaking Bad is a co-founder story disguised as a drug-dealing story.

It’s a hilariously accurate image of what co-founder challenges look like.

Here are the best example scenes and what you can learn from them.

— Hiten Shah (@hnshah) October 20, 2024

lol

guy with one life experience, being a co-founder of a tech startup:

hmm, getting a lot of co-founder vibes from this tv show

was going to connect the dots between Marc Andreessen and Gus Fring but that led to the discovery that Andreessen is only 53?! Soul removal surgery really ages you.

Can we fast-forward to the bit where all the co-founders lie dead in a pool of their own cancerous blood?

sorry guys, you're all Gale

Can’t argue with fancy coffee

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper’s hallucinations in their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the model.
A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper.

In an example they uncovered, a speaker said, “He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.”

But the transcription software added: “He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece ... I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.”

A speaker in another recording described “two other girls and one lady.” Whisper invented extra commentary on race, adding “two other girls and one lady, um, which were Black.”

In a third transcription, Whisper invented a non-existent medication called “hyperactivated antibiotics.”

He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece ... I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.

lmao

we should have hyperactivated antibiotics by now and Whisper knows it

Ain’t so funny when one of these shitty transcriptions misquotes you so that that makes you sound like an idiot and that’s the quote that runs on a local news website. (Without contacting me to verify).

oh wow

I hope you tore them a new one

Or, as Whisper might say, I hope you pour them a Mexican taco

i couldn't, I'm a bureaucrat quoted while on the job. not anything my employer cared enough about.

Ain’t so funny when one of these shitty transcriptions misquotes you so that that makes you sound like an idiot and that’s the quote that runs on a local news website. (Without contacting me to verify).

Xp.Boring … it’s related to California state code, so you probably haven’t encountered this conundrum

ha! and there's also "workforce" housing

Yes! And the work-live housing in question would also be workforce housing (80 - 120% AMI) … maybe the AI needs to be taught Municode

it needs to be taught what "eleemosynary" means

"He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece ... I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people"

this is like a quote from a Trump rally used to prove that, contrary to all the reports, he's recently regained a lot of his lost coherence

that does sound like him