Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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.

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.

did a husky voice, my god, she was really doing her best

the voice thing was so wild lol

Holmes fraud is worse because lives at least hypothetically could have been at stake, except it's hard to imagine things ever would have actually reached the stage where they were.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, March 28, 2024 2:19 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no theranos was actually performing blood tests and fucking them up

This was a federal sentence, he'll have to serve 85%, he's 32, he'll get out when he's 53-54.

https://bsky.app/profile/mitchellepner.bsky.social/post/3korf5o3jcb2i

apparently he's eligible for parole after 13 years

i thought 85% was standard in the feds too

some light googling is confirming this fwiw

There is no possibility of parole in federal criminal cases, but Bankman-Fried can still shave time off his 25-year sentence with good behavior.

"SBF may serve as little as 12.5 years, if he gets all of the jailhouse credit available to him," Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN.

Federal prisoners generally can earn up to 54 days of time credit a year for good behavior, which could result in an approximately 15% reduction.

Since 2018, however, nonviolent federal inmates can reduce their sentence by as much as 50% under prison reform legislation known as the First Step Act.

Epner says the First Step Act was billed as a civil rights measure, to help minority offenders who committed non-violent drug-trafficking offenses.

"It has turned out to be an enormous boon for white-collar criminal defendants, who are already given much lower sentences ... than drug-traffickers," Epner added.

ah ok well good luck to him

Biden can pardon him if he makes a hefty donation to the DNC

wonder if hes got any wallets he forgot about

never forget

Sequoia took down their SBF profile but the internet ensures it will live forever pic.twitter.com/0P3DWookmY

— BuccoCapital Bloke (@buccocapital) March 28, 2024

guys who control billions of dollars of capital losing their minds at the idea of buying a banana

also saying super app but then describing a banking app he couldnt even be bothered to say you can call an uber from it too, low energy

guys who control billions of dollars of capital losing their minds at the idea of buying a banana

Guys like that know that the best way to be fabulously wealthy is to insert yourself into financial transactions that involve incredibly huge amounts of money and raking off a small percentage of it, over and over again. SBF was selling them the idea of a service that would insert itself into every financial transaction on earth. Achieve that dream and you control humanity. Surprised they didn't jump out the window in an ecstatic transport.

he didnt say anything like that he just said you could buy a banana

Everyone wants to remake PayPal

It's one banana! What can it cost, ten dollars?

while ago amazon started giving out free bananas in seattle cause they were getting bad pr about taking over the city, thats what im talkin about free bananas costs zero no app needed thank you mr bezos for the banana

This Sequoia piece is so good with the benefit of hindsight.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/

The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.

I can't believe they lost their entire investment in this guy.

that shit is so funny galaxy brain isnt big enough

To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality.

See, by this logic there's a non-failson SBF universe out there which is doing awesome. Effective altruism wins again.

reality: they are morons in ALL the universes, that’s the singularity they keep talking about

What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss

“As soon as you say, ‘What are the odds that there’s a way to be infinitely happy? What if infinite utility is a possibility? Now, all of a sudden, we’re comparing hierarchies of infinity. Linearity breaks down.”

lolololol

pic.twitter.com/gc1Um92EGD

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) April 2, 2024

“Usually the depth of the downturn is in proportion to the magnitude of the bubble, which would imply we’re in for a brutal time.”

Venture Capital reckons with the end of the “megafund” erahttps://t.co/qI1SXfBXc4?

— George Hammond (@GeorgeNHammond) April 3, 2024

hmm. I wouldn't have guessed you followed the 'Financial Times'. Do you trust them?

Like the WSJ, the FT's reporting is pretty reliable and high quality, within its certain lane

ChatGPT hallucinates. Self-driving cars crash. Amazon is abandonning its 'just walk out' checkouts.

What if AI is overhyped? https://t.co/vgHyGf6lvn

— Henry Mance (@henrymance) April 6, 2024

Aside from the obvious ‘fuck this guy forever’ who looks at Neom and thinks “this will definitely happen and be a rousing success”?

Bill Ackman dreams of turning Gaza into another Neom https://t.co/YchbOfx02T pic.twitter.com/eNmEZ0r1G6

— kelly p. (@k_pendergrast) April 6, 2024

i love high-level thoughts

"ruled by a consortium of Gulf States and the US" wtf?????

Stakeholders and shareholders

Given what I know of him I'm surprised to find him taking a position on Gaza that would be considered unacceptably left-wing and Jew-hating by a lot of rightist commentators (and indeed, there they are in the replies, accusing him of being left-wing and enabling Jew-haters because he dares to imagine Gazans continuing to live in Gaza and to suggest there is a deficit of hope in their current status.)

Here is where neom is at.

80% downgrade…McKinsey’s where to next? pic.twitter.com/yhvXis1UT0

— Rupak (@ghose77) April 5, 2024

Ok just learning about Neom and lol

it seemed like such a good plan

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.