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.

Maybe what Ackman meant by "Think the Saudi neom.com but on the Mediterranean" was "a plan announced with great fanfare and promises of massive financial backing by the sheikhs, which will inevitably be mostly abandoned and the parts not abandoned downgraded, once the spotlight of the world has moved on"

I always find it baffling that these people seem to genuinely think these techno-utopian ideas can work. Who would fund such a thing? Who would run it? Why would it work in a small, cut off, impoverished area that has been ravaged by war? If something like that is a workable idea, why hasn't it already been built somewhere where it would be much easier and less challenging to build? It's like saying "we'll revitalize Gaza with flying cars." No one else has flying cars. They're not workable anywhere else on the planet. Why would they make sense in Gaza?

It's sort of like all those democrat "let's just teach the coal miners to code" type initiatives. How are you going to do that? Why would west virginia or east kentucky be a logical place to build a tech hub? Or all those ideas to build a crypto utopia on some island. Why does that idea actually make sense other than you have a lot of money and you want it to happen? Like they think capital can just build anything anywhere and make it work. Like let's just make South Sudan into the AI capital of Africa while we're at it - it barely has a modern economy or infrastructure, it's struggling with war and starvation, but you can achieve anything if you put your mind to it.

the whole “learn to code -> ??? -> profit!” thing is such blatant patronizing insufficient nonsense

this one even for the genre is particularly ridiculous, what if instead of genocide utopia, as if the entities doing genocide are going to be like hey yeah good idea well just do the opposite

The coding one is particularly fatuous given the number of companies who don’t need to have staff in a colocated office who are forcing staff to commute to a colocated office.

Not even Peter Thiel could make seasteading work.

from the neom wikipedia page:

"Salman's vision for the city incorporates some technologies that do not currently exist, such as flying cars, robot maids, dinosaur robots, and a giant artificial moon."

People are being displaced and murdered for this.

story of the internal politics behind the decline of google search

In the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, was expected to be “one of the largest updates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results, as well as those hit by an update from an August 1, 2018, a few months after Gomes became Head of Search.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Making sure this doesn't just stay on the Perlstein thread:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/

I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.

It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.

I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …

And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.

“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”

I’m taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I can’t be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you’re reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said “quiescent,” or “docile,” or maybe “powerless.” Something, certainly, along those lines.

He was joking, sort of; but he was serious—definitely. “Kidding on the square,” jokes like those are called. All that talk about human potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with, for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.

“Just get into tech! Learn to code!” has always seemed like “If you don’t do this you barely deserve to serve me a coffee you despicable peasant.”

"go out and steal some bootstraps"

That's about an hour and 15 min from where I live, it's definitely rural. Idk, I grew up in rural WI too before high school. I don't really begrudge someone being mad about it if they had a tough time, it can be real rough out there.

(obv not defending this dude otherwise, I don't know anything about him and given that he's a billionaire he has a high chance of being a terrible person)

"unaddressed middle school trauma that turns someone into a terrible person" is prob a defining characteristic of many billionaires tbh

it just turned me into an angry, poor radical leftist.

<3 a testament to your innate goodness

(not that goodness pays the bills, I hear that part)

cant help but think that in some cultures marc andreessen wouldve been buried in a bog

in bog we trust

Dude co-founded Netscape! well that's not nothing

bogscape

thinking about andreesen makes me too angry to post about the reasons he makes me angry

cmon lets hear it then

egg man bad

It doesn’t take middle school trauma or cultural deprivation or limitation, or an incorrect assumption of superior intelligence to end up a total libertarian asshole. Plenty endure both and are not greedy antisocial economic predators and vampires.

All, both, whatever

Worthwhile pod:

https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/218_the_religious_foundations_of_transhumanism_w_meghan_ogieblyn

Paris Marx is joined by Meghan O’Gieblyn to discuss parallels between transhumanism and Christian narratives of resurrection, despite the fact many transhumanists identify as staunch atheists.

Guest

Meghan O’Gieblyn is an advice columnist at Wired and the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine.

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street…you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

“A huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers … You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones…”

Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).

“Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs. Crips gang rivalry. “No Blues should be welcomed there.”

While the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: “In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses … There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.”

Balaji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. “Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first). The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.

Just trying to bring this tweet to life

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) November 8, 2021

Tbf even other tech barons hate balaji.

he has an amazing brain that should be removed from his skull for study

when they’re done they could put it in Andreesen. he’s probably got some spare room in there

Paris Marx is joined by Meghan O’Gieblyn to discuss parallels between transhumanism and Christian narratives of resurrection, despite the fact many transhumanists identify as staunch atheists.

Oh hey, that's my friend. Everyone should read her book.

xp -- he's going to become the double-yolker

that’s right

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

They are both laughable and scary in equal doses.

the original greyshirts (be prepared to be dismally unsurprised):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Gentile_National_Socialist_Movement

These folks loved grey everything too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

And in The President Vanishes (1934), an organization known as "The Grey Shirts" is part of a conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. president.

Technocracy_movement

> it would be enough that every citizen worked a cycle of four consecutive days, four hours a day, followed by three days off. By "tiling" the days and working hours of seven groups, industry and services could be operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

4 day weeks, 4 hour days...

What a card.. I live on the West Coast, so I 'get it'

An exclusive Capitol Hill forum meant to connect the tech industry with Congress took a bewildering political turn on Wednesday when a key CEO condemned “pagan” anti-Israel protests, suggested the protesters be sent to North Korea and mused about launching drone strikes on his business enemies.

The comments came from Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies, the Peter Thiel-linked firm increasingly at the center of Washington’s defense-tech plans.

“We’re gonna do an exchange program sponsored by Karp,” he said. “A couple months in North Korea, nice-tasting flavored bark. See how you feel about that.”

Asked about Karp’s remarks, which at times caused visible discomfort among some attendees, the organizer said that was part of the point.

“The whole goal of the Hill & Valley Forum is to bridge the cultural gap between Washington and Silicon Valley,” said Helberg, who conducted the on-stage interview with Karp on Wednesday. “So it’s great for both sides to familiarize themselves with a little bit of West Coast humor.”

saying the quiet parts out loud seems to be more and more common

I hope Karp dies a slow and painful death

i try not to think about competitors too much, but i cannot stop thinking about the aesthetic difference between openai and google pic.twitter.com/hRFYhzm5K8

— Sam Altman (@sama) May 16, 2024

You're literally bragging about OpenAI looking like McDonald's. pic.twitter.com/yRyxJ9XKUT

— Reid Southen (@Rahll) May 17, 2024

the existence of a Sam Altman implies the existence of a Sam Mainman

The Scandi-Japanese look is all the rage in 2019

that updated 70s fernbar shit is perfect for that generation really

Odd bunch tbqh

To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties—

During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI… https://t.co/LtkBjIMvGi

— Sonia Joseph (@soniajoseph_) May 17, 2024

I’m going to regret asking this but what is consensual nonconsensual

sexual assault fantasies