In five years, an estimated 5.9 billion people will own smartphones. Anyone who can code, or who has something to sell, can be a free agent on the global marketplace. You can work from anywhere on your laptop and talk to anyone in the world; you can receive goods anywhere via drone and pay for them with bitcoins — that is, if you can’t 3-D print them at home. As software eats everything, prices will plunge. You won’t need much money to live like a king; it won’t be a big deal if your job is made obsolete by code or a robot. The rich will enjoy bespoke luxury goods and be first in line for new experiences, but otherwise there will be no differences among people; inequality will increase but cease to matter. Politics as we know it will lose relevance. Large, gridlocked states will be disrupted like any monopoly. Customer-citizens, armed with information, will demand transparency, accountability, choice. They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up. There might be some civil wars, there might be many new nations, but the stabilizing force will be corporations, which will become even more like parts of a global government than they are today. Google and Facebook, for instance, will be bigger and better than ever: highly functional, monopolistic technocracies that will build out the world’s infrastructure. Facebook will be the new home of the public sphere; Google will automate everything.
Thiel and Vassar and Yudkowsky, for all their far-out rhetoric, take it on faith that corporate capitalism, unchecked just a little longer, will bring about this era of widespread abundance. Progress, Thiel thinks, is threatened mostly by the political power of what he calls the “unthinking demos.”
i think it's worth thinking a little bit about an article that came out in the most recent Harper's Magazine entitled "Come with Us if You Want to Live: Among the Apocalyptic Libertarians in Silicon Valley from which this quote by Michael Vassar was excerpted. The article is behind a pay wall, so I'll quote liberally from it, but it focuses on what Elieazar Yudkowsky calls the "New Enlightenment".
"We’re part of the continuation of the Enlightenment, the Old Enlightenment. This is the New Enlightenment,” he said. “Old project’s finished. We actually have science now, now we have the next part of the Enlightenment project.”
It's all about very smart, post-political, radical libertarian, singularitarian rationalists who think they can carry us into the New Jerusalem with code and entrepreneurism and tech. For them it's all about engineering a utopian transhuman fantasy. Postmodern ennui and skepticism about grand narratives are not in their m.o. If you've been following the blowing up of the New Republic under the ownership of Chris Hughes and his new CEO, Guy Vidra, you have some feel for the mindset, but this article goes into the heart from which so many of these ideas flow and in doing so shapes these, alas, very powerful shapers of our economy and culture.
I found the article fascinating for introducing me to a world I have some vague awareness of, but no real feel for. So assuming you are as unfamiliar with this world as I am, you should read it or just take the following abbreviated tour with me. One of the key shapers of that ethos is Peter Thiel,
a billionaire who cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk and invested early in Facebook. His companies Palantir Technologies and Mithril Capital Management had borrowed their names from Tolkien. Thiel was a heterodox contrarian, a Manichaean libertarian, a reactionary futurist.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. Freedom might be possible, he imagined, in cyberspace, in outer space, or on high-seas homesteads, where individualists could escape the “terrible arc of the political.” Lecturing in Palo Alto, California, Thiel cast self-made company founders as saviors of the world . . . .
Thiel’s lectures posited a world in which democratic universalism had failed, and all that was left was a heroic, particularist, benevolent libertarianism.
It's understandable why many people might have given up on politics and are looking for ways to circumvent it, but these guys take it to the next level. I love that the perverse Tolkien connection because salvation for these folks lies with technological and entrepreneurial innovation and markets, hardly elvish institutions.
We meet Michael Vassar, 34, quoted above. He went "to college at seventeen, and had worked as an actuary, as a teacher, in nanotech, and in the Peace Corps. He’d founded a music-licensing start-up called Sir Groovy. Early in 2012, he had stepped down as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)."
"There are all of these different countdowns going on,” he said. “There’s the countdown to the broad postmodern memeplex undermining our civilization and causing everything to break down, there’s the countdown to the broad modernist memeplex destroying our environment or killing everyone in a nuclear war, and there’s the countdown to the modernist civilization learning to critique itself fully and creating an artificial intelligence that it can’t control. There are so many different — on different timescales — ways in which the self-modifying intelligent processes that we are embedded in undermine themselves. I’m trying to figure out ways of disentangling all of that. . . .
“I’m not sure that what I’m trying to do is as hard as founding the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or something. But it’s harder than people’s normal big-picture ambitions, like making a billion dollars.”
It's funny, except, it's kind of not. And then we meet to Eliezer Yudkowsky:
In 2006, Yudkowsky began writing a hydra-headed series of blog posts: science-fictionish parables, thought experiments, and explainers encompassing cognitive biases, self-improvement, and many-worlds quantum mechanics that funneled lay readers into his theory of friendly AI. Rationality workshops and Meetups began soon after.
In 2009, the blog posts became what he called Sequences on a new website: Less Wrong.
The next year, Yudkowsky began publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at fanfiction.net. The Harry Potter category is the site’s most popular, with almost 700,000 stories; of these, HPMoR is the most reviewed and the second-most favorited. The last comment that the programmer and activist Aaron Swartz left on Reddit before his suicide in 2013 was on /r/hpmor.
Who is attracted to Less Wrong his website devoted to human improvement through Bayesian probability models:
Of the 1,636 people who responded to a 2013 survey of Less Wrong’s readers, one quarter had found the site thanks to HPMoR, and many more had read the book. Their average age was 27.4, their average IQ 138.2. Men made up 88.8 percent of respondents; 78.7 percent were straight, 1.5 percent transgender, 54.7 percent American, 89.3 percent atheist or agnostic. The catastrophes they thought most likely to wipe out at least 90 percent of humanity before the year 2100 were, in descending order, pandemic (bioengineered), environmental collapse, unfriendly AI, nuclear war, pandemic (natural), economic/political collapse, asteroid, nanotech/gray goo.
Forty-two people, 2.6 percent, called themselves futarchists, after an idea from Robin Hanson, an economist and Yudkowsky’s former co-blogger, for reengineering democracy into a set of prediction markets in which speculators can bet on the best policies. Forty people called themselves reactionaries, a grab bag of former libertarians, ethnonationalists, Social Darwinists, scientific racists, patriarchists, pickup artists, and atavistic “traditionalists,” who Internet-argue about antidemocratic futures, plumping variously for fascism or monarchism or corporatism or rule by an all-powerful, gold-seeking alien named Fnargl who will free the markets and stabilize everything else.
These folks have moved, in their thinking at least, way past any sense of frustration or malaise about our current political and economic arrangements:
On October 1, 2013, Republicans in Congress shut down the government. The venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya made news for crowing about how great the stagnation was for Silicon Valley. “It’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in L.A.,” he said. “It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. . . . Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter.”
These utopian New Enlightenment nerds are not interested in reforming the current system; they are "post-political" and are working to create a world that can bypass political institutions altogether as an anarchic, radically decentralized new technno-social order emerges from the ruins of the current institutions of the Old Enlightenment.
It sounds naively delusional at first glance, and yet it's been clear to me for some time that something, some kind of radical discontinuity is inevitable in the next fifty years or so. I have argued that evolution has until our own time been the unconscious, random process described by Darwin, but it no longer has to be because of the possible role that human consciousness and human choices can make. Will humans choose the Absolute Future, or will they just be swept along by the Flood?
The Cosmic Flood is metaphor I've been playing with for the cruel, impersonal, random process that scientists describe as having formed the universe and more locally the solar system, the earth, and the random, adaptive processes on it Darwin describes as biological evolution. I will leave aside for now any consideration of the degree to which transcendent forces played a shaping role in the universe and accept the scientific account as mostly correct, i.e., as describing 99%+ of what has happened in the history of our universe since the Big Bang.
But I would argue that's precisely what we needed saving from. And that the Event, the incarnation of the Logos 2000 years ago, introduced a new factor into evolution, and while its influence has been significant, it has gone and continues to go largely unnoticed. This was the moment when the Cosmic Flood met the Absolute Future. And since then, in a slow but persistent way, something has been happening in human beings that allows for a different possibility in history: the resistance and subversion of the random, impersonal processes of evolution driven by the logic of the Flood--or to use another metaphor, the logic of the Serpent.
Both metaphors describe the principle of evolution without grace. If you want to personalize this principle, go ahead: Call it Mephistopheles, Satan, Lucifer, or whatever. I don't want the suggeston that there might be a higher intelligence driving this process to stop any conversations, because I"m not sure there is. But I am talking about what otherwise is a widely recognized phenomenon. But, whether it is a higher intelligence or just a blind force, I would not describe it as evil for the same reason that I would not describe an earthquake or a tsunami as evil--it is just massively impersonal and cruel. It doesn't care about persons.
I would argue that this is the principle of civilization, that it drives the impersonal process that builds empires and promotes advances in science and technology. It thinks, but it thiniks with the logic of the serpent, the principle of intelligence without mercy, of the cold, purely rational calculation that needs no moral justification for its choices except to exclaim, "I am the spirit of evolution". "Greed is good", said the Ayn Rand-parroting Gordon Gecko:
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind . . .
This is the logic of the serpent. It was his logic in the Garden of Eden, wherever or whatever that was, and it's its logic now.
So the Silicon Valley utopia is for me a description of the world and the development of a human being that follows the logic of the serpent. Clearly a lot of what these people are talking about is going to happen whether it's a good idea or not. Perhaps some of it can be redemptively transformed, so I'm not saying that the world they are hoping for is impervious to the influence of grace, but I am saying that to the degree that the New Enlightenment is about building a world without grace, to the degree that its thinking follows the logic of the serpent, the utopia they envision will turn out to be hell on earth.