A cross-section of my thoughts at the moment.

Getting Atherton-ed

Marc Andreessen has started going off about the CFPB. Specifically, he believes that the CFPB is targeting conservatives and debanking them. He argues that the classification of crypto exchanges as risky accounts means that many banks refuse to take on crypto founders as account holders. A balance sheet full of risky accounts invites a federal audit which might uncover smaller sins that add up to huge costs for a bank. There are tweets after his loud claims where he seems to backtrack a bit. They mostly show how ignorant he is of how the government functions and how transparent he is about trying to secure his assets.

Marc’s essays make the rounds on Tech Twitter every so often. Some of them are genuinely inspiring “why we fight” speeches that stand in stark contrast to the actual fights he fights. His “It’s Time To Build” essay would be on my list of recommended readings for anyone new to Silicon Valley. But Marc fails to follow through on his own principles. He and his partner fought to keep their town of Atherton from building any new housing. It’s deeply hypocritical, and it would be so easy not to be a hypocrite in this instance.

Atherton has the country’s most expensive real estate. The median home price is several multiples of my net worth. Atherton has ascended from being merely a town to an assabiyah. The crop of leaders harvested in the late 90s tech boom have all gathered together, reinforced each other’s views and thanks to the algorithm, are blasting out their intellectual circlejerk into our feeds.

The minds I used to look up to have all gotten “Atherton-ed”. They’ve discussed the future amongst the brightest minds they know - each other - and decided what must be. They log in to Twitter to see a million sycophants cheering them on. They can turn away any uncomfortable string of words and return to the bosom of their fellow buildoors who don’t even want affordable housing built. They’ve completely lost the plot.

We killed God

When I meet someone, I try to find their religion and spirituality. It’s rarely as easy as hearing the denomination. It’s usually the axiom upon which they’ve built other facets of their life. It only comes out after a few conversations. If it isn’t an irrational or para-rational one like Gods or spirits, it’s usually technology, and very specifically it is technology as manifested by the forces of Silicon Valley techno-capital. Pascal is credited with the quote about the god-shaped hole within us, that there is an infinite abyss within us and for anyone who peers deep enough within, God presents itself as the solution.

It’s a surprising path to God - it doesn’t involve witnessing or believing the miracles of a supernatural entity within this world. It is seeing the darkness and believing that this is not all there is to human life. That there must be something more and inventing God to fill that hole.

But what are people to do when we kill the path to that inversion? We have people who see the abyss, who see the god-shaped hole but are not allowed to use the god substance to fill it in. What are they to do but fill it in with whatever it is that they don’t understand and that promises them a better life? Infinite life? Pain-free life? In the space where faith in an abstraction might go we find that grifters and snake-oil salespeople appear.

Ghost of Grace

Adam Curtis made an excellent documentary called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. I’m not going to require that you watch all two and a half hours of it before reading on, but I will highly recommend watching the three-and-a-half minute trailer. This came out in 2011. For those who don’t want to click in to see the trailer, I’ll quote the main caption text here.

WE LIVE IN A DREAM WORLD CONNECTED BY THE MACHINES

WHERE WE ARE ALL CONNECTED

AND WE ARE ALL FREE

EVEN IN LOVE

There’s a random Ayn Rand quote in there that’s actually quite interesting about whether those without virtues deserve love.

BUT THE MACHINES BROUGHT WITH THEM ANOTHER IDEA

THAT WE ARE ALL COMPONENTS IN SYSTEMS

NODES IN A GLOBAL NETWORK

WE DREAMED THE SYSTEMS COULD STABILIZE THEMSELVES

AND CREATE A PERFECT BALANCE

IN NATURE’S ECOSYSTEMS

AND IN SOCIETY

AND IN CAPITALISM

WITHOUT POLITICS AND THE OLD HIERARCHIES OF POWER

BUT POWER HASN’T GONE AWAY

IT NEVER DOES

I’ll remind you - this came out in 2011. Many of the criticisms that I had about technology and media - the naivete I carried in 2014 about self-stabilizing systems created outside of the old hierarchies of power - were all anticipated by and dissected within this documentary. I only watched it during the pandemic.

Deliver us to profit

If the 2010s naivete of social media was “enough people on social media would cure the tribal nature of humans and dissolve the politics of old”, the 2020s naivete could be “crypto-powered network states will unleash the creative nature of humans to dissolve the politics of old” or “more data will unleash the humanity of the computer and dissolve the politics of old”.

They’re both prayers. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with prayer. We live in the thin sliver of the universe habitable for us and even within that envelope we must often battle contingencies which can whip us into nothingness in a moment. Our lives are fraught and fragile. If anything, prayer is logical.

What irks me is the insistence that this prayer to techno-capital is the rational unfolding of the fundamentals of technology rather than an inability on the part of some loud voices to comfortably inhabit their mortal bodies and their associated troubled histories.

Far from being a technopessimist, I am a deep optimist. I don’t think that the six-fingered network state is the apotheosis of human achievement. A world filled with machines that deliver us a blurry JPEG of humanity when we ask and scattered networks of humans all dreaming of being nodes in a global network slinging kula around is not the best future I believe is possible. But for some reason, it is the vision of so many who have been Atherton-ed. I don’t think they’ve really loved being flawed and human, as part of a vast, flawed, human collective. Their ambitions are to escape the shackles of humanity as we know it and they hope technology can deliver them.

I sometimes want to ask these ambitious people of the world - do you want to be delivered from poverty or from the human condition? All the money in the world won’t free you from having to eat, poop, wash and yes, ultimately, die. But you can shit on a really amazing Japanese toilet if you’ve got electrical in your bathroom.

We never had a Zion

Just as there’s a god-shaped hole, I think there’s a Zion-shaped one as well. Freud coined the term “penis envy” to describe how young girls would feel seeing their male counterparts swinging their peepee around. I’m not the master of terminology that he was, so I’ll just copy him. Just as there is a deep human need to create God once we view the abyss and its infinity, there is a parallel need to create a Zion when we realize that belonging is hard or even out of reach for us.

“Zion envy”

I see a lot of this energy pointed towards Japan. Many people who grew up in the rough and tumble of America look across one of the ponds to find a society they feel they would have fared better within. Japan with its orderliness and structure appeals to the helper-nerd. One who feels that America’s social norms favor a kind of impertinent personality that they could never embody. France appeals to the hedonist-nerd. At once a place of scholarly philosophy but also rippling with an unbridled sexual electricity.

Of course upon moving to these places, the costs become apparent. The order and structure is maintained through exclusion and self-repression. The erudite libido cares not for the softer emotions and old school sensibilities. These are both unmooring experiences. Our characters return to America wise enough to know that they shouldn’t meet their heroes.