What has gone wrong with the minds of Silicon Valley? In the 1970s the place was full of hippies who saw computers as a counter-culture. In the 1990s information wanted to be free. In the 2010s the internet was claimed to topple dictators. And now? Now Silicon Valley is run by broligarchs – tech bros who want to control elections, control the media, control the markets. (And in some cases puppets for bigger forces.) Much has been said about Big Tech’s ideological U-turn, but Netopia wants to offer three observations: early signs, religion and… sand. Bear with me:
Early signs. Let’s take a look at the arch-broligarch, tech investor Peter Thiel. He laid out the plan almost forty years ago as the co-founder and editor-in-chief of student newspaper Stanford Review when he articulated the manifesto for Silicon Valley’s dominance: 1. No regulation 2. No taxes. 3. No copyright. 4. No competition. It is fair to say that the plan worked. The same Thiel suggested datacenters be set up on abandoned oil rigs on international water in order to escape government intervention (Barbara Broccoli, if you read this put this in the next 007 flick!). In his 2014 book From Zero to One, Thiel advocates niche monopolies as business strategy (no competition!). And perhaps those oil rigs aren’t necessary after all, if you pull the strings of policy-makers like puppets. None of this should come as a surprise though, the signs were there all along.
Religion. Worship higher powers, separate soul from body and be blessed with eternal life. Sound familiar? They simply replaced the word God with AI and look what happened. If you want to know if a broligarch is after your soul or just your money, look for the word TESCREAL for example on their Twitter/X-profile. (Or check if they are a member of a community such as this!) Tescr… what? Let’s decipher it:
T – Transhumanism. Transcend the limits of the physical body and live forever through technology. Stop infection with microbots in your bloodstream. Replace worn-out organs with synthetic ones. Add new sensory functions like night vision. None of these technologies exist yet? Fear naught, there is a company that offers to cryo-freeze your corpse until the tools and methods have been properly developed.
E – Extropianism. An earlier label for the transhumanism idea. A scoop on Truthdig revealed that this also included ideas of superior intelligence in the white race (by Oxford AI professor Nick Bostrom no less).
S – Singularitarianism. The idea that the accelerating pace of innovation will come to a point – The Singularity – when all innovation happens at the same time. Moore’s law which predicts increases in computing power is one ingredient. The speed of dissemination of new technologies (soundbites like “television took four decades, smartphones four years and Chat-GPT four days” are par for the course) is another. Expotential growth is another key word. When the singularity comes, technology will liberate us, we will live forever and shall not want. Google chief technologist Ray Kurzweil expects the singularity in the year 2045, though his more recent forecasts suggest it may have been delayed slightly. Oh, there is also the Singularity University in Santa Clara, CA, (right next to Google’s Mountain View) where students can study this concept.
C – Cosmism. Humans will merge with technology and become a new race, for example by uploading our minds online and live forever without bodies. Same Kurzweil has a new book out about this (review coming soon on this website). And of course William Gibson described this idea long ago in Neuromancer (Ace, 1984) where “cyber-cowboy” McCoy Pauley’s consciousness uploaded to ROM-drive plays a central part. (Re-read the book!)
R is for Rationalism. For all this good stuff to happen, we need really smart people working on the execution. The TESCREAL-flavour of rationalism is about finding ways to make people smarter so the fantasy can become reality. An obsession with IQ-tests is part of the package.
EA is for Effective Altruism. Don’t waste your time saving the world at some not-for-profit, instead make heaps of money on something evil and donate to something good. How about crypto currency scams and donations to one of those NGOs (or Singularity University!)?
L – last but not least: Longtermism. A moral compass that says if human kind can live forever uploaded to the cloud or on new planets, maximising happiness and minimizing suffering the really long view means we should care more about the happiness and suffering of those who will live forever in the future than those who live today. Can’t make an omelet… (or as if talibans interpreted utilitarianism.)
So there it is. TESCREAL is a litmus-test, use it to see if a broligarch is a creepy cultist or just a harmless hyper-capitalist megalomaniac. TESCREAL’s baby cousin is e/acc or “effective accelerationism” which means we should accelerate the development of AGI so it can fix our problems. (It makes for good sci-fi, in the very least) The word “problems” is key to understanding the TESCREAL world-view. If the world is full of problems that stand in the way of our development as a species/civilization/culture/insert-your-favourite-big-word, it would be great to solve them, no?
But you said something about sand? Ah, yes. That too. I’m thinking of course of the Burning Man-festival, the Nevada Desert glamping fiesta where some pay 2 500 US dollars to expand their minds, share their ideas about the inevitable path of technology and partake in sexual experimentation (maybe I’m just envious of the “sex plane”?). Elon Musk himself said “if you haven’t been, you just don’t get it”. Burning Man has come a long way from its anti-capitalist roots, just like the Silicon Valley – once a haven for hippies. Perhaps this is why higher powers released their wrath on last year’s “burners”. Or maybe that was an AGI taking control of the weather?
