Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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

" don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. "

some of these guys really like the chinese state! land in particular

it's an authoritarian state run by engineers hell bent on getting rich as quickly as possible, what's not to love

true, there are multiple stripes of badness here

yeah they're big on how little they agree on things (while the prof left is a huge monolith of conformity etc etc)

*prog left

yeah, unified front on the left, for sure

" don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. "

some of these guys really like the chinese state! land in particular

right, I think Singapore, Hong Kong are the promising models for some of them - and from what I've seen the "racial realism" end of the dark enlightenment/mencius moldbug crowd throw around NAM as an acronym for the ppl they want out of their dictatorships – "non-asian minorites"

they are other-ing the hell out of people, aren't they?

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

― purposely lend impetus to my HOOS (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, May 22, 2014 3:11 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This seems completely otm to me – techno-libertarianism maybe has the money, connections, technical accomplishment, power to fuck up a lot of the decent bits of the state & society in the future. Probably just enough of those things to implement a really miserable, corrupt and half-arsed version of its Utopia in a muddled alliance with the old right.

To be clear: techno-libertarian utopia = shit, robot cars, people starving on the streets; half-arsed version = probably even shitter, robot car companies sueing the starving people they run over on the streets.

techno-montessori schools?

kids making their own beats at their own pace, discovering new filters

808fasciststate

ok, i take it back, it's all ok if Thiel is like

http://www.me.gr/m/photos/get_image/file/c4a5ed918dd0eb0c058b5cfa95afc85d.jpg

The Palantir chore coat is made by the same Palantir named in homage to Lord of the Rings, the same Palantir that has developed a reputation as ruthlessly committed to any number of national-security imperatives, and, yes, the same Palantir that builds AI tools for the military and tracks migrants for ICE. The mysterious tech giant now also wants to sell you outerwear. Only a tiny Palantir logo is embroidered into the coat’s left breast pocket, but flip the coat inside out and you’ll find a message from Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, sewn into the lining.

Ask yourself constantly, Am I winning? If the answer is yes, nothing else matters. Chaos is tolerable; pain is tolerable. The only thing that matters is to win.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260625143533/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/palantir-chore-coat/687686/

I've really soured on pretty much all other remnants of 2010s "workwear" because it it all seems to have been subsumed by Pr__d Boys. I keep seeing younger uniformed cops in my town who all have the shaved head, gym physique, full beard and sunglasses look, and they all just look like ICE/PBs to me. At least they aren't even bothering trying to mask it.

For some reason I had a bad perception of her before — forget why

because she sucks? and her priorities involve going after palestinian activists for their failure, in the midst of a genocide, for not masking

https://bsky.app/profile/marinadove.bsky.social/post/3mot3xlo64k2d

kind of a surprise when one of her pieces is normal or reasonable coverage when the internet-facing public persona is so inexplicably grating. strong tendencies to throw something private into the public sphere, then to chastise people when they question what's up with that

that recent outburst was a very weird one. I could ponder what's up with it, but it's not worth it

severely internet poisoned brain

https://nypost.com/2026/07/05/health/biohacker-bryan-johnson-reveals-he-has-incurable-disease/

uncritically publishing his press releases is how we got here

After being diagnosed with hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid that fails to produce enough hormones, at 21, Johnson supplemented with levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid to ensure his thyroid functioned properly.

This journalist can't seem to get simple facts straight.

What do you mean? That seems to state very clearly that dude’s thyroid wasn’t working properly and he tried to dose it back into working condition; nothing about that statement implies he was successful.

I don’t think the thyroid thing has anything to do with his stomach. Injecting blood from close relatives, on the other hand…

again, this is all PR and lore for the smooth man and he’ll be curing it himself or attributing his continued aging to that

"supplemented" makes it sounds like more of an experiment than it is. Hypothyroidism is super common. For whatever reason your thyroid doesn't work so you have to take Levothyroxine, which is a version of synthetic thyroid. Used to be synthroid. Not familiar with Armour Thyroid, looks like more of the same. Levothyroxine is one of the most prescribed medicines in the world.

What do you mean? That seems to state very clearly that dude’s thyroid wasn’t working properly and he tried to dose it back into working condition

Just because a statement is clear doesn't make it factual. He was prescribed levothyroxine by a licensed physician, because it is a prescription drug and its purpose was not to dose it back into working condition, but to make up for the shortfall of thyroid that his thyroid gland was unable to produce. It does not promote healing.

I used to have Graves Disease, which is an OVER active thyroid. Lost 40 pounds one summer in high school and couldn't easily untie my shoes. Spent a bunch of years taking various pills to try to control and bring the thyroid down to a normal range when an endocrinologist finally said why are you doing that, nobody does that any more, it's much easier and more common to treat an underactive thyroid, so they gave me radioactive iodine pills, with the goal of knocking down or killing my thyroid, until it was underactive instead of overactive, and now I take Levothyroxine and the dosage has changed slightly over the years but not for decades. Fun fact before synthroid/synthetic thyroid, people used to be prescribed sheep thyroid extracts.

this is seriously nitpicking the reporter saying it treated his thyroid instead of saying it simulated the outcome of having a functioning thyroid, got it

hmmm. djp read the same sentence and thought it very clearly stated that the subject's "thyroid wasn’t working properly and he tried to dose it back into working condition". Which isn't at all what levothyroxine does. He got that misimpression from bad writing, not because he's a bad reader. to me, calling the reporter out for misinforming readers isn't serious nitpicking, but maybe our standards for clear writing are different.

Guy fucked himself up with bad medicine in pursuit of a stupid goal

Now that's clear writing.

You know what, never mind