Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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.

lol cyberpunk was all about dystopianism

there's also a strong overlap, I would wager, between this group and those that think wearing google glass everywhere is a great idea

lol cyberpunk was all about dystopianism

― a strange man (mh), Thursday, May 22, 2014 8:10 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right but cyberpunk ~fetishists~ are people who can't wait to jack into their decks so they can have outsized power and information

not so far from these nerds imo

I mean, the baffler piece makes the point that they don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. blade runner sure as hell wasn't a utopia... from my standpoint. this despotic, oligarchic vision seems to be "utopia and all the freedom and information for me, shitty gutter with my leftover circuit boards for you"

fuckin' ayn rand fetishists, thinking that the disadvantaged or "less meritous" deserve what they get, good and hard

hi tech lowlife

your faulty code is not my problem, if you've got enough money we got some patches you can try.

can't wait for a movement populated by people allergic to brands.
i guess the naomi klein thing happened but i mean literally allergic to brands.

are brands a gluten?

thread of brand shaming

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