Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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

'shitty paypal founder and devout gay catholic wanted everyone to drop out of college' is the obit in my head for peter thiel
(i mean shitty paypal founder to mean paypal is shitty, not necessarily that thiel is shitty any more than being responsible for shitty paypal)

it's mostly ebay's fault

there does seem to be a mentality of thinking of the problems of the world as something you can code for, like I have this one pretty successful silicon valley friend who likes to say stuff like "that depends on what you want to optimize for" wrt policy questions.

inputs go in, outputs go out, you've just got to optimize. tell me your variables.

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.

i'm cool with this

that lady is a complete fucking nut, btw

otm

I do think that the thread title is off a bit(it makes me think more of transhumanists or cyberpunk-fetishists) since the tone of these guys seems to be bits & pieces of wanting totalitarianism or even some sorta anarcho-corporatism. Not fascism quite yet, but certainly shit that can lead to proto-fascism once violence enters the situation.

I think the inflation/deflation aspect is a key bit to it. Like, the real world is complicated and fucked up and you're kinda sorta sold a bill of goods by authority figures a about what adulthood actually will be v. what you wind up in 15 years after adolescence.

I get the sense that a lot of these guys are pretty much victims, with a high intelligence stat but a correspondingly low wisdom stat. Being really smart but not getting how that doesn't solve everything and can be a hindrance. Its that gap that breeds the intense anger and alienation.

“My most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir,” Ganesan says. The company, cofounded by Peter Thiel, a supporter of President Donald Trump, contracts with the military on surveillance and targeting systems.

lol

i hate silicon valley so much

Man, scanning back through this thread is WILD. Here's the article from my OP (link is broken): https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

It basically lays it all out, then the thread just goes on for ten years of them making shitty apps and crypto bullshit that mostly fails, and now here we are.

I got to interview Corey Pein a couple times after his book came out years back for my podcast. Good guy.

Re: Zizians, if anyone is still on that rabbithole, the Behind The Bastards podcast did a recent 4-part episode that does about as good of a job as the Wired piece at explaining ~all of this~

I can go either way on Evans but in this instance he does a really good job of conveying how Rationalism broke Ziz’s mind, and you do move through the first 2/3 of the story with a lot of sympathy for the increasingly desperate state she is in mentally before any of the killing begins

Does it talk about the group house in Berkeley and the boat thing?

yep

reading all these pieces on the zizians there was a small detail bothering me they all mentioned that the two who got in a shootout with police in vermont stayed at a motel in lyndonville but they never said the name of it, the motel they moved to after in newport they have the name of they have security footage quotes from people there, since i live near lyndonville i did a citizen journalism and swung by, i present to you the colonnade

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

https://i.imgur.com/9yZfUd1.jpeg

i think its the only motel in town but i did confirm to my but not journalism standards that its actually the one (asked my barber, talked to the lady behind the counter who gave me a "no comment" lol)

As in, are there interviews with some of the group housemates, because I want to know if I know them.

Xp the only thing sadder than a Days Inn is a former Days Inn that kept the sign.

it wasnt the most cheerful place ive been to

xpost oh, then no - no interviews, or much detail on other names.

excellent gumshoe work, lag∞n

not everyone is cut out for this work but for those of us who are its the only life we know

True Detective at work

Crypto executives are particularly peeved at this turn of events, given Bitcoin’s oft-touted reputation as a hedge against inflation (and tariffs). The industry was one of the biggest spenders on Trump’s bid to return to the White House last year.

“We expected the tailwind, and in return, he stiffed us,” said Matthew Graham, CEO of crypto-focused venture capital fund Ryze Labs.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GoQnyHKXIAAXbXs?format=png&name=medium

we're not tech bros — we're technology brothers

lmao

'fun'

The brothers gonna work it out

'meal replacement startup Soylent'

fuck I remember that poorly-named startup

I actually bought some Huel

There’s no more Soylent?

I see it in Wal-Mart all of the time.

IT'S PEOPLE

Making my way through this enjoyably written piece on the intellectualisms of SV, which many of us know here have read quite a bit about.

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/silicon-valleys-new-legislators/

“AI will be superhuman at everything except early-stage investing” is a truly hilarious take https://t.co/8DcsAsj6sI

— dylan matthews 🔸 (@dylanmatt) April 30, 2025

"AI will take all of your jobs but it won't take my job"

amazing

ironically a good bit about exactly this from Levine today ("AI rollup")

i'm always amazed by how much regard these utter douche bags have for themselves

They have money and their asses are regularly kissed (by people trying to get that money). A classic formula for swelled heads.

"it's more art than science" is a topic i frequently chew on as someone whose job may or may not be able to be overtaken by AI... but baby i actually work in the arts!

xp not so much swelling as becoming ever more egg-shaped

Swelling itching brain

Surely this will all work out well!

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/10/nx-s1-5393950/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-billy-evans-blood-testing

i love that line like she “plans to resume her career in biotech”

what do you mean RESUME / what do you mean CAREER / what do you mean BIOTECH

like the gulf between what she thinks she did and what actually happened, even now she is is prison, is truly insane

if there was any question as to whether shes a true grifter or someone who just got out over her skis

At the same time anyone investing in this venture gets what they deserve.

Haemanthus (nb: her new venture) hopes to bring the cost of the technology down and to take it out of research labs to make it commercially available to patients, though what the potential consumer product would actually look like is still under development.

^loved this. the writer wields a sharp knife

and the name! lmao
vc-bait 2.0