Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Thread for general discussion of, and feeble resistance to, our new overpaid 20-something savant overlords, starting with this lovely article:

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

is the baffler as smug and unreadable as it was in the late 90s/early 00s? to be frank all i ever got from them (or thomas frank solo) was a withering contempt for most of america, rather than any mournful concern.

haha to be frank see what I (unintentionally) did there?

nerds with power

shudder

This is the first Baffler thing I've bothered with in a while. I thought it had its moments back in its earlier incarnation -- there was an essay on cities and the "creative class" that I still refer to mentally sometimes. I think the internet has kind of made the sort of bullshit-skewering it specialized in more widespread and diffuse.

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 spent several hours today reading about these people and the boat sagas, the sexual assault at the tree monastery, the weird jargon … and it’s kinda like tankie activists minus the marxism. Like replacing marx with star wars world.

link?

I followed the links in max’s article. Then more links. I am pretty certain I don’t know any of these people.

I do wonder if they had overlap with Direct Action Everywhere which organizes animal rights actions (i know someone involved in that group) … but I kinda doubt it. These people seem pretty insular from actual political activism, which is weird to me… but probably the insularity reinforces the star wars ideology and larping.

yeah you gotta hunker down and write some blogs

I spent several hours today reading about these people and the boat sagas, the sexual assault at the tree monastery, the weird jargon … and it’s kinda like tankie activists minus the marxism. Like replacing marx with star wars world.

However it does seem like they have the equivalent of struggle sessions …

More deets on the 'Zizians'... I find myself not very interested in these people at all, but this is about a rusting abandoned tugboat

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/sunken-boat-linked-to-zizians-mysterious-vallejo-murder-case/

i blame burning man for all of this

The Zizians have well-educated followers

i suppose the quality of education is in the eye of the beholder

_The Zizians have well-educated followers_


i suppose the quality of education is in the eye of the beholder

theyre educated at doing computers not reading books other than harry potter

they don't follow Marx's tumblr

“Educated” in this case I would posit just means “credentialed,” in that the person went thru undergrad.

In that they have been “educated” from the result of sitting thru classrooms for hours at an ostensibly educational institution, but they haven’t actually expended effort at knowing wtf they’re prattling on about past a cursory wiki scan.

been going down so many rabbit holes after reading about the Zizians on this thread, holy fuck

well tell us about it then

Here’s an interesting piece that’s related to both this but also a lot of other threads on socio-political topics

https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone

Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling
-
The symbolic professions aggressively select for those who are highly educated and cognitively sophisticated. This is a key source of their dysfunction.

It’s related to how most cult members tend to have above-average intelligence. If you’ve been socialized as being “smart” in a culture that accords higher status to people who pose that way, you tend to be _really_ good at coming up with justifications for what you believe and convincing yourself that you’re right.

Here’s an audio version w/ commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDCHDxqMZuI

good stuff kingfish ty

i love varn vlog

Thanks, keep a-readin’

Here’s an interesting piece that’s related to both this but also a lot of other threads on socio-political topics

https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone

blurbs for this guy's book from Tyler Cowen, David Brooks and Tyler Austin Harper. oh and a Quillette guy

Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative book undercuts the left elite by pointing out the hypocrisy of its well intentioned rhetoric. The “woke” live comfortable lives because of the very inequities they condemn.

yeah this is a devastating critique, how will we ever come back from this

Rather than becoming more likely to converge on the same position, people tend to grow more politically polarized on contentious topics as their knowledge, numeracy, reflectiveness increases, or when they try to think in actively openminded ways.

These empirical patterns would be shocking and difficult to explain while operating under the assumption that humans’ cognitive and perceptual systems are primarily oriented towards objective truth.

Why would that be shocking at all? Why would we assume that the truth lies in the middle? Why would we assume there's such a thing as objective truth in political positions? Politics entails value judgments!

He has links. So many links. Some seem to be to highly-cited papers. Some are Matt Ygelsias blog posts, or worse. But he's trying to weave them together in a way that I find highly sketchy. I dunno, I don't want to say there's nothing there - yes, tribalism, confirmation bias, etc, these are all things. But as far as I can tell none of the research he cites supports the idea that the problem is worse on the left than the right.

And in general I'm just suspicious of analysis of the current moment that is ahistorical and ostensibly (but never in fact!) value-neutral.

The best analysis of the current situation is mine, which is: people suck. (The rest is extrapolation.)

xp lukas otm, i read some of that piece, got weird vibes, then went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to pin that guy down. he was the comms director for “the heterodox academy”, which aiui tries to highlight and balance out the lack of right wing voices in academia under the guise of free speech concerns. seems he’s of the matt yglesias/sam harris mold of just asking questions, concealed within some extremely verbose pop intellectualism. anyway it tripped my radar the way he was talking about ”smart people” and glad I’m not alone in my bs detector going up. like lukas said, there are lots of sections there that are hard to refute but i do not see where they add up to his thesis at all

The fact that the terminology was ill-defined and there were lots of graphics that didn’t seem to directly tie into the argument he was making… which I wasn’t clear on to begin with… I felt like I was reading another variant of lesswrong jargon

And when you look at the tribalism of who is running America now, it isn’t smart people.

The very concept of smartness/intelligence within this kind of framework is suspect. Like it's some sort of measurable quality.

I saw a similar idea years back but it was about educational attainment rather than intelligence.

“Ooh you have a Yale Law degree?” (makes jerkoff motion)

More on Ziz and the Zizians, this shit is nuts and all these people are crazy

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/new-details-bay-area-zizians-death-cult-20165754.php

OMFG

in the two minutes since you posted that I read about 3 dozen totally insane sentences

They also practiced “unihemispheric sleep” or “partial sleep,” a scientifically dubious technique apparently developed by Danielson, in which one half of the brain rests while the other is active.

you couldn't make these names up: Ophelia Bauckholt, Maximillian Snyder....this season of Mr. Robot is crazy

"The tenants, who numbered over 20 at times, were often referred to as a “cult” by neighbors and seen walking around in the nude, talking to themselves and wearing gas masks."

Sounds like the parking lot to a Phish show.

this actually reminds me of the half-crazy "superbrights" in Bruce Sterling's book "Schismatrix"

Wonder what the cocktail was. K? Speed? Both?

K and meth, the Burning Man special

but they were all also super smart! read the bios!

I mean $500K a year right out of college is not yr average cult druggie loser, hate to valorize salary but again read the bios

the leader, otoh, seems like your average cult druggie loser but also very cunning/manipulative

cult leaders really fascinate me.

If i were going to remake The Wire but set it in present day Oakland, season 5 would feature a fake cult of white techies in lieu of the fake serial killer. These people that are associated with one another are responsible for the deaths of 5 people over a 3 year period…. Vs criminal gangs that have the same or higher body counts but don’t get the same coverage…

I am dumbfounded that these people exist

I also feel that my college instincts to stay far away from Silicon Valley were very wise

I feel like if I was a little younger it could have been ok. Can you imagine showing up to a date and you're the first person to not mention Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that your date has encountered in a year?

I also feel that my college instincts to stay far away from Silicon Valley were very wise

meeting people online is the worst, as we can all attest to

oh now we’re pretending the Silicon Valley is a strictly physical place?

Zizian leader arrested

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/18/jack-lasota-alleged-cult-like-group-zizian-arrest-maryland