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The billionaire oligarchs have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world and now they want others to join them.
What do powerful tech-nerds such as William MacAskill (the Oxford Professor), Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Land, and Elizier Yudkowski—among innumerable others—share across their minor differences? Well, according to Adam Becker in his fascinating and timely new book More Everything Forever, they share a commitment to ever more rapid capitalist growth managed by tech billionaires and exported to other planets. To these folks, current dislocations such as global climate wreckage, huge economic inequalities, the dangers of nuclear holocaust, the powers of a wealthy oligopoly, fascist movements, and the earthly legacies of racism and colonialism do not set the center of attention. These are second-order concerns (at best) to be resolved or left behind in a future dominated by the interminable expansion of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, space travel, human brain uploads to computers, and colonization of distant planets.
These tech-bros, centered in Silicon Valley, form a constellation of either impossibly rich or extremely well-funded and self-certain “visionaries” of a Brave New World. They manufacture an endless supply of acronyms which, I think, helps to push numerous problems in their assumptions and ambitions into the rearview mirror as they press ahead. No worries about the massive new energy outputs that will be required by AI and cryptocurrency. Nevermind that the massive wealth generated and ever more sublime technologies created will either eventually resolve those problems on earth or allow "humanity" to escape them through new extra-terrestrial "colonization."
Consider an initial example. Elizier Yudkowski, an apparent dissident in this constellation, seems to think that a hi-roller, tech world is the only agenda worth pursuing, but he also worries that advanced AI systems could well turn against humanity. He calls this the "alignment problem" in a way that reminds one of sci-fi stories such as Star Wars and Bladerunner. By keeping our eyes focused on the future danger of AI systems escaping control, in a world otherwise governed by techno-rationality, Yudkowski—intentionally or not—supports an existential shell game. You focus on that existential issue in the future and ignore or downplay the problems that hi-tech capitalism has created for the present and near future. Accelerate the pace of production and mastery over the earth now and then resolve the one (fictive?) problem it produces later. This is a temporal magnification of Donald Trump's everyday politics of deflection and diversion; it helps to explain how Trump and Musk found each other—even if that alliance may not hold much longer.
Let's turn now to the even more expansive distractions fueled by the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk space agendas. Bezos, talking about energy limits on earth: "We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to us...Stasis would be really bad, I think ...But the solar system can easily support a trillion humans...That's the world I want my great-grand children's great-grand children to live in."
If accelerated growth and hyper inequality are not to be overturned now in the name of justice and planetary resilience, the only answer, apparently, is massive space exploration and new planetary occupations. For the options are only "stasis" or eternally accelerated growth overseen by multi-billionaire overlords. Keep your eyes on the space bauble shining from the future to distract attention from the present.
And Musk's interim plan for settlement on Mars? "We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization and extending life to other planets."
Again, no need to eliminate unprecedented multibillionaire fortunes, no hesitation about his own rigid mode of reasoning, no real case for planetary resilience now, no apparent concern for the devastating lives currently lived by so many humans, no care about the lives of other species. Rather, continue the same old course by accelerating its pace and expanding its range rapidly to other planets. Hence, the heavily state-subsidized Space X program which has already crashed twice. And the super-self confidence of those who call themselves "effective altruists." These are the men who either control inordinate wealth or, like William MacAskill in What We Owe The Future, have institutional access to it because they play by the rules of the hi-tech billionaires. They insist on being the ones who determine what altruism means and how it operates.
There are several ways to counter the mad, mad cosmic visions of Bezos and Musk. Becker concentrates on the underlying terror of death that helps to fuel their visions, as well as the absence of care for others that fuels these late-adolescent modes of reasoning. There are, for instance, very few women, Native Americans or other minorities in this hi-tech bros club. Moreover, there are uncanny affinities and parallels between this vision of the future and the views of heaven and a second coming advanced by evangelicals. The evangelicals promise a second coming and eternal life after death; the hi-tech boys promise computer brain uploads to retain consciousness for centuries. Thus, it is not all that hard to switch from one to the other. That underlying affinity is also why it was rather easy to forge a white evangelical/neoliberal assemblage in the States during the 1980s, one that has been morphing toward fascism today as its effectiveness has faltered and its demands have escalated.
I respect Becker's responses to this madness and will merely amplify and adjust them here. The tech-bros accounts of brains as human computer systems that can be uploaded to human-manufactured computers is, well, an adolescent dream parading as science. Our brains are intimately connected to our bodies and cannot function without them. The gut-brain relays recently studied by neuroscientists, to take merely one instance, help to explain how our thought-oriented responses to the world are infused with affective prompts and emotional priorities. Don't try to "upload" your brain.
The simple, detached model of reasoning the tech bros embrace, treated as rationality itself by these cosmic dreamers, reflects distortions in their own modes of thought rather than sophisticated images of thinking and reasoning. Their oft-stated contempt for the humanities and the academy exposes and enacts that distorted image, as they join Donald Trump in trying to reshape the academy to reflect such cruel models of thinking, feeling, and reasoning.
Moreover, extended life on Mars is next to impossible—another flashy image to project onto the cosmos in an extension of old shell games. Besides, Mars settlement would be a horror story even if it were populated by humans who carried their bodies with them to its "colonization." Bracket for now the problems of the poisonous soil there, no stable supply of oxygen, material breakdowns, and internal wars or conflicts. Where, in this world far, far away, would be moonlight walks, mountain hikes, ocean views, and body surfing? What about traveling to another country? What about humanistic schools and universities, designed to educate the mind and body together? What about those essential ties to chimps, birds, elephants, horses, dogs, trees, fertile soil, platypuses, and cats that so enliven and educate human life?
The point is clear. The "long-termists," as they sometimes call themselves in contrast to those of us supposedly mired here on the earth, have either continued to buy an untenable adolescent boy's vision or have quietly outgrown it and now deploy it as a series of shiny baubles to deflect us from their callousness about the present and absence of wisdom about the future. For wisdom is neither a technique nor an algorithm. It involves mixing care for this world into an appreciation of how many things we do not know about it. Don't forget how Elon Musk has already displayed his willingness to participate in Big Lies, as he wreaks havoc on governmental programs for the poor, elderly, and sick—anything irrelevant to his immediate manufacturing interests. He recently insisted, for instance, that those who publicly protest the DOGE destruction rampage have been paid by its opponents to do so, projecting back onto them the cynical salesman approach he has adopted to sell Tesla and Space X and to entrance young men to vote for Trump in the most recent presidential election.
It is time for entangled humanists in the Academy—those who respect embodied human beings and other species as they explore and demand new modes of resilience today—to take on these hi-tech bros more directly and actively, as Adam Becker has started to do. We can, for instance, expose the fallacies in their space dreams as we undercut their child-like images of reason. We can expose the space subsidies they demand and receive, as they pretend to purge waste from the "deep state."
For the high-tech bros do not only distract and deflect too many from the dangers of today and the irrationalities their incredible wealth allows them to enact. They also seek to destroy the liberal arts academy—an essential institution that educates the youth, helps all of us better to discern dangers in such mad dreams, and helps us to forge wise responses to them.
They have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world; now they want a larger cadre to join them. We must not allow them to succeed.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Stormy Weather: Pagan Cosmologies, Christian Times, Climate Wreckage (Fordham, 2024)
What do powerful tech-nerds such as William MacAskill (the Oxford Professor), Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Land, and Elizier Yudkowski—among innumerable others—share across their minor differences? Well, according to Adam Becker in his fascinating and timely new book More Everything Forever, they share a commitment to ever more rapid capitalist growth managed by tech billionaires and exported to other planets. To these folks, current dislocations such as global climate wreckage, huge economic inequalities, the dangers of nuclear holocaust, the powers of a wealthy oligopoly, fascist movements, and the earthly legacies of racism and colonialism do not set the center of attention. These are second-order concerns (at best) to be resolved or left behind in a future dominated by the interminable expansion of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, space travel, human brain uploads to computers, and colonization of distant planets.
These tech-bros, centered in Silicon Valley, form a constellation of either impossibly rich or extremely well-funded and self-certain “visionaries” of a Brave New World. They manufacture an endless supply of acronyms which, I think, helps to push numerous problems in their assumptions and ambitions into the rearview mirror as they press ahead. No worries about the massive new energy outputs that will be required by AI and cryptocurrency. Nevermind that the massive wealth generated and ever more sublime technologies created will either eventually resolve those problems on earth or allow "humanity" to escape them through new extra-terrestrial "colonization."
Consider an initial example. Elizier Yudkowski, an apparent dissident in this constellation, seems to think that a hi-roller, tech world is the only agenda worth pursuing, but he also worries that advanced AI systems could well turn against humanity. He calls this the "alignment problem" in a way that reminds one of sci-fi stories such as Star Wars and Bladerunner. By keeping our eyes focused on the future danger of AI systems escaping control, in a world otherwise governed by techno-rationality, Yudkowski—intentionally or not—supports an existential shell game. You focus on that existential issue in the future and ignore or downplay the problems that hi-tech capitalism has created for the present and near future. Accelerate the pace of production and mastery over the earth now and then resolve the one (fictive?) problem it produces later. This is a temporal magnification of Donald Trump's everyday politics of deflection and diversion; it helps to explain how Trump and Musk found each other—even if that alliance may not hold much longer.
Let's turn now to the even more expansive distractions fueled by the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk space agendas. Bezos, talking about energy limits on earth: "We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to us...Stasis would be really bad, I think ...But the solar system can easily support a trillion humans...That's the world I want my great-grand children's great-grand children to live in."
If accelerated growth and hyper inequality are not to be overturned now in the name of justice and planetary resilience, the only answer, apparently, is massive space exploration and new planetary occupations. For the options are only "stasis" or eternally accelerated growth overseen by multi-billionaire overlords. Keep your eyes on the space bauble shining from the future to distract attention from the present.
And Musk's interim plan for settlement on Mars? "We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization and extending life to other planets."
Again, no need to eliminate unprecedented multibillionaire fortunes, no hesitation about his own rigid mode of reasoning, no real case for planetary resilience now, no apparent concern for the devastating lives currently lived by so many humans, no care about the lives of other species. Rather, continue the same old course by accelerating its pace and expanding its range rapidly to other planets. Hence, the heavily state-subsidized Space X program which has already crashed twice. And the super-self confidence of those who call themselves "effective altruists." These are the men who either control inordinate wealth or, like William MacAskill in What We Owe The Future, have institutional access to it because they play by the rules of the hi-tech billionaires. They insist on being the ones who determine what altruism means and how it operates.
There are several ways to counter the mad, mad cosmic visions of Bezos and Musk. Becker concentrates on the underlying terror of death that helps to fuel their visions, as well as the absence of care for others that fuels these late-adolescent modes of reasoning. There are, for instance, very few women, Native Americans or other minorities in this hi-tech bros club. Moreover, there are uncanny affinities and parallels between this vision of the future and the views of heaven and a second coming advanced by evangelicals. The evangelicals promise a second coming and eternal life after death; the hi-tech boys promise computer brain uploads to retain consciousness for centuries. Thus, it is not all that hard to switch from one to the other. That underlying affinity is also why it was rather easy to forge a white evangelical/neoliberal assemblage in the States during the 1980s, one that has been morphing toward fascism today as its effectiveness has faltered and its demands have escalated.
I respect Becker's responses to this madness and will merely amplify and adjust them here. The tech-bros accounts of brains as human computer systems that can be uploaded to human-manufactured computers is, well, an adolescent dream parading as science. Our brains are intimately connected to our bodies and cannot function without them. The gut-brain relays recently studied by neuroscientists, to take merely one instance, help to explain how our thought-oriented responses to the world are infused with affective prompts and emotional priorities. Don't try to "upload" your brain.
The simple, detached model of reasoning the tech bros embrace, treated as rationality itself by these cosmic dreamers, reflects distortions in their own modes of thought rather than sophisticated images of thinking and reasoning. Their oft-stated contempt for the humanities and the academy exposes and enacts that distorted image, as they join Donald Trump in trying to reshape the academy to reflect such cruel models of thinking, feeling, and reasoning.
Moreover, extended life on Mars is next to impossible—another flashy image to project onto the cosmos in an extension of old shell games. Besides, Mars settlement would be a horror story even if it were populated by humans who carried their bodies with them to its "colonization." Bracket for now the problems of the poisonous soil there, no stable supply of oxygen, material breakdowns, and internal wars or conflicts. Where, in this world far, far away, would be moonlight walks, mountain hikes, ocean views, and body surfing? What about traveling to another country? What about humanistic schools and universities, designed to educate the mind and body together? What about those essential ties to chimps, birds, elephants, horses, dogs, trees, fertile soil, platypuses, and cats that so enliven and educate human life?
The point is clear. The "long-termists," as they sometimes call themselves in contrast to those of us supposedly mired here on the earth, have either continued to buy an untenable adolescent boy's vision or have quietly outgrown it and now deploy it as a series of shiny baubles to deflect us from their callousness about the present and absence of wisdom about the future. For wisdom is neither a technique nor an algorithm. It involves mixing care for this world into an appreciation of how many things we do not know about it. Don't forget how Elon Musk has already displayed his willingness to participate in Big Lies, as he wreaks havoc on governmental programs for the poor, elderly, and sick—anything irrelevant to his immediate manufacturing interests. He recently insisted, for instance, that those who publicly protest the DOGE destruction rampage have been paid by its opponents to do so, projecting back onto them the cynical salesman approach he has adopted to sell Tesla and Space X and to entrance young men to vote for Trump in the most recent presidential election.
It is time for entangled humanists in the Academy—those who respect embodied human beings and other species as they explore and demand new modes of resilience today—to take on these hi-tech bros more directly and actively, as Adam Becker has started to do. We can, for instance, expose the fallacies in their space dreams as we undercut their child-like images of reason. We can expose the space subsidies they demand and receive, as they pretend to purge waste from the "deep state."
For the high-tech bros do not only distract and deflect too many from the dangers of today and the irrationalities their incredible wealth allows them to enact. They also seek to destroy the liberal arts academy—an essential institution that educates the youth, helps all of us better to discern dangers in such mad dreams, and helps us to forge wise responses to them.
They have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world; now they want a larger cadre to join them. We must not allow them to succeed.
William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Stormy Weather: Pagan Cosmologies, Christian Times, Climate Wreckage (Fordham, 2024)
What do powerful tech-nerds such as William MacAskill (the Oxford Professor), Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Land, and Elizier Yudkowski—among innumerable others—share across their minor differences? Well, according to Adam Becker in his fascinating and timely new book More Everything Forever, they share a commitment to ever more rapid capitalist growth managed by tech billionaires and exported to other planets. To these folks, current dislocations such as global climate wreckage, huge economic inequalities, the dangers of nuclear holocaust, the powers of a wealthy oligopoly, fascist movements, and the earthly legacies of racism and colonialism do not set the center of attention. These are second-order concerns (at best) to be resolved or left behind in a future dominated by the interminable expansion of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, space travel, human brain uploads to computers, and colonization of distant planets.
These tech-bros, centered in Silicon Valley, form a constellation of either impossibly rich or extremely well-funded and self-certain “visionaries” of a Brave New World. They manufacture an endless supply of acronyms which, I think, helps to push numerous problems in their assumptions and ambitions into the rearview mirror as they press ahead. No worries about the massive new energy outputs that will be required by AI and cryptocurrency. Nevermind that the massive wealth generated and ever more sublime technologies created will either eventually resolve those problems on earth or allow "humanity" to escape them through new extra-terrestrial "colonization."
Consider an initial example. Elizier Yudkowski, an apparent dissident in this constellation, seems to think that a hi-roller, tech world is the only agenda worth pursuing, but he also worries that advanced AI systems could well turn against humanity. He calls this the "alignment problem" in a way that reminds one of sci-fi stories such as Star Wars and Bladerunner. By keeping our eyes focused on the future danger of AI systems escaping control, in a world otherwise governed by techno-rationality, Yudkowski—intentionally or not—supports an existential shell game. You focus on that existential issue in the future and ignore or downplay the problems that hi-tech capitalism has created for the present and near future. Accelerate the pace of production and mastery over the earth now and then resolve the one (fictive?) problem it produces later. This is a temporal magnification of Donald Trump's everyday politics of deflection and diversion; it helps to explain how Trump and Musk found each other—even if that alliance may not hold much longer.
Let's turn now to the even more expansive distractions fueled by the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk space agendas. Bezos, talking about energy limits on earth: "We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to us...Stasis would be really bad, I think ...But the solar system can easily support a trillion humans...That's the world I want my great-grand children's great-grand children to live in."
If accelerated growth and hyper inequality are not to be overturned now in the name of justice and planetary resilience, the only answer, apparently, is massive space exploration and new planetary occupations. For the options are only "stasis" or eternally accelerated growth overseen by multi-billionaire overlords. Keep your eyes on the space bauble shining from the future to distract attention from the present.
And Musk's interim plan for settlement on Mars? "We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization and extending life to other planets."
Again, no need to eliminate unprecedented multibillionaire fortunes, no hesitation about his own rigid mode of reasoning, no real case for planetary resilience now, no apparent concern for the devastating lives currently lived by so many humans, no care about the lives of other species. Rather, continue the same old course by accelerating its pace and expanding its range rapidly to other planets. Hence, the heavily state-subsidized Space X program which has already crashed twice. And the super-self confidence of those who call themselves "effective altruists." These are the men who either control inordinate wealth or, like William MacAskill in What We Owe The Future, have institutional access to it because they play by the rules of the hi-tech billionaires. They insist on being the ones who determine what altruism means and how it operates.
There are several ways to counter the mad, mad cosmic visions of Bezos and Musk. Becker concentrates on the underlying terror of death that helps to fuel their visions, as well as the absence of care for others that fuels these late-adolescent modes of reasoning. There are, for instance, very few women, Native Americans or other minorities in this hi-tech bros club. Moreover, there are uncanny affinities and parallels between this vision of the future and the views of heaven and a second coming advanced by evangelicals. The evangelicals promise a second coming and eternal life after death; the hi-tech boys promise computer brain uploads to retain consciousness for centuries. Thus, it is not all that hard to switch from one to the other. That underlying affinity is also why it was rather easy to forge a white evangelical/neoliberal assemblage in the States during the 1980s, one that has been morphing toward fascism today as its effectiveness has faltered and its demands have escalated.
I respect Becker's responses to this madness and will merely amplify and adjust them here. The tech-bros accounts of brains as human computer systems that can be uploaded to human-manufactured computers is, well, an adolescent dream parading as science. Our brains are intimately connected to our bodies and cannot function without them. The gut-brain relays recently studied by neuroscientists, to take merely one instance, help to explain how our thought-oriented responses to the world are infused with affective prompts and emotional priorities. Don't try to "upload" your brain.
The simple, detached model of reasoning the tech bros embrace, treated as rationality itself by these cosmic dreamers, reflects distortions in their own modes of thought rather than sophisticated images of thinking and reasoning. Their oft-stated contempt for the humanities and the academy exposes and enacts that distorted image, as they join Donald Trump in trying to reshape the academy to reflect such cruel models of thinking, feeling, and reasoning.
Moreover, extended life on Mars is next to impossible—another flashy image to project onto the cosmos in an extension of old shell games. Besides, Mars settlement would be a horror story even if it were populated by humans who carried their bodies with them to its "colonization." Bracket for now the problems of the poisonous soil there, no stable supply of oxygen, material breakdowns, and internal wars or conflicts. Where, in this world far, far away, would be moonlight walks, mountain hikes, ocean views, and body surfing? What about traveling to another country? What about humanistic schools and universities, designed to educate the mind and body together? What about those essential ties to chimps, birds, elephants, horses, dogs, trees, fertile soil, platypuses, and cats that so enliven and educate human life?
The point is clear. The "long-termists," as they sometimes call themselves in contrast to those of us supposedly mired here on the earth, have either continued to buy an untenable adolescent boy's vision or have quietly outgrown it and now deploy it as a series of shiny baubles to deflect us from their callousness about the present and absence of wisdom about the future. For wisdom is neither a technique nor an algorithm. It involves mixing care for this world into an appreciation of how many things we do not know about it. Don't forget how Elon Musk has already displayed his willingness to participate in Big Lies, as he wreaks havoc on governmental programs for the poor, elderly, and sick—anything irrelevant to his immediate manufacturing interests. He recently insisted, for instance, that those who publicly protest the DOGE destruction rampage have been paid by its opponents to do so, projecting back onto them the cynical salesman approach he has adopted to sell Tesla and Space X and to entrance young men to vote for Trump in the most recent presidential election.
It is time for entangled humanists in the Academy—those who respect embodied human beings and other species as they explore and demand new modes of resilience today—to take on these hi-tech bros more directly and actively, as Adam Becker has started to do. We can, for instance, expose the fallacies in their space dreams as we undercut their child-like images of reason. We can expose the space subsidies they demand and receive, as they pretend to purge waste from the "deep state."
For the high-tech bros do not only distract and deflect too many from the dangers of today and the irrationalities their incredible wealth allows them to enact. They also seek to destroy the liberal arts academy—an essential institution that educates the youth, helps all of us better to discern dangers in such mad dreams, and helps us to forge wise responses to them.
They have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world; now they want a larger cadre to join them. We must not allow them to succeed.
