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.

listen some day there will be a computer intelligence so potent you cannot even imagine, and its going to be a total bitch

nicely sums up my feelings about most religions

reading the wired and sfgate piece back to back is funny wired one is like the more you learn about them the less you know you start to wonder if youre living inside their dream, sfgate the zizians incomprehensible pseudo intellectual ramblings offer no clue as to how they got so lame and dumb

lol otm

wired piece was great btw def the best one ive read

yeah the writer seems to want to understand & isnt projecting anything (or anything much) onto them. and committed a fair amount of shoe leather to the reporting, rather than just retelling transcripts & arrest warrants.

I don't know how formative Roko's Basilisk is, it's very silly but they were already very silly by that stage. And nearly everyone as far as I can tell agrees now that it's pretty silly.

But I love Yudkowsky's immediate panicked response:

I don't usually talk like this, but I'm going to make an exception for this case.

Listen to me very closely, you idiot.

YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL. [...]

You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends.

This post was STUPID.

Because the "clever enough to" / "not clever enough to" is the real stupid idea at the heart of this, that coming up with philosophical structures is the same kind of thing as thinking about how humans react, that they're both "write a program to get better at chess" then keep going

their brains are so cooked they make reading Nick Land seem like a decent alternative

(do not do that either)

i tried to read Fanged Noumena a while back, I could not make heads or tails of it.

yeah like they’ve fully disassociated from how human thought irl works and them trying in any way to even talk about it just sounds like conversational programming language

time for a juicebox and a deep defrag session, everybody. take five.

i tried to read Fanged Noumena a while back, I could not make heads or tails of it.

10,000-word Guardian article, which I have not yet read

https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence

Cyan Banister, Arielle Zuckerberg Firm Raises https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-03-19/cyan-banister-arielle-zuckerberg-raise-181-million-to-back-magical-weirdos?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc0MjQxNzg3MSwiZXhwIjoxNzQzMDIyNjcxLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTVEREQ1NUMVVNMFcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJGODgyODQ0REQ2MUY0QTc3QTVDQjI3MDM5OTEzNzNCRCJ9.wE4fhcCLuTwSbX7gt8ICTftnsmf9e_GW0gse3FyWQH881.8 Million to Back ‘Magical Weirdos’

Long Journey has raised $181.818 million for its latest fund — a lucky number in Judaism — and this week is making its public debut, with a launch party it’s calling a “housewarming.”

“Our thesis is to look for those magically weird people and to find them before it becomes consensus,” Banister said, popping Lemonhead candy in her mouth and tucking shoeless feet under a conference table shaped like a baby grand piano. “There’s always a pocket of dreamers and weirdos. You just have to know where to look.”

silicon valley is going back to its roots https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/

“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