The psychic structure of disciplinary imperialism

From Sherry Turkle’s classic The Second Self pg 229-230:

The first justification for AI’s invasions and colonization of other disciplines’ intellectual turf was a logic of necessity. The excursions into psychology and linguistics began as raids to acquire ideas that might be useful for building thinking machines. But the politics of “colonization” soon takes on a life of its own. The invaders come not only to carry off natural resources but to replace native “superstitions” with their “superior” world view. AI first declared the need for psychological theories that would work on machines. The next step was to see these alternatives as better—better because they can be “implemented,” better because they are more “scientific.” Being in a colonizing discipline first demands and then encourages an attitude that might be called intellectual hubris. You need intellectual principles that are universal enough to give you the feeling that you have something to say about everything. The AI community had this in their idea of program. Furthermore, since you cannot master all the disciplines that you have designs on, you need confidence that your knowledge makes the “traditional wisdom” of these fields unworthy of serious consideration. Here too, the AI scientist feels that seeing things through a computational prism so fundamentally changes the rules of every game in the social and behavioral sciences that everything that came before is relegated to a period of intellectual immaturity. And finally you have to feel that nothing is beyond your intellectual reach if you are smart enough.

See also the hostility of digital elites towards expertise.

#dataScience #digitalElites #disciplines #domainExpertise #epistemicHeirarchy #intellectualLabour #intellectualLife #work

The hostility of digital elites to expertise

From Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley loc 999:

They were smart and loyal. Silicon Valley elites tended to dismiss expertise. “Everything you read makes sense if you simply translate ‘experts’ as ‘crazy people,’” according to Marc Andreessen. That attitude provided broad rhetorical and ideological cover for tech moguls to refashion any industry in their image, from taxis to healthcare to real estate to the entire federal government. Their worldview upheld the pretense that creative destruction and technological innovation were synonymous with progress. If expertise was worthless—because the experts themselves represented the corruption of the ancien régime—then tech was a salvific force. And the people leading the tech vanguard were the ones doing the saving.

#digitalElites #ElanMusk #elites #expertise #siliconValley

The jouissance of the new far right

This was a crucial point in an excellent New Yorker profile on Curtis Yarvin:

On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

This ‘transgressive energy’ which comes from ‘forbidden knowledge’: the sense of having penetrated to a deeper layer of reality, through the intervention of the master. It’s a classically esoteric experience but characterised by worldliness, rather than worldlessness. It venerates knowledge and gives the aspirants towards it a path forward without leaving them caught and immobilised in the painful distance between the world that is and the world that could be:

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.)

He offers the libidinal satisfaction of ‘burning it all down’ filtered through the safe pleasures of remaining behind a screen:

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch

#cults #CurtisYarvin #digitalElites #esotericism #farRight #Jouissance #knowledge #radicalRight

Taking the AGI pill

I thought this was telling from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. On loc 194 she describes how Altman narrates the ‘process’ which he claims most of the OpenAI staff have been through, which he believes most of the human population will go through over the coming years:

“It wasn’t that long ago that almost no one believed in AGI,” he said. “And still, maybe most people don’t. But I think more people are willing to entertain it now. And I think a lot of the world is going through a process that most of the people here have gone through in previous years, which is, like, really grappling with this. And it is hard. It is exciting. It is terrifying. It’s a lot. And so I expect that process to unfold in the world over the next few years, and we’ll try to be a voice of some guidance along the way.”

I think we urgently need a sociology of this process which engages with it as an empirical phenomenon, rather than a front in the culture politics of technology. I’ve found a lot of journalistic coverage (of variable quality) but I need to search to see if there’s qualitative social science which I’ve yet to stumble across.

#AI #digitalElites #KeachHagey #LLMs #openAI #samAltman

Are digital elites literally trying to establish a new species?

I found this morbidly fascinating from Harry Shukman’s (excellent) Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. He went undercover with the pro-natalists Simone and Malcolm Collins who attracted a great deal of media attention (and funding) in recent years for what has been described as ‘hipster eugenics’. From pg 228:

the Collinses are building is a network of ideologically aligned friends who they can make their own community with. ‘We want our kids to know other kids [their] age. As we’re worried about the same things you’re worried about, I hate to say it, but the only path forward is likely to be speciation, even though we’re never going to get everyone on board. That means I need to know lots of people who my kids can marry.’

This knocks me back for a second. Speciation is when a new species with different characteristics splits from an existing species, like horses and donkeys evolving from a single common ancestor.

A species is defined as a group that is ‘reproductively isolated’ from other populations. This means that one species can’t breed with another to produce fertile offspring (donkeys and horses can make mules, but mules are usually infertile and can’t produce foals of their own).

When Malcolm says speciation is the only path forward, it seems like he is not just talking about creating a community of elites who are culturally different but one that is biologically distinct from other humans.

“What I’m really trying to do is make sure my kids have an isolated and differential breeding network. And that’s what we’re really trying to build to an extent, and that has the highest source of value going into the future.”

And from pg 229:

The Collinses believe they can create an original intergenerationally durable culture that prizes high fertility. Their culture teaches children to look towards the future, they say. Malcolm and Simone tell reporters that they do not celebrate Christmas with their kids but Future Day, in which their children receive presents from the Future Police, based on contracts they draw up pledging to complete certain objectives over the course of the year.

Malcolm also wants to offer arranged marriages so young people can remain in his isolated and differential breeding network.

On their website and in their self-help books, Malcolm and Simone call their new culture ‘techno puritanism’ or ‘secular Calvinism’. In practice, it means viewing central heating and fun as unnecessary indulgences, while advocating for smacking children as a form of discipline. The most important aspect of techno puritanism seems to be a belief in predestination.

I wonder how widespread this is? I’d previously assumed there was a loose coupling here between what we might call consumerised eugenics (i.e. seeking to genetically tweak your own kids) and social eugenics (i.e. a concern for the genetic ‘welfare’ of the entire species). I find it easy to see sociologically how a concern for one could rapidly lead to a concern for the other, particularly if you enter into a community of likeminded eugenicists. In other words I don’t think we should assume that the ideologues of this movement speak for everyone loosely connected to it, but that everyone loosely connected to it is potentially on a trajectory towards being gene-pilled.

BUT how widespread is this concept and goal of ‘speciation’? That would break the loop I’d imagined by making consumerised eugenics a matter of seceding from the entire species rather than seeking to intervene in relation to it. One of the most striking things about Shukman’s book is how it identifies a careful strategic orientation on the part of the far-right elite to insulate public performance from private beliefs. In other words how much talk of speciation takes place within these circles in private? Is this a stated goal for many pro-natalists? In fact could this be the stated goal?

Here’s a recent video which gives a sense of the direction they’ve gone in since their flurry of media attention in the later stages of the pandemic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub95EcWgSto

(It was also startling to discover that Malcolm is an alcoholic, telling Harry he drank 45 beers a day (which is obviously physically impossible!?) until discovering naltrexone which has enabled him to achieve ‘moderation’. In fact if most of this account is true it’s hard not to see them as deeply traumatised people and worry about what will happen to the many children who might get locked into their “isolated and differential breeding network”.)

#digitalElites #eugenics #farRight #HarryShukman #MalcolmCollins #SimoneCollins

The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity

Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525:

trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation of a human brain in a computer. . . . If you have a small difference in the information your eye is giving your brain and your ear is giving your brain, that’s already an awful feeling. It’s like seasickness, and nausea, or different types of pain. So what we’re promising to do here is to create thousands or millions of instances of sentient beings in computers that are probably suffering horribly, and are just going to get turned off. I mean, you could see this really macabre process of creating—if you imagine you can—sentient things in computers. There’s a lot of things to get wrong. And those outcomes are terrible.

What’s striking is how these ‘terrible’ outcomes are presented as a detail about implementation. They are a stepping stone, part of the journey, rather than something which might lead us to pause. If uploading is happening at scale, might these not be billions of souls tortured before being put out of their misery, like the digital hells conceived of by Iain M Banks which still haunt me fifteen years after I read the book?

They are presumably licensed by the outcome of infinite life for an infinite humanity. But if millions of instances of torture are licensed by the goodness of the outcome then what wouldn’t be? What more mundane viciousness and injuries might be enacted in pursuit of digital transcendence? I always thought the TESCREAL stuff was slightly overstated, in the sense of taking the intellectual games of digital elites too seriously, but I’m starting to revise that opinion.

What if this did become the dominant ideology amongst the most powerful people in the world, as opposed to something they like discussing when they’re high at parties? How would the goal of transcendence they conceived play out against a backdrop of spiralling inequality, social unravelling and climate chaos? It makes me want to go back to Peter Frase’s Four Futures and suggest a Fifth future, not quite what he called eliminativism but something close to it.

As Becker goes on to observe, Kurzweil’s vision of a universe subordinated to computation is colonialism on a vast scale, which unlike the mass psychological torture which precedes our glorious digital futures (whoops!) the guru only implicitly recognises, even as he insists that restraint would be exercised to prevent the entirety of existence becoming grist to the computational mill. From loc 1534:

There’s still a serious problem with Kurzweil’s notion of waking up the universe: it’s a euphemism for total destruction. It would be the end of nature, colonialism on a universal scale, with entire galaxies’ worth of planets and stars chewed up to provide more computing power for the digital remnants of humanity. Hence Kurzweil’s insistence that alien life is unlikely: it is an assurance that the universe is ours for the taking, with nobody else there to worry about.

And it’s also one in which coding would be the ultimate form of power, creating a universe where one imagines it would be quite a good life for a principle researcher at Google and his descendants. From loc 1652:

With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.

Fun fact: I just found out Kurzweil is married to a psychotherapist who he credits here for “her love, guidance and insight into the interpersonal world” (my emphasis). I would be genuinely curious as to whether/how she interprets Kurzweil’s attachment to the Singularity and whether they discuss these ideas in psychodynamic terms.

#AdamBecker #climateCrisis #digitalElites #IainMBanks #ideology #postNeoliberalCivics #postNeoliberalism #postpandemicCivics #RayKurzweil #singularity #TESCREAL #transcendence

Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?

I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398:

And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We Owe the Future was published.

Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill has built a hugely influential philosophical movement on the moral application of our knowledge about the world. In its more recent Longtermist variant this rests on weighing knowledge, even if fuzzy, about the long term trajectory of human civilisation against present concerns.

Yet Will MacAskill was old friends with billionaire crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who he was repeatedly warned about and who supported his organisations with tens of billions of dollars. If he couldn’t act morally in relation to the substantial weight of evidence about SBF’s malfeasance then why should anyone have confidence in his capacity to act morally in relation to the deeply speculative knowledge of the future he assigns great importance to?

#AdamBecker #digitalElites #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #SamBankmanFried #WillMacAskill

The ‘vibes shift’ as a preemptive declaration of hegemony

This from the consistently excellent John Ganz (highly recommend his book) captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate since Trump’s victory. Why has there been such a rush to frame this in hegemonic terms when there was a 1.5% difference in vote share between the two candidates? There’s clearly an elite recomposition underway, with tech capital taking the leadership role for the first time, which is starting to produce substantive outgrowths. Watching JD Vance’s speech I immediately found myself thinking about how Bush era leaders would have talked about issues relating to the oil industry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64E9O1Gv99o

The richest people in the world with unprecedented control over the media and communications realign politically and then—coincidentally—there is a “big cultural shift.” Why? “Can’t say for sure, but probably has something to do with how annoying liberals are.” Come the fuck on. They are already putting pressure on the media to soften coverage. It’s not that things are just happening, they are doing things. And the media is already bending or being taken over by regime-friendly oligarchs. It’s not a mystery what’s going on—we can still read about it in the newspaper—so let’s not mystify ourselves.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/vibes-cartel

One last thought. What this insistence on a new order—the vibes—remind me of a lot was the hysterical run-up to the war against Iraq. The sense was created of an unstoppable momentum and there was relentless, insidious sidelining and castigation of critics and dissent. Even if people did not think they were warmongering, they helped the regime’s cause by attacking those who objected as fuddy-duddies, hopelessly out-of-date, and unfashionable. Obviously, we were in a New Era™ after 9/11. Obviously, the administration had the winds of history at its back. It wasn’t conservatives and right-wingers who did a lot of this work, but liberals who rationalized and justified what was a series of absurd lies and ultimately a catastrophe. This is what I was trying to get at when we were moving into a Vichy era: a lot of people are just going to go along to get along. But not all.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/vibes-cartel

#capitalism #digitalElites #hegemony #JDVance #JohnGanz #trump

Digital elites and reactionary modernism

From Wikipedia:

Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf[1] in the 1980s to describe the mixture of “great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy” that was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism.[2] In turn, this ideology of reactionary modernism was closely linked to the original, positive view of the Sonderweg, which saw Germany as the great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East.

From John Ganz on this Peter Thiel op-ed:

When Thiel writes about a “war on the internet” and “the internet” that had “begun our liberation,” the natural assumption is to assume that he’s speaking figuratively, that this is a metonym or synecdoche meaning “people on the internet.” But let’s say he’s being literal: for Thiel, the internet is a subject, it is doing something and the machines, The Big Machine has agency—it is “agentic,” as the tech people like to say. This is the viewpoint of the “Dark Enlightenment” and “neo-reaction,” which forms part of Thiel’s intellectual milieu. The belief is that a technological singularity is coming and the elect must work to accelerate it. The state must organize itself like an enterprise for this work to be completed. Progress, which is hampered by democracy, must have an authoritarian state to continue unabated. This is, of course, reactionary modernism: a belief in technological advances without the sentimental baggage of the Enlightenment.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/reading-thiels-op-ed

#accelerationism #digitalElites #modernism #modernity #peterThiel #technology #theInternet

TikTok is the next stage in Elon Musk’s cultural machinery of reaction

After writing this post in November I started getting preoccupied about the possibility of Elon Musk buying TikTok in the case of an American ban. Looks like the talks about this have now started:

Chinese officials have reportedly held preliminary talks about a potential option to sell TikTok’s operations in the US to the billionaire Elon Musk, should the short-video app be unable to avoid an impending ban.

Beijing officials prefer that TikTok remains under the control of Chinese parent Bytedance, but have discussed other options including a sale to Musk, Bloomberg reported.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/13/china-tiktok-sale-elon-musk

Consider what Musk has done to X, which last time I logged in (to delete the account) presented me with an algorithmic timeline largely full of far-right content despite the fact I’m a socialist academic. Now imagine the cultural power which could be wielded by enacting a similar shift on TikTok, given the demographics and the attentional force carried by short-term video.

Elon Musk’s AI startup was valued at $50 billion in December. All content on X is now used for training Grok by default, with widespread speculation that the opt out will be removed in the not too distant future. If the next frontier of GAI will be video models (which tbf I’m entirely sceptical of, but I could see how this could be the next hype cycle) then TikTok would be the most incredible source of training data. Furthermore, could it eventually be integrated into X to constitute the ‘everything app’ Musk has long purportedly been fixated on?

Even if not the cultural power he’s able to exercise through X + TikTok would be incredible, particularly in a climate where regulatory constraints will be near zero. There are marginally more left-wing political influencers on TikTok than right wing ones, but it’s also been a potent mobilising force for far-right movements. If you tweak the algorithm to maximise the visibility of far-right influencers, the organising parameters of a generation disinterested in X would change in the space of a few months.

#digitalElites #farRight #Musk #TikTok