Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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.

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

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.