Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Thread for general discussion of, and feeble resistance to, our new overpaid 20-something savant overlords, starting with this lovely article:

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

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.

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

yeah, this all sounds good, good for the planet, let's do it

Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing artificial intelligence products in the near future and, to that end, construct a data center planned to be nearly the size of Manhattan.

Super barf techie christianity

They're having a four part lecture about The Antichrist in San Francisco, it costs $200 and the 'registration is subject to approval by the host'
Peter Thiel is somehow involved, which makes sense

https://www.denisonforum.org/daily-article/the-acts-17-collective-is-introducing-tech-leaders-to-jesus/

^^^^ I probably should not have linked to that website, but whatevs

Jonathan Katz’s recent novel _Cleave the Sparrow_ is very funny and funny and rips into these guys. Worth a read

mountainhead movie by the succession mastermind is about these guys, have not watched it tho

I watched part of it then quit half way through…

you just watched mountain

good excuse for white guys to hoard their cash

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and early supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, has urged long-time associate Elon Musk to quit the Giving Pledge under which signatories leave the majority of their wealth to charity.
In transcripts and audio of lectures given by Thiel and shared with Reuters, Thiel in September recalled how he recently warned Musk that his wealth would go "to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates."

FEARS OF 'ANTICHRIST'
Thiel told the anecdote during a closed-door, four-part, eight-hour lecture series he gave during the past month in San Francisco, in which he discussed his concern that a figure he describes as an "Antichrist" could emerge on the global stage.

In particular, Thiel says he has grown wary that an Antichrist will emerge who will create a one-world government on the promise of something like stopping nuclear, AI or climate-induced disaster.
That figure, who Thiel says is augured by the Christian bible, would curtail individual freedoms and halt humanity's shot at a future innovation that would avoid Armageddon, Thiel believes.

Listen up, Mr. Thiel! If the Bible says Armageddon is God's Will and going to happen, then saying we can avoid it not only makes you a heretic, it makes you a candidate for the AntiChrist.

Take some more ketamine you creep

good luck to his husband. avoid balconies!

I love san francisco for shit like this:

A trio of self-described “satanists” dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attendees carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. “Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby’s blood?” they asked. Then they performed what they called a “dark ritual”, dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: “Take us to your personal hell … Thank you for being our dark lord.”

Are YOU getting enough lead and cadmium?

https://futurism.com/future-society/tech-bros-huel-lead

LOL

wow

This is one I've been keeping a close eye on because I'm supposed to be drinking 2 protein shakes a day to prepare for upcoming surgery. I already hated the brand I've been using, but this makes finding a new one trickier.

tbh there's too much lead in a lot of stuff (spices, chocolate)

True, but I don't have to chug a huge quantity of those every day.

if this is any comfort, this video is a food scientist who notes that the methodology they use is to measure lead against the california prop 65 guidelines and not the federal guidelines on what is considered a harmful amount for human consumption. apparently prop 65 sets a rate that is considerably lower (1000x) than federal levels.

https://www.tiktok.com/@hydroxide/video/7561615691464461581

dairy-based protein supplements are supposed to have less lead than plant- or meat-based supplements

whey protein is also the most palatable of the protein powders

Okay but also lol at immediately below that futurism article:
Meet The Pillow That's Becoming Uk's Go-To for Sleep Apnea - Health Wellness Daily
See Why Seniors Are Calling This £57 Hearing Aid A Life-Changer - ClarityPro CIC Rechargable
Sharp Pain, Numbness & Tingling? Anyone With Neuropathy Should Watch This - WellnessGaze Neuro
Regrowing Hair Follicles After 40 Linked to 1 Thing (Start Doing This) - WG Hair Restore
Blurry Vision? Do This Immediately and See Results - WellnessGaze Vision
[Watch Now] Odd 10 Second Remedy Ends Tinnitus for Good - WellnessGaze Tinnitus
Suffering From Vertigo? Experts Swear by This One-minute Fix - WellnessGaze Vertigo
Simple Method Ends Sleep Deprivation & Insomnia (Try Tonight) - WG Sleep Health

both huel and the consumer reports study that futurism dot com article is based on are extremely bad.

Even though when Soylent first appeared on the market I was as scornful as anyone of the concept of "what if we eliminated eating", as my IBS worsened I have started yearning for a tablet or something I could take on occasion when I'm having a bad health day but have to go outside and get stuff done. So I gave huel a go, and apart from tasting horrible it is also just as good at fucking up my guts as any "real" food, perhaps more.

back in the day when I had taken enough rave drugs that I couldn't face eating anything, a nice tin of nurishment would get me through the day, still on sale if not fashionable, fuck knows what's in it though.

will give that a go, thx

Hank Scorpio, tech bro

29 years ago today, The Simpsons first met Hank Scorpio and Homer said goodbye to a shoe for the second time in his life. “You Only Move Twice” first aired November 3, 1996. pic.twitter.com/CyFK25voNC

— On This Day in Simpsons History 🇺🇦 (@dailysimpsons) November 3, 2025

so wait what happened when the biohacker dude livestreamed his shroom trip with Grimes DJing?

that sounds like the setup to a particularly weird riddle

seems he's had a mea culpa

'Whole Thing Has Gotten Out Of Control': Bryan Johnson Questions His Anti-Ageing Obsession Post Magic Mushroom
Social media users quickly pointed out that his shift in perspective was due to his experience with magic mushrooms.

That’ll do it

pivoooooot

The only reason to care about this guy's wrongheaded obsession with artificially inducing extreme longevity is that he was evangelizing for it and his money gave him a big megaphone and lots of attention. Otherwise, he could have experimented on himself in private until the chickens came home to roost and it wouldn't matter a bit.