Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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

forwarded this link with subject: "smug silicon valley shits want to create a randian/fascist utopia" which is pretty much all i can really think to say about this

what is that gatefold from??

prodigy - music for the jilted generation

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

Interestingly enough the thesis of Amy Chua's follow-up book was that this combo was at the root of Jewish-Chinese greatness

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