“In short, one may say anything about the history of the world—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
This past December, a wave of collective jouissance swept the internet as the CEO of UnitedHealthcare—a notoriously hated company even by the standards of one of America’s most hated industries—was gunned down by a lone assassin in the center of Manhattan. But the search for a political narrative to make sense of the newly minted folk hero soon ran aground. Rather than a radical leftist engaged in propaganda of the deed, as some hoped and others feared, the suspect (at least on the evidence of his internet presence) was an otherwise well-adjusted, successful and highly educated young man who nevertheless held a seemingly incoherent collection of niche social views. While some observers were confused at what could be the common thread between Luigi Mangione’s concern over climate change, disdain for diversity initiatives and strangely detailed proposals to solve Japan’s falling birth rate, others were able to spot the unmistakable footprint of a specific “type of guy” and a worldview that has become increasingly familiar as the values of the tech industry have continued to filter through U.S. society.
The presence of Silicon Valley on both sides of the recent election—one that pitted a former Bay Area attorney general backed by Uber and LinkedIn executives against a billionaire TV host turned conspiracy theorist supported by the founders of Tesla and PayPal—has led analysts to posit a rift of sorts within the tech world. At the progressive end of the spectrum, according to this view, are philanthropists who believe in harnessing the industry’s power to address abiding liberal concerns about poverty, global inequality, animal rights and climate change. Over the past decade, this side of the division has been most prominently represented by the effective altruists—a cultural movement initially focused on identifying efficient charities that has now grown into a full-fledged global community whose composition skews disproportionately vegetarian and polyamorous. Before his fall from grace, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a major figure within the effective-altruism movement as well as one of the Democratic Party’s most visible donors.
On the other side of the conflict, according to this picture, are the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk: essentially, libertarians who soured on the idea of democracy after realizing that voters might use their rights to restrict the power of oligarchs like themselves. These so-called neoreactionaries advocate a feudal world in which those at the top of “natural hierarchies” rule their own sovereign microstates unburdened by democratic constraints. The fact that these alleged natural hierarchies happen to overlap almost perfectly with preexisting hierarchies of race and gender has also served as a magnet for the white nationalists and anti-abortion tradcaths who mix merrily with sea-steaders and crypto enthusiasts at the sort of astroturfed “reactionary avant-garde” cultural spaces extensively analyzed and satirized over the last four years. In any case, among other factors, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory has been attributed to an overall shift within the tech world toward this end of the spectrum, with the typically atheist and libertarian inhabitants of that world becoming surprisingly sympathetic toward religious traditionalism.
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But beneath these contradictory political currents lies a deeper continuity, defined not so much by any coherent ideological positions as by a shared conceptual vocabulary. Much of this scaffolding has its origins in what’s known as the rationalist community, a set of cliques and discourses that emerged during the mid-aughts with blogs like Overcoming Bias and LessWrong. Existing at the intersection of Bay Area counterculture and the libertarian hacker ethos that characterized the early tech industry, these forums became known for painstakingly argued discussions on subjects ranging from veganism and religion to media ethics and the possibility of nuclear war. In many ways, rationalism is the result of people with STEM educations attempting to tackle questions that had long been the purview of the humanities, guided by a stubbornly autodidactic conviction that definitive answers could be reached through a rigorous application of logic untainted by psychological biases. Mangione’s social media posts bear the recognizable hallmarks of this tendency: an earnest curiosity about how the world works coupled with a boundless faith in technology’s ability to reshape it, a treatment of social issues as engineering problems reducible to a utilitarian calculus, and a great deal of confidence in one’s own ability to apply this calculus as a “high decoupling” thinker unconstrained by political “tribalism.”
Over the last two decades, the rationalist community and its offshoots have evolved from niche internet spaces to Silicon Valley’s equivalent of think tanks, with former bloggers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Curtis Yarvin gaining the ear of industry CEOs and policymakers. And as tech increasingly comes to inform our political and economic reality, these discussions have also become more reflective of how the industry sees itself and its own priorities. Researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have coined the acronym TESCREAL—transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism—to define the constants underpinning the various positions within this worldview, an overlapping set of assumptions and values that, like the water to the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous parable, are largely taken for granted by their adherents.
Mangione’s fixation on birth rates touches on a common theme in the TESCREAL cloud, one that has increasingly entered mainstream discourse across the political spectrum. During the election, J.D. Vance floated the idea of incentivizing procreation by disenfranchising “childless cat ladies,” while Musk can increasingly be heard fretting about the possibility of civilizational collapse due to population decline. Coming from the right, such concerns are often—and somewhat correctly—dismissed as dog whistles for a racist panic about a “great replacement” of the white population by third-world hordes. But one need not look too far to find a slew of oddly indulgent interviews, books and articles probing a “progressive case” for pro-natalism. These range widely in quality: demographer Paul Morland critiques how rich countries with dropping fertility rates are effectively outsourcing reproduction to developing nations, while others propose that having more children can help solve the climate crisis simply by increasing the total amount of intelligence in the world—an example of the kind of idea George Orwell considered so stupid that only an intellectual could believe it. More commonly, however, we are told that larger generations of young workers are needed to support the welfare state, a point that may sound reasonable as long as we don’t think too hard about the idea of human beings being brought into existence as a means to serve economic ends.
In fact, the notion that it’s imperative to increase the number of people in the world and that creating new lives is thus morally equivalent to preventing deaths is a key pillar of the techno-optimist worldview. This is the same formula by which Steven Pinker is able to declare that a world in which a growing absolute number of people face violence and starvation is nevertheless a desirable one as long as the proportion of such people in the overall population decreases—equivalent to claiming that a warlord who enslaves a hundred villagers but sires a thousand free children has made a net positive contribution to humanity. The presumption that perpetual population growth is self-evidently both desirable and inevitable, combined with a moral framework that assigns the same weight to potential lives as existing ones, results in a bizarre utilitarian calculus concluding that any action with the slightest chance of impacting the distant future carries a moral weight many magnitudes greater than any concern for the mere eight billion humans alive today. This conclusion forms the basis of longtermism—the L in TESCREAL.
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Longtermism explains one of the most striking commonalities between progressive and reactionary techno-optimists: their shared set of enemies. Proponents of degrowth, community activists who oppose gentrification and luxury development and anyone else perceived as standing in the way of economic and technological progress are considered guilty of contributing to outcomes that are not merely inefficient or suboptimal but literally equivalent to murder. This is because any delay forestalls the development of technologies that could hypothetically be used not only to save lives but give rise to vastly more of them, either by colonizing galaxies or simulating virtual ones populated with trillions of digital consciousness. Taken to its logical extreme, this means that every moment not spent pursuing technological growth is equivalent to multiple future holocausts. Such reasoning also underpins the fixation on artificial intelligence, which has by this point eclipsed nearly all other debate in tech spaces. Whether viewed positively or negatively, people in TESCREAL spaces share a near-universal agreement that humanlike artificial general intelligence is not only possible but just around the corner and, once developed, will have the power to either destroy humanity entirely or ensure its infinite advancement. Either way, it necessarily follows that AI research is the most important thing in the world—perhaps the only important thing.
So great is the faith that TESCREALists have in their deductive acumen that once these logical leaps are made, all the conclusions that supposedly flow from them are treated as entirely reasonable, no matter how counterintuitive, absurd or morally abhorrent. Sometimes this leads to amusing results, such as when, in the form of a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk, significant numbers of self-proclaimed rationalists scared themselves nearly to death by reinventing Pascal’s Wager and imagining the inevitable emergence of an AI deity that would reach back through time and simulate exact copies of their consciousness to eternally torment them for not sufficiently contributing to its development. Other times, the implications are more disturbing. In a now-infamous dissertation, former FTX executive Nick Beckstead used the logic of effective altruism to conclude that the lives of people in the first world are worth more than those in the developing world, as the former have greater productivity and are more likely to contribute to “innovation” that will save more lives in the long run. And just like that, the gulf between progressive philanthropists and openly racist neoreactionaries no longer seems quite so vast.
To be sure, many in the EA community either distanced themselves from Beckstead’s argument or challenged its validity. Yet its repugnant conclusion was not a bug caused by accidental personal bias, but a feature inherent in attempts to apply utilitarian calculus to human populations since the days of Karl Pearson. Widely known as the father of mathematical statistics and less widely so as a eugenicist and social Darwinist, Pearson held that a nation must be “kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races.” These social views were not incidental to Pearson’s development of population statistics—they were its key motivation, and have since continued to haunt the field, periodically reemerging in new guises such as Charles Murray’s notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve. Despite—or perhaps more accurately, because of—its repudiation by polite liberal circles as a front for scientific racism, Murray’s work and the valorization of IQ in general still find significant purchase among TESCREAL thought leaders like Anders Sandberg, who served as a research fellow at the Musk-funded Future of Humanity Institute, as well as in recent political discourse surrounding mass immigration.
That utilitarianism applied to populations almost inevitably leads to genocidal conclusions is not the only issue, though it is indeed an issue. The bigger question is what purpose this utility is ultimately intended to serve, in other words: Utility for whom? To do what? Longtermism in both its reactionary and progressive varieties offers surprisingly few answers to this question, and such answers, when they are given, tend to be vaguely tautological: growth to increase wealth, eugenics to increase fitness, innovation to increase progress. The only constant seems to be that no matter the abstract noun in question, the goal is to increase it. This worship of quantity as such is most clearly crystalized by William MacAskill, considered one of the founding philosophers of effective altruism, in the line “More of a good thing is better.” Thus, every complex aspect of human life—whether it’s births, housing, technology, economic activity, intelligence or existence itself—is collapsed into a fungible mass existing on a simple linear scale that we must necessarily strive to maximize, with no consideration as to whether the good it represents may be relative and positional, dependent on specific qualities or circumstances of its instantiation, or subject to emergent feedback loops over a certain threshold.
And once this “good” is abstracted from any particular beneficiaries, a funny thing happens. Consider that effective altruism begins with the unobjectionable idea of maximizing charitable impact by identifying the interventions capable of saving the most lives at the lowest cost, such as buying malaria nets. Of course, the money that would be spent on a one-time purchase of malaria nets could go even further if it’s instead spent on a campaign convincing wealthy people to continually donate to such charities, or setting up a foundation dedicated to promoting such campaigns. It then stands to reason that an even greater impact could be made by putting the money into investment funds dedicated to financing such foundations, or hiring executives and consultants in order to increase these funds’ returns. In fact, forget about malaria nets altogether: the greatest impact one can pursue is to maximize “societal wealth” that can theoretically be channeled toward any and all charitable purposes one wishes, though to actually spend such wealth on those charitable purposes at any given moment would prevent it from being invested toward even greater future growth. Accordingly, the “highest-impact career paths” identified by the effective-altruist site 80,000 Hours include “helping build the effective altruism community,” “research into global priorities” and “operations management in high-impact organisations.”
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Are we starting to get it yet? The joke is that rationalist longtermists have produced countless articles, blog posts and podcasts; organized conferences and retreats; and spent billions promoting a supposedly radical new philosophy. The punchline is that the grand result of this project is simply our current system with extra steps, the value it seeks to maximize being none other than capital as Marx described it over one hundred and fifty years ago. This vampiric force that “lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” alienates the products of human effort from their makers, converting them into an abstract quantity whose only purpose is to reproduce and grow itself. Accordingly, longtermism posits an ever-growing omelet that recedes perpetually into the future while demanding a potentially infinite number of broken eggs—a utility monster at the end of time.
But where Marx used the language of gothic horror to describe the demonic force that transfers human agency into inanimate objects, TESCREALists invoke the utopian tropes of science fiction to promote it as a techno-deity to which we must willingly offer our blood and sweat. Nowhere is this more clearly spelled out than in the writings of cyberpunk academic turned self-described “hyper-racist” neoreactionary Nick Land, who wrote back in 2008 that “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” Land’s vision has since been embraced by more mainstream accelerationists like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, as the account of capital’s threat to human existence is transmuted from a dire warning into a sales pitch.
TESCREAL thus represents the doctrine of capitalist growth distilled into its purest ideological form and elevated to the status of an apocalypse cult, often by the same people who deride environmentalist advocates of degrowth as irrational and anti-humanist Gaia worshippers. And it is precisely this religious dimension of techno-optimism that underpins the confluence of secular tech developers and Christian fundamentalists, liberal philanthropists and genocide advocates: all of them see humanity as raw material to be molded in the divine image, an equation to be maximized in pursuit of a transcendent telos, a “biological bootloader” for the singularity.
One may ask how seriously those driving the proliferation of TESCREAL ideology really take these metaphysical fantasies. But this is largely beside the point. Whether true belief or a cynical con, every religion needs its priests, and this is a position for which these “high IQ” individuals have eagerly volunteered themselves. Obsessed with optimizing every aspect of their lives—their thought, their diet, their relationships, their aging, their reproduction—the acolytes of progress have been hard at work developing a new homo algorithmicus to populate and rule the future Nerd Reich. And whether they believe the arrival of superintelligent machines is to be welcomed or feared, their proposed solutions unsurprisingly tend to converge on shifting more of society’s resources into technology research, and more of its decision-making power into the hands of people like themselves.
It’s no accident that an ideology advocating infinite sacrifice for the sake of an abstract future would arise precisely at a time when humanity faces catastrophic threats in the concrete present. Until fairly recently, capitalism could ostensibly justify itself via tangible promises of rising living standards, bigger houses and cheaper consumer goods in the near term. But even its apostles no longer pretend to believe this in an age of climate disaster, mass displacement and accelerating collapse of the global order; instead, our erstwhile visionaries now proffer distant dreams of space colonization even as they invest in personal apocalypse bunkers. Where neoliberalism once promised a rising tide to lift all boats, the longtermists seem to want to ensure they’re first in line for the life rafts.
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It is not only oligarchs who have been guilty of betraying the present. Marx’s quip that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” found itself transmuted by generations of would-be revolutionaries into a vulgar self-justifying prometheanism whose only purpose was to break with the past. The German Social Democrats who believed that state-led development would naturally bring proletarian victory, the Russian cosmists who dreamed of universal immortality, the Italian futurists who worshipped speed and power for their own sake: all were intoxicated with the possibilities that industrial technology had carved out for human liberation, and all ultimately had their dreams subsumed by projects that achieved quite the opposite. As Walter Benjamin saw shortly before his own tragic end, the mistake had been to conflate possibility with inevitability in a vision of progress that “bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at their disposal” and recognizes only “the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society.” Just like our alienated labor, a future imagined in this way confronts us as something that is not ours, but exists of its own accord, suspended in what Benjamin termed “homogeneous, empty time.”
But rejecting the false promise of futurism does not mean abandoning hope or dismantling technological civilization. What it does mean is the categorical refusal of any human instrumentality project, any philosophy or politics that grounds its purpose in anything other than actually existing human beings. Difficult as it may be for some to imagine, a concern for the future as such does not require any utilitarian accounting of hypothetical virtual minds, because it is already baked into the present. Making it easier for people to have and raise children is desirable, not because it makes an imaginary line go up, but because it’s something that many currently living people want to do. If lower birth rates cause problems for the economy, then perhaps the solution lies not in breeding more humans as economic livestock but shifting to a production system that’s not an intergenerational Ponzi scheme requiring children to pay off debts incurred by their grandparents. And an interest in long-term environmental sustainability merely requires understanding that we already share the planet with multiple generations, who will in turn share it with more. The future is not a discrete entity on a hypothetical horizon; it exists only as an extension of the present, built on the very threads of human sociality that bind us to each other. And today it is not only the weight of dead generations but that of imagined nonexistent ones that is foisted upon us by those who would destroy our reality for their science fiction. Like Benjamin, who saw rivers of blood spilled for the sake of promises that never came to be, we must understand that human liberation lies not in an endlessly deferred tomorrow but the struggle to redeem the past today.
What, then, shall we make of Luigi Mangione? His trajectory appears to have been driven largely by his own struggles with the aftermath of a back injury—but it wasn’t entirely personal either. UnitedHealthcare was not his own insurer but one he chose methodically because it was America’s largest, making it the target with the most potential impact. His manifesto contained both statistics and citations justifying the case against the insurance industry, particularly the observation that while health-care costs have grown, American life expectancy has not. It may be a stretch to conclude that Mangione used rationalist calculus to determine that his course of action was the best thing he could do to maximize happiness under the given circumstances. Yet ultimately, even someone so steeped in capital’s latest cutting-edge ideology was forced to confront the fact that the numbers didn’t add up, that value-optimizing algorithms may not only fail to alleviate human suffering but may in fact serve as its direct cause. Faced with this realization, Mangione responded in a way that resonated with millions of people across political lines. Was he wrong? Certainly it’s hard to imagine any positive developments resulting from this intervention. But to answer the question would require reclaiming a vision of tomorrow rooted not in the nihilism of individual powerlessness or the disembodied fantasies of the powerful, but in our shared present. As distant as such possibilities may seem, the future is not set in silicon.
Photo credit: Robbie Shade (Flickr / CC-BY 2.0)
“In short, one may say anything about the history of the world—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
This past December, a wave of collective jouissance swept the internet as the CEO of UnitedHealthcare—a notoriously hated company even by the standards of one of America’s most hated industries—was gunned down by a lone assassin in the center of Manhattan. But the search for a political narrative to make sense of the newly minted folk hero soon ran aground. Rather than a radical leftist engaged in propaganda of the deed, as some hoped and others feared, the suspect (at least on the evidence of his internet presence) was an otherwise well-adjusted, successful and highly educated young man who nevertheless held a seemingly incoherent collection of niche social views. While some observers were confused at what could be the common thread between Luigi Mangione’s concern over climate change, disdain for diversity initiatives and strangely detailed proposals to solve Japan’s falling birth rate, others were able to spot the unmistakable footprint of a specific “type of guy” and a worldview that has become increasingly familiar as the values of the tech industry have continued to filter through U.S. society.
The presence of Silicon Valley on both sides of the recent election—one that pitted a former Bay Area attorney general backed by Uber and LinkedIn executives against a billionaire TV host turned conspiracy theorist supported by the founders of Tesla and PayPal—has led analysts to posit a rift of sorts within the tech world. At the progressive end of the spectrum, according to this view, are philanthropists who believe in harnessing the industry’s power to address abiding liberal concerns about poverty, global inequality, animal rights and climate change. Over the past decade, this side of the division has been most prominently represented by the effective altruists—a cultural movement initially focused on identifying efficient charities that has now grown into a full-fledged global community whose composition skews disproportionately vegetarian and polyamorous. Before his fall from grace, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a major figure within the effective-altruism movement as well as one of the Democratic Party’s most visible donors.
On the other side of the conflict, according to this picture, are the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk: essentially, libertarians who soured on the idea of democracy after realizing that voters might use their rights to restrict the power of oligarchs like themselves. These so-called neoreactionaries advocate a feudal world in which those at the top of “natural hierarchies” rule their own sovereign microstates unburdened by democratic constraints. The fact that these alleged natural hierarchies happen to overlap almost perfectly with preexisting hierarchies of race and gender has also served as a magnet for the white nationalists and anti-abortion tradcaths who mix merrily with sea-steaders and crypto enthusiasts at the sort of astroturfed “reactionary avant-garde” cultural spaces extensively analyzed and satirized over the last four years. In any case, among other factors, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory has been attributed to an overall shift within the tech world toward this end of the spectrum, with the typically atheist and libertarian inhabitants of that world becoming surprisingly sympathetic toward religious traditionalism.
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But beneath these contradictory political currents lies a deeper continuity, defined not so much by any coherent ideological positions as by a shared conceptual vocabulary. Much of this scaffolding has its origins in what’s known as the rationalist community, a set of cliques and discourses that emerged during the mid-aughts with blogs like Overcoming Bias and LessWrong. Existing at the intersection of Bay Area counterculture and the libertarian hacker ethos that characterized the early tech industry, these forums became known for painstakingly argued discussions on subjects ranging from veganism and religion to media ethics and the possibility of nuclear war. In many ways, rationalism is the result of people with STEM educations attempting to tackle questions that had long been the purview of the humanities, guided by a stubbornly autodidactic conviction that definitive answers could be reached through a rigorous application of logic untainted by psychological biases. Mangione’s social media posts bear the recognizable hallmarks of this tendency: an earnest curiosity about how the world works coupled with a boundless faith in technology’s ability to reshape it, a treatment of social issues as engineering problems reducible to a utilitarian calculus, and a great deal of confidence in one’s own ability to apply this calculus as a “high decoupling” thinker unconstrained by political “tribalism.”
Over the last two decades, the rationalist community and its offshoots have evolved from niche internet spaces to Silicon Valley’s equivalent of think tanks, with former bloggers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Curtis Yarvin gaining the ear of industry CEOs and policymakers. And as tech increasingly comes to inform our political and economic reality, these discussions have also become more reflective of how the industry sees itself and its own priorities. Researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have coined the acronym TESCREAL—transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism—to define the constants underpinning the various positions within this worldview, an overlapping set of assumptions and values that, like the water to the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous parable, are largely taken for granted by their adherents.
Mangione’s fixation on birth rates touches on a common theme in the TESCREAL cloud, one that has increasingly entered mainstream discourse across the political spectrum. During the election, J.D. Vance floated the idea of incentivizing procreation by disenfranchising “childless cat ladies,” while Musk can increasingly be heard fretting about the possibility of civilizational collapse due to population decline. Coming from the right, such concerns are often—and somewhat correctly—dismissed as dog whistles for a racist panic about a “great replacement” of the white population by third-world hordes. But one need not look too far to find a slew of oddly indulgent interviews, books and articles probing a “progressive case” for pro-natalism. These range widely in quality: demographer Paul Morland critiques how rich countries with dropping fertility rates are effectively outsourcing reproduction to developing nations, while others propose that having more children can help solve the climate crisis simply by increasing the total amount of intelligence in the world—an example of the kind of idea George Orwell considered so stupid that only an intellectual could believe it. More commonly, however, we are told that larger generations of young workers are needed to support the welfare state, a point that may sound reasonable as long as we don’t think too hard about the idea of human beings being brought into existence as a means to serve economic ends.
In fact, the notion that it’s imperative to increase the number of people in the world and that creating new lives is thus morally equivalent to preventing deaths is a key pillar of the techno-optimist worldview. This is the same formula by which Steven Pinker is able to declare that a world in which a growing absolute number of people face violence and starvation is nevertheless a desirable one as long as the proportion of such people in the overall population decreases—equivalent to claiming that a warlord who enslaves a hundred villagers but sires a thousand free children has made a net positive contribution to humanity. The presumption that perpetual population growth is self-evidently both desirable and inevitable, combined with a moral framework that assigns the same weight to potential lives as existing ones, results in a bizarre utilitarian calculus concluding that any action with the slightest chance of impacting the distant future carries a moral weight many magnitudes greater than any concern for the mere eight billion humans alive today. This conclusion forms the basis of longtermism—the L in TESCREAL.
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Longtermism explains one of the most striking commonalities between progressive and reactionary techno-optimists: their shared set of enemies. Proponents of degrowth, community activists who oppose gentrification and luxury development and anyone else perceived as standing in the way of economic and technological progress are considered guilty of contributing to outcomes that are not merely inefficient or suboptimal but literally equivalent to murder. This is because any delay forestalls the development of technologies that could hypothetically be used not only to save lives but give rise to vastly more of them, either by colonizing galaxies or simulating virtual ones populated with trillions of digital consciousness. Taken to its logical extreme, this means that every moment not spent pursuing technological growth is equivalent to multiple future holocausts. Such reasoning also underpins the fixation on artificial intelligence, which has by this point eclipsed nearly all other debate in tech spaces. Whether viewed positively or negatively, people in TESCREAL spaces share a near-universal agreement that humanlike artificial general intelligence is not only possible but just around the corner and, once developed, will have the power to either destroy humanity entirely or ensure its infinite advancement. Either way, it necessarily follows that AI research is the most important thing in the world—perhaps the only important thing.
So great is the faith that TESCREALists have in their deductive acumen that once these logical leaps are made, all the conclusions that supposedly flow from them are treated as entirely reasonable, no matter how counterintuitive, absurd or morally abhorrent. Sometimes this leads to amusing results, such as when, in the form of a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk, significant numbers of self-proclaimed rationalists scared themselves nearly to death by reinventing Pascal’s Wager and imagining the inevitable emergence of an AI deity that would reach back through time and simulate exact copies of their consciousness to eternally torment them for not sufficiently contributing to its development. Other times, the implications are more disturbing. In a now-infamous dissertation, former FTX executive Nick Beckstead used the logic of effective altruism to conclude that the lives of people in the first world are worth more than those in the developing world, as the former have greater productivity and are more likely to contribute to “innovation” that will save more lives in the long run. And just like that, the gulf between progressive philanthropists and openly racist neoreactionaries no longer seems quite so vast.
To be sure, many in the EA community either distanced themselves from Beckstead’s argument or challenged its validity. Yet its repugnant conclusion was not a bug caused by accidental personal bias, but a feature inherent in attempts to apply utilitarian calculus to human populations since the days of Karl Pearson. Widely known as the father of mathematical statistics and less widely so as a eugenicist and social Darwinist, Pearson held that a nation must be “kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races.” These social views were not incidental to Pearson’s development of population statistics—they were its key motivation, and have since continued to haunt the field, periodically reemerging in new guises such as Charles Murray’s notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve. Despite—or perhaps more accurately, because of—its repudiation by polite liberal circles as a front for scientific racism, Murray’s work and the valorization of IQ in general still find significant purchase among TESCREAL thought leaders like Anders Sandberg, who served as a research fellow at the Musk-funded Future of Humanity Institute, as well as in recent political discourse surrounding mass immigration.
That utilitarianism applied to populations almost inevitably leads to genocidal conclusions is not the only issue, though it is indeed an issue. The bigger question is what purpose this utility is ultimately intended to serve, in other words: Utility for whom? To do what? Longtermism in both its reactionary and progressive varieties offers surprisingly few answers to this question, and such answers, when they are given, tend to be vaguely tautological: growth to increase wealth, eugenics to increase fitness, innovation to increase progress. The only constant seems to be that no matter the abstract noun in question, the goal is to increase it. This worship of quantity as such is most clearly crystalized by William MacAskill, considered one of the founding philosophers of effective altruism, in the line “More of a good thing is better.” Thus, every complex aspect of human life—whether it’s births, housing, technology, economic activity, intelligence or existence itself—is collapsed into a fungible mass existing on a simple linear scale that we must necessarily strive to maximize, with no consideration as to whether the good it represents may be relative and positional, dependent on specific qualities or circumstances of its instantiation, or subject to emergent feedback loops over a certain threshold.
And once this “good” is abstracted from any particular beneficiaries, a funny thing happens. Consider that effective altruism begins with the unobjectionable idea of maximizing charitable impact by identifying the interventions capable of saving the most lives at the lowest cost, such as buying malaria nets. Of course, the money that would be spent on a one-time purchase of malaria nets could go even further if it’s instead spent on a campaign convincing wealthy people to continually donate to such charities, or setting up a foundation dedicated to promoting such campaigns. It then stands to reason that an even greater impact could be made by putting the money into investment funds dedicated to financing such foundations, or hiring executives and consultants in order to increase these funds’ returns. In fact, forget about malaria nets altogether: the greatest impact one can pursue is to maximize “societal wealth” that can theoretically be channeled toward any and all charitable purposes one wishes, though to actually spend such wealth on those charitable purposes at any given moment would prevent it from being invested toward even greater future growth. Accordingly, the “highest-impact career paths” identified by the effective-altruist site 80,000 Hours include “helping build the effective altruism community,” “research into global priorities” and “operations management in high-impact organisations.”
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Are we starting to get it yet? The joke is that rationalist longtermists have produced countless articles, blog posts and podcasts; organized conferences and retreats; and spent billions promoting a supposedly radical new philosophy. The punchline is that the grand result of this project is simply our current system with extra steps, the value it seeks to maximize being none other than capital as Marx described it over one hundred and fifty years ago. This vampiric force that “lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” alienates the products of human effort from their makers, converting them into an abstract quantity whose only purpose is to reproduce and grow itself. Accordingly, longtermism posits an ever-growing omelet that recedes perpetually into the future while demanding a potentially infinite number of broken eggs—a utility monster at the end of time.
But where Marx used the language of gothic horror to describe the demonic force that transfers human agency into inanimate objects, TESCREALists invoke the utopian tropes of science fiction to promote it as a techno-deity to which we must willingly offer our blood and sweat. Nowhere is this more clearly spelled out than in the writings of cyberpunk academic turned self-described “hyper-racist” neoreactionary Nick Land, who wrote back in 2008 that “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” Land’s vision has since been embraced by more mainstream accelerationists like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, as the account of capital’s threat to human existence is transmuted from a dire warning into a sales pitch.
TESCREAL thus represents the doctrine of capitalist growth distilled into its purest ideological form and elevated to the status of an apocalypse cult, often by the same people who deride environmentalist advocates of degrowth as irrational and anti-humanist Gaia worshippers. And it is precisely this religious dimension of techno-optimism that underpins the confluence of secular tech developers and Christian fundamentalists, liberal philanthropists and genocide advocates: all of them see humanity as raw material to be molded in the divine image, an equation to be maximized in pursuit of a transcendent telos, a “biological bootloader” for the singularity.
One may ask how seriously those driving the proliferation of TESCREAL ideology really take these metaphysical fantasies. But this is largely beside the point. Whether true belief or a cynical con, every religion needs its priests, and this is a position for which these “high IQ” individuals have eagerly volunteered themselves. Obsessed with optimizing every aspect of their lives—their thought, their diet, their relationships, their aging, their reproduction—the acolytes of progress have been hard at work developing a new homo algorithmicus to populate and rule the future Nerd Reich. And whether they believe the arrival of superintelligent machines is to be welcomed or feared, their proposed solutions unsurprisingly tend to converge on shifting more of society’s resources into technology research, and more of its decision-making power into the hands of people like themselves.
It’s no accident that an ideology advocating infinite sacrifice for the sake of an abstract future would arise precisely at a time when humanity faces catastrophic threats in the concrete present. Until fairly recently, capitalism could ostensibly justify itself via tangible promises of rising living standards, bigger houses and cheaper consumer goods in the near term. But even its apostles no longer pretend to believe this in an age of climate disaster, mass displacement and accelerating collapse of the global order; instead, our erstwhile visionaries now proffer distant dreams of space colonization even as they invest in personal apocalypse bunkers. Where neoliberalism once promised a rising tide to lift all boats, the longtermists seem to want to ensure they’re first in line for the life rafts.
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It is not only oligarchs who have been guilty of betraying the present. Marx’s quip that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” found itself transmuted by generations of would-be revolutionaries into a vulgar self-justifying prometheanism whose only purpose was to break with the past. The German Social Democrats who believed that state-led development would naturally bring proletarian victory, the Russian cosmists who dreamed of universal immortality, the Italian futurists who worshipped speed and power for their own sake: all were intoxicated with the possibilities that industrial technology had carved out for human liberation, and all ultimately had their dreams subsumed by projects that achieved quite the opposite. As Walter Benjamin saw shortly before his own tragic end, the mistake had been to conflate possibility with inevitability in a vision of progress that “bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at their disposal” and recognizes only “the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society.” Just like our alienated labor, a future imagined in this way confronts us as something that is not ours, but exists of its own accord, suspended in what Benjamin termed “homogeneous, empty time.”
But rejecting the false promise of futurism does not mean abandoning hope or dismantling technological civilization. What it does mean is the categorical refusal of any human instrumentality project, any philosophy or politics that grounds its purpose in anything other than actually existing human beings. Difficult as it may be for some to imagine, a concern for the future as such does not require any utilitarian accounting of hypothetical virtual minds, because it is already baked into the present. Making it easier for people to have and raise children is desirable, not because it makes an imaginary line go up, but because it’s something that many currently living people want to do. If lower birth rates cause problems for the economy, then perhaps the solution lies not in breeding more humans as economic livestock but shifting to a production system that’s not an intergenerational Ponzi scheme requiring children to pay off debts incurred by their grandparents. And an interest in long-term environmental sustainability merely requires understanding that we already share the planet with multiple generations, who will in turn share it with more. The future is not a discrete entity on a hypothetical horizon; it exists only as an extension of the present, built on the very threads of human sociality that bind us to each other. And today it is not only the weight of dead generations but that of imagined nonexistent ones that is foisted upon us by those who would destroy our reality for their science fiction. Like Benjamin, who saw rivers of blood spilled for the sake of promises that never came to be, we must understand that human liberation lies not in an endlessly deferred tomorrow but the struggle to redeem the past today.
What, then, shall we make of Luigi Mangione? His trajectory appears to have been driven largely by his own struggles with the aftermath of a back injury—but it wasn’t entirely personal either. UnitedHealthcare was not his own insurer but one he chose methodically because it was America’s largest, making it the target with the most potential impact. His manifesto contained both statistics and citations justifying the case against the insurance industry, particularly the observation that while health-care costs have grown, American life expectancy has not. It may be a stretch to conclude that Mangione used rationalist calculus to determine that his course of action was the best thing he could do to maximize happiness under the given circumstances. Yet ultimately, even someone so steeped in capital’s latest cutting-edge ideology was forced to confront the fact that the numbers didn’t add up, that value-optimizing algorithms may not only fail to alleviate human suffering but may in fact serve as its direct cause. Faced with this realization, Mangione responded in a way that resonated with millions of people across political lines. Was he wrong? Certainly it’s hard to imagine any positive developments resulting from this intervention. But to answer the question would require reclaiming a vision of tomorrow rooted not in the nihilism of individual powerlessness or the disembodied fantasies of the powerful, but in our shared present. As distant as such possibilities may seem, the future is not set in silicon.
Photo credit: Robbie Shade (Flickr / CC-BY 2.0)
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