This piece totally misreads the temperament of actual builders imo. The author confuses a malicious will to power with a genuine, if sometimes naive, optimism that code/crypto can solve human coordination problems.
I think both things can be true simultaneously. Like in the Russian Revolution, there can be a mass of people motivated by a sincere, if naive, optimism in a new way to organize society, but they can get used by people like Lenin and Stalin who were primarily motivated by their thirst for power.
The rich men of SV belong to a narrow generation cohort, genX and early millenials. They were overgrown kids in 2006 and had no political ambitions. In 2016 they still didn't so they voted against the grain. in 2026 they are over 40 and willing to bend to whatever makes the rest of their life easier.
In reality it's a bunch of children that were "socialists in their teens , conservatives as adults" (but because socialism was bad taste their only choice was libertarianism). They are still not very old, not very evil. They have some way to go. Musk is 52, Thiel is 58, Zuck is 41. Wait to see what happens after 65... the culture of technologists will take a very dark turn
Technocracy is fascinating because the ideology is either an intentional obfuscation about what politics is at its core, or an ideology for well-educated and absolutely politically illiterate people.
“Don’t make this political.” See, right there? That’s the entire shtick. The negation of the political. Repeat that very political mantra until it takes hold. Until the political philosophy of not-politics has won.
Politics is conflicts of interests between persons and groups. A political problem is a people problem. A technical problem has a technical and objective solution. Fifty different interests does not have a technical solution.
Or does it? Everything is dynamic, and one person’s supposed technical problem is a political problem for another one. But mix the two together? Then it becomes a political problem unless the first one manages to dominate the other.
>More recently, Srinivasan has been proselytizing a new belief that he likens to “tech Zionism.”38 Tech elites had to exit democracy and settle sovereign territories of their own. These peripheral islands of tech utopianism would in time unite, eventually accruing enough capital and power to challenge the nation-state. They would oversee a new tribe of loyal citizens dressed in matching gray. “If you see another gray on the street… you do a nod. You’re a fellow gray.”39
This makes the Roko's Basilisk post seem sane and reasonable
Something that strikes me every time I encounter SV Rationalism presented this way is the self-annihilation of it: tastes and preferences are to be optimized out as cognitive biases, grey uniforms mandated in lieu of individual expression (fashion). The god they're sacrificed to? “Technological progress"
I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy. It was as if expressing an aesthetic preference weren't an optimal way to spend one's time or money. Better to spend those things "optimizing efficiency” or optimizing oneself/one’s own life
It seems like Thiel and co _don't actually care about other people_ or human welfare writ large. This isn't a novel observation, but it bears repeating
It's mirrored in something I ask myself every time I hear that Thiel is a "libertarian" _while also_ being the founder of the biggest surveillance dragnet ever created: what about surveillance is libertarian? I thought libertarians were all about "live and let live" and "stay out of my business". It's the opposite. But I guess what he really wants is "freedom for me, surveillance for thee". Again, not a novel observation, but it finally clicked into place for me reading this piece
The state integration and the separatist fantasy aren't competing visions, though; you build the surveillance infrastructure inside the state, then exit into your own enclave that benefits from it. It all feels like a way to create the world depicted in Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy (fantastic if you haven't read it): corporate enclaves with private security built for employees and their families with lawless "pleeblands" outside the walls
Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property.
So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...
> Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property.
> So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...
Whatever technical definition of Libertarianism you're using is very narrow. Nobody is under the delusion that Libertarianism requires no crime.
It does if you don't want a worse privately owned government. Either the government will stop crime, or Palantir and the Pinkertons will stop anything they seem to be crime, or there never was any crime.
You see, that's the great thing about Libertarinaism, it can be whatever you want, and when there's something you don't like you go "but that's not real Libertarianism"
There’s really two types of people that tend to be drawn to libertarianism at some point: humanists and narcissists.
Those who are fundamentally humanist want to tear down systems of oppression because it pains them to see their fellow humans abused and brought low by corrupt laws and regulations. They (perhaps naively) imagine that if the system was dismantled or at least shrunk to minimum size, basic human decency will step in to fill the vacuum and people will thrive. Folks like Penn Gillette are the face of this group.
The narcissists are drawn to the movement because they feel like “if only everyone would get out of my way, I can do GREAT THINGS™ “. They like ideas like social Darwinism because they are already privileged enough to not be worried about losing in a survival of the fittest contest, and don’t tend to concern themselves with the second order effects of dismantling the system because it is simply an immoral impediment to their greatness. Peter Thiel and folks like him are the face of this group. This is largely the strain that has taken root in SV.
I see a whole lot more that end up at libertarianism as almost the default answer to "what philosophy most emphasis less government".
It's a generational thing I think, you see public money being spent on junk, and laws used to entrench and make competition hard; and you think "why do we want the government to do these things at all?". And if you look at common ideas around 20 years ago, the default answer was libertarianism.
> I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy.
That has to do with the crowd you ran into. Burning Man is many things, but among those, it does have a lot of art. Did you go to SF Museum of Modern Art? or any of the art anything's? Same with sports. There are a ton of nerds that call it sportsball and think they're clever, but at the same time, the Superbowl is this weekend and there's a lot of sport-related things happening around the Bay Area that you wouldn't know about if you didn't look for it. So I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from such a limited sample set.
> I ask myself every time I hear that Thiel is a "libertarian" _while also_ being the founder of the biggest surveillance dragnet ever created: what about surveillance is libertarian?
Surveillance does not directly violate the non-aggression principle, and a myopic adherence to minimal principles without any consideration to where they lead is the central feature of libertarianism.
Surveilance means stealing intellectual property of surveiled people. If you're a TRUE libertarian, then you need to make sure that you arrange some kind of a contract with the people you surveil.
Technocracy had both socialist proponents like Charles Steinmetz and also anti-communists racists/fascists like Joshua Haldeman (Elon Musk grandfather). In some ways technocracy is the acknowledging of the necessity of economy planning to transcend capitalism but without taking into account class struggle. That way, it can be seen like a good-willed engineer dream that doesn't wants to face social reality or thinks socialist like planning can be implemented just by convincing capitalists it's advantages for the entire society (somewhat like the old utopian socialism / fabianism)... or, it can be used as an ideological cover-up to sell the dream of a brighter future but without questioning the billonarie class, the concentration of capital or the property of the means of production, while avoiding taking explicit positions in every class struggle instance.
I think this new version is the latter case, a bad rehearsal used as a veil of the ascent of fascism in the States.
> I think this new version is the latter case, a bad rehearsal used as a veil of the ascent of fascism in the States.
I've found over time that one man's utopia is another's hellish nightmare. This is true of every utopia and should be a pretty strong argument against implementing them at all.
I see this in some cities. They are very clean looking, no litter, no graffiti, very shiny windows. Then you think about how the people must be treated to make this be true.
> Then you think about how the people must be treated to make this be true.
People who have all their needs met (food and safety, social, etc) tend to want to make the world around them better. I would wager the nice looking places are more likely to have well-treated people.
Places that look like dumps are the ones more likely to be populated by people who are treated poorly.
TLDR; they built a mouse utopia universe 25 with plenty of food water and space . Eventually some grew violent, others sat and groomed themselves all day, they stopped breeding and died out.
War is violent and mucky and you never know if you’re going to make it out on the other side. I think a great value of Marx’s later work is the reminder of its inevitability. All we can do is prepare and hope it works out better this time.
This is like communism in the sense that it's sold as one thing, but serves another purpose for a different set of people than those it was marketed to.
Having worked as a software engineer in the industry for almost 15 years, my experience is that the leading (elite) proponents of this philosophy don't really care about tech or innovation; they only care to the extent that they control the innovation.
Any innovation created outside of their sphere of control will be ignored and suppressed (as best as possible). It's ironic because this is how they view China's tech sector. I remember reading an article about DeepSeek and the author made a comment about how it was developed independently of government by a relatively small company and how unusual this is for China; surprised that they were able to build without the blessing of the CCP... But the US works the same way! Except instead of the CCP, the power is called Big VC.
Anyway this is the past 20 years or so. I'm skeptical of this model. I'm quite sure, as a tech guy, I would do better in a strict hard-money capitalist system, even if I just did software as a side project. Right now it's just too centralized and monopolized and there are perverse incentives keeping everything locked in. It used to be that a 10x solution could get you noticed, now nothing will get you noticed besides the right technocratic pedigree.
It could also be simple. This looks like a bunch of very high profile people in a fast changing environment, just doing their best not to become targets, and helping consolidate power is a side effect.
The time will come when it’s rational for powerful people to make a stand - but that time has not yet arrived. According to the pattern, society has to go through a dark time first. Probably so there’s something to contrast against.
The most tragic thing is how many museums we already have - all over the world! - that tell this story.
> The time will come when it’s rational for powerful people to make a stand - but that time has not yet arrived. According to the pattern, society has to go through a dark time first. Probably so there’s something to contrast against.
This piece totally misreads the temperament of actual builders imo. The author confuses a malicious will to power with a genuine, if sometimes naive, optimism that code/crypto can solve human coordination problems.
I think both things can be true simultaneously. Like in the Russian Revolution, there can be a mass of people motivated by a sincere, if naive, optimism in a new way to organize society, but they can get used by people like Lenin and Stalin who were primarily motivated by their thirst for power.
No idea why you're getting downvoted. That's exactly how it played out. Though the "mass of people" rapidly lost their naivete.
The rich men of SV belong to a narrow generation cohort, genX and early millenials. They were overgrown kids in 2006 and had no political ambitions. In 2016 they still didn't so they voted against the grain. in 2026 they are over 40 and willing to bend to whatever makes the rest of their life easier.
In reality it's a bunch of children that were "socialists in their teens , conservatives as adults" (but because socialism was bad taste their only choice was libertarianism). They are still not very old, not very evil. They have some way to go. Musk is 52, Thiel is 58, Zuck is 41. Wait to see what happens after 65... the culture of technologists will take a very dark turn
It seems like a bold assumption these guys will still be in the same roles at 65.
Technocracy is fascinating because the ideology is either an intentional obfuscation about what politics is at its core, or an ideology for well-educated and absolutely politically illiterate people.
“Don’t make this political.” See, right there? That’s the entire shtick. The negation of the political. Repeat that very political mantra until it takes hold. Until the political philosophy of not-politics has won.
Politics is conflicts of interests between persons and groups. A political problem is a people problem. A technical problem has a technical and objective solution. Fifty different interests does not have a technical solution.
Or does it? Everything is dynamic, and one person’s supposed technical problem is a political problem for another one. But mix the two together? Then it becomes a political problem unless the first one manages to dominate the other.
This is some Fallout material right here !
>More recently, Srinivasan has been proselytizing a new belief that he likens to “tech Zionism.”38 Tech elites had to exit democracy and settle sovereign territories of their own. These peripheral islands of tech utopianism would in time unite, eventually accruing enough capital and power to challenge the nation-state. They would oversee a new tribe of loyal citizens dressed in matching gray. “If you see another gray on the street… you do a nod. You’re a fellow gray.”39
This makes the Roko's Basilisk post seem sane and reasonable
Asimov’s Foundation series
Something that strikes me every time I encounter SV Rationalism presented this way is the self-annihilation of it: tastes and preferences are to be optimized out as cognitive biases, grey uniforms mandated in lieu of individual expression (fashion). The god they're sacrificed to? “Technological progress"
I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy. It was as if expressing an aesthetic preference weren't an optimal way to spend one's time or money. Better to spend those things "optimizing efficiency” or optimizing oneself/one’s own life
It seems like Thiel and co _don't actually care about other people_ or human welfare writ large. This isn't a novel observation, but it bears repeating
It's mirrored in something I ask myself every time I hear that Thiel is a "libertarian" _while also_ being the founder of the biggest surveillance dragnet ever created: what about surveillance is libertarian? I thought libertarians were all about "live and let live" and "stay out of my business". It's the opposite. But I guess what he really wants is "freedom for me, surveillance for thee". Again, not a novel observation, but it finally clicked into place for me reading this piece
The state integration and the separatist fantasy aren't competing visions, though; you build the surveillance infrastructure inside the state, then exit into your own enclave that benefits from it. It all feels like a way to create the world depicted in Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy (fantastic if you haven't read it): corporate enclaves with private security built for employees and their families with lawless "pleeblands" outside the walls
> The god they're sacrificed to? “Technological progress"
They're wannabe-Morlocks.
Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property.
So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...
> Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property. > So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...
Whatever technical definition of Libertarianism you're using is very narrow. Nobody is under the delusion that Libertarianism requires no crime.
It does if you don't want a worse privately owned government. Either the government will stop crime, or Palantir and the Pinkertons will stop anything they seem to be crime, or there never was any crime.
>technical definition of Libertarianism
You see, that's the great thing about Libertarinaism, it can be whatever you want, and when there's something you don't like you go "but that's not real Libertarianism"
There’s really two types of people that tend to be drawn to libertarianism at some point: humanists and narcissists.
Those who are fundamentally humanist want to tear down systems of oppression because it pains them to see their fellow humans abused and brought low by corrupt laws and regulations. They (perhaps naively) imagine that if the system was dismantled or at least shrunk to minimum size, basic human decency will step in to fill the vacuum and people will thrive. Folks like Penn Gillette are the face of this group.
The narcissists are drawn to the movement because they feel like “if only everyone would get out of my way, I can do GREAT THINGS™ “. They like ideas like social Darwinism because they are already privileged enough to not be worried about losing in a survival of the fittest contest, and don’t tend to concern themselves with the second order effects of dismantling the system because it is simply an immoral impediment to their greatness. Peter Thiel and folks like him are the face of this group. This is largely the strain that has taken root in SV.
I see a whole lot more that end up at libertarianism as almost the default answer to "what philosophy most emphasis less government".
It's a generational thing I think, you see public money being spent on junk, and laws used to entrench and make competition hard; and you think "why do we want the government to do these things at all?". And if you look at common ideas around 20 years ago, the default answer was libertarianism.
fwiw Penn Gillette no longer calls himself a libertarian.
> I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy.
That has to do with the crowd you ran into. Burning Man is many things, but among those, it does have a lot of art. Did you go to SF Museum of Modern Art? or any of the art anything's? Same with sports. There are a ton of nerds that call it sportsball and think they're clever, but at the same time, the Superbowl is this weekend and there's a lot of sport-related things happening around the Bay Area that you wouldn't know about if you didn't look for it. So I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from such a limited sample set.
> I ask myself every time I hear that Thiel is a "libertarian" _while also_ being the founder of the biggest surveillance dragnet ever created: what about surveillance is libertarian?
Surveillance does not directly violate the non-aggression principle, and a myopic adherence to minimal principles without any consideration to where they lead is the central feature of libertarianism.
> a myopic adherence to minimal principles without any consideration to where they lead is the central feature of libertarianism.
Your definition, maybe. Redefining that idea and assuming it is accepted as fact is a touch arrogant.
Libertarianism itself it a touch arrogant.
I'm not assuming or defining anything, just summarizing my observations of how self-proclaimed libertarians behave.
Surveilance means stealing intellectual property of surveiled people. If you're a TRUE libertarian, then you need to make sure that you arrange some kind of a contract with the people you surveil.
Technocracy is not a human ideology. It's an ideology for machines and by machines in which humans are reduced to machines.
Technocracy had both socialist proponents like Charles Steinmetz and also anti-communists racists/fascists like Joshua Haldeman (Elon Musk grandfather). In some ways technocracy is the acknowledging of the necessity of economy planning to transcend capitalism but without taking into account class struggle. That way, it can be seen like a good-willed engineer dream that doesn't wants to face social reality or thinks socialist like planning can be implemented just by convincing capitalists it's advantages for the entire society (somewhat like the old utopian socialism / fabianism)... or, it can be used as an ideological cover-up to sell the dream of a brighter future but without questioning the billonarie class, the concentration of capital or the property of the means of production, while avoiding taking explicit positions in every class struggle instance.
I think this new version is the latter case, a bad rehearsal used as a veil of the ascent of fascism in the States.
> I think this new version is the latter case, a bad rehearsal used as a veil of the ascent of fascism in the States.
I've found over time that one man's utopia is another's hellish nightmare. This is true of every utopia and should be a pretty strong argument against implementing them at all.
The origins of the word utopia are exactly that idea. The original books about utopias almost all showed the negative heart at the center of the idea.
I see this in some cities. They are very clean looking, no litter, no graffiti, very shiny windows. Then you think about how the people must be treated to make this be true.
> Then you think about how the people must be treated to make this be true.
People who have all their needs met (food and safety, social, etc) tend to want to make the world around them better. I would wager the nice looking places are more likely to have well-treated people.
Places that look like dumps are the ones more likely to be populated by people who are treated poorly.
unrealistic expectation. The city is hyper–clean because anyone who litters is shot.
Can you be more specific? I guess you're talking about some place like one of the central Asian republics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
TLDR; they built a mouse utopia universe 25 with plenty of food water and space . Eventually some grew violent, others sat and groomed themselves all day, they stopped breeding and died out.
War is violent and mucky and you never know if you’re going to make it out on the other side. I think a great value of Marx’s later work is the reminder of its inevitability. All we can do is prepare and hope it works out better this time.
This is like communism in the sense that it's sold as one thing, but serves another purpose for a different set of people than those it was marketed to.
Having worked as a software engineer in the industry for almost 15 years, my experience is that the leading (elite) proponents of this philosophy don't really care about tech or innovation; they only care to the extent that they control the innovation.
Any innovation created outside of their sphere of control will be ignored and suppressed (as best as possible). It's ironic because this is how they view China's tech sector. I remember reading an article about DeepSeek and the author made a comment about how it was developed independently of government by a relatively small company and how unusual this is for China; surprised that they were able to build without the blessing of the CCP... But the US works the same way! Except instead of the CCP, the power is called Big VC.
Anyway this is the past 20 years or so. I'm skeptical of this model. I'm quite sure, as a tech guy, I would do better in a strict hard-money capitalist system, even if I just did software as a side project. Right now it's just too centralized and monopolized and there are perverse incentives keeping everything locked in. It used to be that a 10x solution could get you noticed, now nothing will get you noticed besides the right technocratic pedigree.
"Every accusation is a confession" they say
It could also be simple. This looks like a bunch of very high profile people in a fast changing environment, just doing their best not to become targets, and helping consolidate power is a side effect.
The time will come when it’s rational for powerful people to make a stand - but that time has not yet arrived. According to the pattern, society has to go through a dark time first. Probably so there’s something to contrast against.
The most tragic thing is how many museums we already have - all over the world! - that tell this story.
> The time will come when it’s rational for powerful people to make a stand -
Stand for what? They all seem to gain from this so I am not sure where your logic is coming from.
> According to the pattern, society has to go through a dark time first.
This sounds like a stereotypical hollywood story and not an actual thoughtful response to what is actually going on.
It’s a stereotype for a reason..
People need to see how bad it can get before they’ll care.
> The time will come when it’s rational for powerful people to make a stand - but that time has not yet arrived. According to the pattern, society has to go through a dark time first. Probably so there’s something to contrast against.
What do you mean, "make a stand?"
Adding a rainbow flag to their product for June 1 2029 until June 30 2029