Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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.

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

thinking about andreesen makes me too angry to post about the reasons he makes me angry

cmon lets hear it then

egg man bad

It doesn’t take middle school trauma or cultural deprivation or limitation, or an incorrect assumption of superior intelligence to end up a total libertarian asshole. Plenty endure both and are not greedy antisocial economic predators and vampires.

All, both, whatever

Worthwhile pod:

https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/218_the_religious_foundations_of_transhumanism_w_meghan_ogieblyn

Paris Marx is joined by Meghan O’Gieblyn to discuss parallels between transhumanism and Christian narratives of resurrection, despite the fact many transhumanists identify as staunch atheists.

Guest

Meghan O’Gieblyn is an advice columnist at Wired and the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine.

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street…you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

“A huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers … You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones…”

Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).

“Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs. Crips gang rivalry. “No Blues should be welcomed there.”

While the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: “In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses … There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.”

Balaji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. “Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first). The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.

Just trying to bring this tweet to life

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) November 8, 2021

Tbf even other tech barons hate balaji.

he has an amazing brain that should be removed from his skull for study

when they’re done they could put it in Andreesen. he’s probably got some spare room in there