We don’t know. However, it is certain that in their orgies and little orgies they make various “cocktails” – and they have been completely dumbed down. Of course, they can still float on top exercising power over crowds that have also been dumbed down, in different or even similar ways…
We are referring to various western “personalities” of the declining Silicon Valley. Some more widely known as names, others not.
The text below refers to various such personalities, and their delusions. We did not intend to translate / publish it here, since there is always the possibility that various people might take them all seriously. Good Lord, they have a lot of money! Doesn’t that make them omnipotent?No! And not only are they not omnipotent, but they are also (forgive us the word) fucked. They see the magnetic train of 600 kilometers per hour (: the Chinese state/capital) coming down on them. And the only way to escape is to “take off” into technological metaphysics of their own construction!
Finally, we offer it to you. We hope you have a clear mind, humor, and a certain sense of the vanity that Kassovitz staged in “Hate” in 1995: … jusqu’ici, tout va bien… So far, everything is going well… When you have finished reading, remember that all these things are said and orchestrated in the most decadent zones of the capitalist planet. And that what the 4th industrial revolution (will) be as it spreads, we will not learn from such techno-press releases. We will learn it from where capitalism is … “at its best”!!!
Remember this “detail” and rejoice: woe to the defeated!
Ziggy Stardust
The ideologies of Silicon Valley as a lens for observing
current events
Nat Wilson Turner, September 10, 20251
The awareness of the various emerging ideologies of Silicon Valley can provide a useful prism through which we will analyze current events.
The techbros have control over the technologies that increasingly govern our lives, billions upon billions of dollars to influence our politics, and a shameless desire for power and control.
It turns out that they have devoted considerable time discussing the big questions among themselves, and now their philosophies are spilling over into our real lives.
I intended to complete my mini series on companies that promote Artificial Intelligence (also known as Large Language Models) with a look at the alleged “thinking systems” that have captivated Silicon Valley.
Then I read Matt Stoller’s book2 titled “Is There a Silicon Valley Plan to Cancel Elections?” and Emile P. Torres’s book titled “Here Are the Radical Proponents of Human Extinction in Silicon Valley” and I knew the time had come to deal with this.
Not to mention Ross Douthat’s article3 titled “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist: The authentic player of the right’s technology Artificial Intelligence for Mars and immortality” in the New York Times.
The Stoller article that sparked discussions:
“…The creation of a new political fund with hidden donors from Silicon Valley giants: I don’t want to worry, but if everything goes according to plan, they could potentially颠覆 the elections in America.”
…If someone can spend an infinite amount of money to call you a pedophile who loves trannies, you will probably lose your political career. For example, in Ohio in 2024, longtime senator Sherrod Brown found himself facing a campaign funded with cryptocurrency worth 40 million dollars, with various accusations against him, and this reduced his popularity resulting in his loss.
Today, Fairshake4 can overturn most politicians without spending a dime, knowing that aspiring candidates for office would not want to lose simply for what they perceive as a secondary policy compared to their funding. These companies got everything they wanted. Now they are applying cryptocurrency policy for Trump and have intimidated most members of Congress to vote for whatever they want. Fairshake has raised yet another large “war chest” for 2026 and it is unlikely that the power of cryptocurrencies will diminish until there is an economic crisis.
Unfortunately, the Fairshake lesson did not go unnoticed by others in Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen, who is a member of Meta’s board of directors and participates in Fairshake, has organized this strategy in other areas as well. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and artificial intelligence venture capitalists have now decided to launch their own Fairshake-type secret funds, in order to make legislative regulation of productive artificial intelligence or big technology impossible.
The net result of these monetary amounts is that the implementation of public policy around Artificial Intelligence could become operationally impossible through our democratic system. As Artificial Intelligence gains greater significance, this means that American legislation will take the same form as that which Andreessen and some other giants want it to have. Additionally, other corporate giants will begin to get involved in their areas, closing off other zones from democratic oversight.
Now, it is always difficult, especially in the era of Citizens United4, to make progress, as too much money drowns out many good policy decisions. Indeed, what we are actually seeing is the final stages of an organized effort since the 1970s to allow money to overwhelm democracy. These massive dark funds could mean that elections have truly become decorative.
Torres, in the second of his three-part series on the champions of human extinction in Silicon Valley, wrote:
A journalist asked me the other day what I believe is the most important thing for people to understand about the current race to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). My answer was: First, that the AGI movement arose directly from the TESCREAL movement. The construction of AGI originally concerned utopia rather than profit, although profit has become a significant lever alongside the techno-utopian dreams of AGI that will inaugurate a paradisiacal fantasy world within literal heavens. Therefore, one simply cannot understand the AGI movement without some understanding of TESCREAL ideologies.
Secondly, that the TESCREAL movement is deeply interwoven with a pro-extinction view, according to which our species, Homo Sapiens, should be marginalized, disempowered, and ultimately erased by our post-human successors. More specifically, I argue in an upcoming entry titled “TESCREAL” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia that views within the TESCREAL movement almost without exception fall somewhere on the spectrum between pro-extinction and (as I call it) extinction-neutral. Silicon Valley pro-extinction is the claim that our species ought to be replaced, while extinction-neutrality says it doesn’t much matter whether our species survives once post-humanity arrives.
Torres continues by giving brief summaries of the thoughts of various Silicon Valley personalities, including Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon, Google co-founder Larry Page, Turing Award winner Richard Sutton, commentator Beff Jezos (aka Gill Verdon), the Singularity prophet Ray Kurzweil, and:
Sat Alman
Altman5 is not only a significant reason why the race toward General Artificial Intelligence began and is accelerating, but he also believes that uploading human minds to computers will become reality during his lifetime (he is currently 40 years old). Several years ago, he was one of 25 people who signed a contract with a newly formed company called Nectome to preserve his brain in the event of his premature death. Nectome promises to preserve brains so that their microstructure can be scanned and the resulting information transferred to a computer, which can then simulate the brain’s functioning. In this way, the person who owned the brain would suddenly “wake up,” thus achieving “cybernetic immortality.”
Is this a form of transcendence of the human species? In a way, yes. If all future humans are digital post-humans in the form of uploaded minds, then our species will have disappeared. Should this happen? I suppose Altman would have no objection to these post-humans colonizing the world – what matters to many TESCREALists, to which Altman belongs, is the continuation of “intelligence” or “consciousness.” They have no faith in the biological substrate (in humanity) and, in this sense, they are at least neutral towards disappearance, if not supporters of it.
Peter Thiel
Thiel supports a specific interpretation of philo-extinction, according to which we should become a new post-human species, but this post-human species should not be entirely digital. We should retain our biological substrates, albeit in a radically transformed state. Therefore, this comes into contrast with most other views discussed here. These other views constitute clear examples of digital eugenics, while Thiel supports a version of philo-extinction that is more traditionally eugenic – specifically, it is a philo-biological variant of transhumanism (a form of eugenics).
Torres also points out a fundamental “naive” mistake by Thiel when he gave an interview to the conservative, moderately intelligent NYT journalist Ross Douthat:
Thiel was asked whether “humanity would prefer to survive” in the future. Thiel responded with an uncertain “Uhh…”, prompting journalist Ross Douthat, who conducted the interview, to note with a tone of concern: “You hesitate.” The rest of the discussion proceeded as follows:
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I’ll… I’ll…
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There are so many questions that are implied in this.
Douthat: Should the human species survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: Okay.
(Torrres does not analyze Douthat’s attempt to reconcile his views with the supposed Christianity of:)
But it still seems that the promise of Christianity in the end is that you attain the perfect body and the perfected soul through the grace of God. And the person who tries to do it alone with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.
Thiel: Well, it is …. let’s say….
Douthat: And there may be a heretical form of Christianity that says something else.
Thiel: Yes, I don’t know. I think the word “nature” doesn’t appear even once in the Old Testament. So, there is a word with which, with the meaning that, as I understand it, the Judeo-Christian inspiration concerns the transcendence of nature. It is about the overcoming of things. And the closest thing you can say to nature is that people have fallen. This is the natural thing with the Christian meaning, that you are messed up. And this is true. But there are some ways in which, with the help of God, it is supposed that you should deal with this and overcome it.
Douthat: Correct. But most people – excluding those who are here now – who work on building the hypothetical god from machine do not consider that they are collaborating with Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts.
Thiel: Sure, sure. But…
Douthat: They think they are building immortality by themselves, right?
Thiel: We are changing roles in many things. So, again, the criticism I was making is: They are not ambitious enough. From a Christian perspective, these people are not ambitious enough.
I should also quote an excerpt from Torres’s previous work for TruhDig to explain his acronym TESCREAL, which combines the first letter of the ideologies transhumanism, extropianism6, singularitarianism7, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and long-termism:
“…the asterism of ideologies behind the current race to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and the terrible warnings about the disappearance of human nature that have emerged alongside it…”
At the heart of TESCREALism lies a “techno-utopian” vision for the future. It envisions an era when advanced technologies will allow humanity to achieve things such as: radical abundance, redesign, immortality, colonization of the universe, and the creation of an extensive “post-human” civilization among the stars, filled with trillions upon trillions of people. The simplest way to realize this utopia is through the construction of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
We believe these ideologies are a central reason why companies such as OpenAI, which is primarily funded by Microsoft, and its competitor, Google DeepMind, are trying to create “artificial general intelligence” from the outset.
…According (to Marc Andreessen’s view), the most likely outcome of advanced Artificial Intelligence is that it will dramatically increase economic productivity, give us “the opportunity to deeply enhance human intelligence” and “tackle new challenges that were impossible to address without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.” The development of Artificial Intelligence is therefore “a moral obligation we have towards ourselves, our children and our future,” writes Andreessen.
Torres also pointed me to David Z. Morris8 whose book titled “DeepSeek and the Culture of Killings for AI” argues that “techno-rationalism connects a wave of murders, FTX embezzlement, and market collapses.”
An excerpt of it:
The (tech) rationalism lingers at the heart of Sam Bankman-Fried’s unrestrained embezzlement at #FTX, from which 500 million dollars went to Anthropic, a nascent company funded by “AI Safety” and employing Amanda Askell, former spouse of Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill. 5 million dollars from the funds stolen by SBF also went directly to the Center for Applied Rationality, one of Yudkowsky’s two organizations.10 Half a million dollars in FTX capital also helped facilitate the purchase of a hotel that became the headquarters of a CFAR subsidiary called Lightcone Research, which was notorious for the presence of several eugenicists and white racists at its events.
It also helps explain, I think, why OpenAI and other American AI startups were recently humiliated in a disgraceful manner by a Chinese hobbyist: because they are guided by some of the same ideas that have led fringe rationalists into paranoia.
In the past three years, at least EIGHT violent deaths have been recorded, which are connected, to varying degrees, with fringe factions of the (techno) rationalist movement founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky in San Francisco. The (techno) rationalist community wishes to disown the perpetrators and it is true that the clique members have been at odds with the main group here for years. Most importantly, they just seem outright insane.
But, I would hesitantly argue, the source of the conflict is that these bad actors took Yudkowsky’s core ideas, above all the ideas about the impending destruction of humanity by Artificial Intelligence, and pushed them to a logical conclusion—or, at least, to a conclusion according to their own logic. This wave of murders is simply the most extreme manifestation of cult-like elements that have emerged from the effective altruism movement itself over the past decade, including MKUltra-style coercive learning both at Leverage Research—a splinter group that was apparently expelled from effective altruism itself following certain revelations—as well as within the Center for Effective Altruism itself.
In his article “FTX, Techno-Rationalism, and American Intelligence Services: A Conspiracy Theory” (an excerpt from his book “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, the Elite Scam, and the Worship of Techno-Utopia”), Morris connects some troubling dots:
The Center for Applied Rationality, which received (and has resisted returning) capital stolen from FTX customers by Sam Bankman-Fried and his associates, bears a striking resemblance to agendas for both individual brainwashing and large-scale social engineering that led to some of the CIA’s most troubling programs.
Now, with the revelation that a group of techno-rationalist fraudsters, known as “Zizians”11, has been linked to a wave of murders across the United States, it seems justified to investigate the possibility that the techno-rationalist movement may not simply be a misguided ethos that has become toxic due to a fringe version of it resembling a cult. Placed within a broader context, its principles and practices begin to resemble both the Human Potential Movement centered around institutions such as the Esalen Institute, and, in fringe subgroups that have splintered off from techno-rationalism itself, the illegal human experiments conducted by the CIA beginning in the 1950s under the code name MKUltra.
Morris’s article titled “What is TESCREALism? Mapping the worship of techno-utopia” can help us return to current events:
The myth of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the reason why efforts based on reality to make existing artificial intelligence algorithms safe for people living today have almost zero resonance among the most ardent supporters of “AI safety.” In exactly the same way that Sam Bankman-Fried stole customer capital to make long-term bets, today’s AI leaders actively and loudly dismiss the current, substantive risks of machine learning algorithms and instead focus on a long-term future they predict with certainty without a trace of real evidence. (Only two unfounded assumptions of the disgraced visionary’s fantasy are that AI will become self-improving and that it will easily conquer nanotechnology.)
This blatant display of foolishness may be the deeper underlying reason why the tech industry had to get rid of Timnit Gebru.12 The vision of Artificial Intelligence shared by people like Sam Altman essentially stems from science fiction such as James Cameron’s Terminator, and goes back as far as Karel Capek’s RUR, the source of the word “robot.” Capek’s 1923 work preceded anything resembling Artificial Intelligence by a wide margin, making it clear that the purposeful, humanoid, thinking “robot” was always primarily a metaphor for the far more complex dialectic through which human-made technology becomes a threat to human essence. Advocates of the Singularity have made the childish mistake of confusing these simplified fairy-tale stories with the complexity of reality, and as long as Gebru and her team remain committed to describing how technology actually functions in reality, the collective fantasy of super-intelligent yet incredibly dangerous Artificial Intelligence is under threat.
Norris also connects TESCREALism with the recent release The Argument and the Abundance bros in his book “Effective altruism in disguise: the ‘Argument’ is the laundering of austerity”:
The launch of the new “liberal” news agency The Argument was undoubtedly heartwarming, mainly because most of their top writers, particularly Matt Yglesias and Kelsey Piper, are not so much “liberal” in the commonly understood American sense, but rather “center-right to secretly aristocratic.” Piper and Yglesias were both previously associated with Vox, and The Argument also features Derek Thompson as a writer – Klein’s partner in the ideologically very similar work “Abundance Liberalism,” which largely concerns adopting right-wing deregulatory rhetoric.
When examining the funding of The Argument, it becomes very clear why this “liberal” edition is dedicated to undermining the case for a welfare state. The Argument is funded and staffed primarily not by “liberals,” but by a mix of Effective Altruists such as Dustin Moskovitz, who strategically distanced themselves from this brand after the FTX collapse exposed its strategic and ideological void; and entities linked to far-right funding sources, such as Peter Thiel and the Koch Brothers. This is “liberalism” in 2025.
If you know Yglesias and Piper, you know that their whole gambit is to maintain a strategic ignorance that serves their ideological goals.
Freddy DeBoer13 offers some complementary thoughts on Ezra Klein14, which are not explicitly connected to Silicon Valley ideologies, but provide additional information:
Klein, with his sincere disbelief towards the claims of AI maximalists, shows us a way in which this denial unfolds. Klein is captivated by the prospect of a radical technological transformation, by the possibility that genetic models or robotics or biotechnology will completely reshape the human condition.
He has taken interviews from dozens of people on the subject and, although he hesitates and selects information, there is always an underlying receptiveness to the idea that we are on the threshold of a science fiction future. «One after the other… they come to me saying… We are ready to reach artificial general intelligence[!]», says Klein, with his incredulous tone, without taking a breath to acknowledge that each of these individuals is someone who has a direct financial investment not in real and impending artificial intelligence, but in the impression that artificial intelligence is real and impending.
Klein doesn’t want to abandon the possibility of living in Star Trek or Blade Runner or Terminator. He wants to believe that our lives can change so radically that the burden of ordinary existence can be lifted. And I promise I’m not lying when I claim that, while I consider most AI evangelists to be insincere charlatans, I find everything Klein says full of honesty and emotion. Which, analytically, is naturally the central problem: he is too eager to believe.
…
Klein wants the story of Artificial Intelligence to write that we are at the threshold of a post-scarcity society, that the hard work of politics and labor can soon be overcome by miraculous machines. He is smart enough not to say the other part out loud, that he wants to pilot a mech on the sands of Mars, to drive his X-Wing into the mouth of a wormhole that will take him who knows where.
…
Klein’s fantasies risk destroying the global economy.
What deBoer understands is that Klein desperately wants to believe in magic. What he misses is that Klein’s fantasies are constructed and guided by “visionaries” of Silicon Valley, who are equally devoted to a fantastical vision of reality.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, they have the money and power to impose these fantasies on us.
At the peak of wildcat strikes in the industrial backbone of Italian capitalism in the ’60s, Agnelli, owner of Fiat, dreamed of “a factory without workers”…
Facing the onslaught of the Chinese state/capital and its allies, the “pioneers” of Silicon Valley dream of a planet inhabited by androids, replicas, exclusively of their own making and ownership…
translation – rendering
Ziggy Stardust
- From the site naked capitalism ↩︎
- Right-wing writer and columnist at the New York Times. He has served as a staff member of the Atlantic. ↩︎
- It is described as a “political action committee,” funded by the cryptocurrency industry, which in turn funded various congressional and senate candidates in the recent 2024 elections. According to CNBC, it pushed 33 out of the 35 candidates it supported into the internal party primaries. Its creation was attributed to the cryptocurrency industry’s outrage over the Biden administration’s anti-crypto stance. Consequently, Fairshake supported Trump-aligned candidates… ↩︎
- Conservative mp. She became particularly known in 2010 when she managed to obtain a court decision allowing companies to fund candidates of their choice in elections… ↩︎
- The CEO of OpenAI. ↩︎
- Extropianism in English, from extropy, the opposite of entropy. Ideology of continuous improvement of the human species through technological means in order to overcome human biological limits: aging and death. ↩︎
- Singularity ↩︎
- American author specializing in the “miracles” (and traumas…) of the computer industry. ↩︎
Sam Bankman-Fried (33 years old today) created the first cryptocurrency “exchange” in 2019, named FTX, quickly becoming the 41st richest American. In practice, he was stealing from “investors” and “depositors”. When things started to “smell fishy” in November 2022, “depositors” began withdrawing from FTX, which quickly went bankrupt. A month later, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024.
↩︎- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky: American artificial intelligence researcher and ethicist regarding it. He is mainly known for the latter. ↩︎
- Zizians: an informal American group of techno-rationalists that has been indicated to have a direct connection with 6 murders in the USA, 3 in 2022 and 3 in 2025. The name (which has been attributed to them by third parties) comes from Ziz LaSota, the group’s self-proclaimed “guru.” ↩︎
- With origins from Eritrea and Ethiopia, Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist specializing in “artificial intelligence,” data mining, and critiquing the creation of “biased” algorithms. Until the end of 2020, she co-led Google’s “AI ethics team.” At that time, she published a position on the risks of “large language models,” which she characterized as “stochastic parrots.” Google asked her to retract it; she refused, and Google fired her, sparking a wave of criticism. ↩︎
- American Marxist writer and art critic. ↩︎
- American journalist, writer for the New York Times since 2021, co-founder of Vox along with Yglesias and Bell. In the past, he has held executive positions at the Washington Post and the American Prospect, and has also worked at Bloomberg. ↩︎