Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein

For some time, Google’s cars also spied on the internet traffic of any unprotected wireless networks they happened to pass by—a practice called “wardriving.” In so doing, this mammoth corporation, which tracked its users’ behavior more efficiently and comprehensively than any totalitarian government in history, dispensed with the fig leaf of consent implicit in its one-sided “terms of service” agreement.

Here was the dream of a new order that was at once futuristic and antiquated, a feudal fantasy played out on a sci-fi stage that looked deceptively like any boring stretch of asphalt in America.

“An aristocracy of brains is the final purpose of democracy,” Jordan declared—equality was for saps, as he saw it. He blamed poverty on bad breeding. Progress therefore required thinning the human herd and protecting “the stock of freeborn races” from “mulatto taint.”

Even if this owes more to an earnest, misguided sense of libertarian free-speech absolutism rather than sinister cryptofascism, the result is the same: social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have done little to stop racist hate groups from using their services to organize and spread noxious propaganda.

Naked racism from the mouths of serious political candidates was still vaguely taboo at that moment. But when it came to tolerating the rhetorical adaptations of resurgent fascism, Silicon Valley was once again on the cutting edge.

Theirs was a vast but slapdash network of alienated, underemployed man-children; tortured, gynophobic gamers; and upwardly mobile, right-curious tech dudes.

“Should we stop persecuting racists and fascists or should we start persecuting communists and socialists? Very difficult question,” he said. He was, in the spirit of many a provocateur, just asking questions.

Yarvin’s faith in HBD informed his politics. He wrote that the U.S. Civil War hadn’t freed the slaves but rather “nationalized” them as “dependent” wards of the state.

Soon Yarvin became a cause célèbre for a certain kind of free speech purist—those advocates who always pipe up loudest in defense of right-wing white men.

An Inc. magazine report on the controversy was typical in the way it hedged, noting that Yarvin’s “writing has been interpreted as supportive of the institution of slavery” when in fact his writing was supportive of slavery.

For all the fuss it caused, Yarvin’s disinvitation was no violation of his free speech rights. Though it should go without saying, no private venue, virtual or physical, has an obligation to host anyone else’s views.

The agency invested in Thiel through its Silicon Valley VC front, In-Q-Tel. With Palantir, this self-described “civil libertarian” became an important player in the growth of a secretive, invasive, and patently unconstitutional global surveillance apparatus.

For instance, as the symbolic basis for Urbit, Yarvin chose an alphabet composed not of Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek letters but of “runes” in the volkisch tradition.

Might a dictatorial approach, in Thiel’s opinion, also work better for society at large? He never said so in his Stanford lecture (he said pure dictatorship is unideal in a company, although he did cast tech CEOs as the heirs to mythical “god-kings” such as Romulus).

The rise of the neoreactionaries was not exclusively a coup orchestrated from above with the help of powerful, well-connected hyperlibertarians like Thiel, Patri Friedman, and Trump’s campaign financier, the tech billionaire Robert Mercer. It was also a movement from below, embraced by thousands—and eventually perhaps by millions—of disaffected young people.

No single scapegoat united the neoreactionaries in hatred. Their loathing was a live wire of high-wattage rage flapping like a whip in a storm over anyone imagined to receive preferential treatment. Blacks and Latinos, Muslims and Jews, leftists and ladies—anyone who threatened the fragile ego of the vengeful nerd may feel the sting of punishment.

These young men saw themselves as possessing secret knowledge—hidden histories, scientific certainties, and political proofs—suppressed by the nefarious hand of the Cathedral. This was the powerful mystical significance of “the red pill.” Through coded language and symbols of affinity, this ideology turned personal frustration into camaraderie and a sense of purpose.

How closely all of this prefigured the rhetoric of the Trump campaign and presidency: fake news, fake judges, men’s rights, white power, full frontal assault—and no apologies, ever!

The basic problem, as Mishra saw it, was that globalized capitalism created far too many “superfluous young people”—that is, losers. The gap between the promise and the reality of capitalism created “simmering reservoirs of cynicism and discontent.” In this new order, “everyone was supposed to be an entrepreneur.” The more typical experience, however, was one of “defeat and humiliation,

The press mostly missed this story as it was happening, but the young agents of change were clear about their goals, and about globalized capitalism’s role in creating an opening for extremist movements.

He saw no contradiction whatsoever between his new hypertraditionalist social views and the peppy futurism he had long endorsed. They were, as he saw it, intrinsically linked, and on that one thing, at least, he was correct.

However, as conversations with programmers often do, the discussion quickly petered out. Which was fine.

“You can become a billionaire by doing anything. Find what is in your heart and soul, and do that,” he told the Summitgoers. Apparently, Diamandis had scoured his own soul and found a passion for the extractive industries.

The same ahistorical and romantic view of conquest pervaded the Summit, frequently punctuated by charts going up.

Was this the grand vision of the future? Smartphones? What a marvelous grift this was, charging $2,500 per head to rehash Apple advertising copy for two days.

People fear what they don’t understand. And “exponential technologies like AI” were, in his view, a way to resolve once and for all the “failures of our ability to implement our own moral code.” Complicated details like whose moral code would be programmed into the giant floating sky brain, with its invincible legions of law enforcement drones, were best left to the most brilliant and morally upright. In short, the problem was indeed my feeble human brain.

“There are some guys in the Netherlands, they store Bitcoin in these implants.” Now that was impressive—they’d found a way to make virtual currencies even more impractical than they already were.

It was eerie how closely the transhuman vision promoted by Singularity University resembled the eugenicist vision that had emerged from Stanford a century before.

But eugenics was also all about “enhancement.” Moreover, the problem with eugenics was not that the technology didn’t work. The problem was that it was a racist, authoritarian, and violently nonconsensual program in pursuit of indefensible goals. There must be no mystery about this.

What’s worse, powerful people take him seriously, because he is forever telling them what they’d like to hear and zealously defending the excesses of consumer capitalism.

The author of this bloodthirsty screed was no illiterate barstool general. Bradbury was a Harvard-educated programmer who had been an early employee at Oracle—

His admirers were willing to overlook certain quirks, such as his claim that American democracy deteriorated as a result of women’s suffrage and his reported interest in a procedure called parabiosis that involved receiving transfusions of young people’s blood for the purpose of hopefully extending his own lifespan.

Technology does not equate to progress. The fundamental confusion around this fairly obvious point reflects the entitled view of a wealthy lifelong consumer and pedigreed capitalist.

Women, Anissimov wrote, “complain about anything that isn’t perfect” and would pose a “distraction” to the settlers as they built a world apart. “The key idea here,” Anissimov wrote, “is freedom.”

An anonymous tech reporter with the Verge who covered Page’s speech was struck by the humdrum audience response. “What’s weird is the absolute lack of reaction to any of this in the room,” the reporter wrote. “Page is saying he wants a separate country to try out new laws and no one is even murmuring about it.”

To the extent that these companies accelerate American decline, they accumulate more power for themselves—and, per the dominant Singularitarian ideology, they expect that power to last in perpetuity.

They see everything, and they report everything they see. They know more about you, by the numbers, than you know about yourself. What you forget, they remember. What you seek, they store. We are tagged and tracked like calf and cow, profiled de minimis, and poked with thousands upon thousands of urgent yet pointless instructions from the ether. Create your account. Log in to continue. Click yes to agree. Ding! You have notifications. Could that be your boss? Shouldn’t you be working? Why are you reading this? Click. Swipe. Share. We insist. Anxious? Have some dopamine. Ding! Have some more. Boredom was once possible. Idle hands made tremendous things. Today, no one is idle. Everybody’s working, even when they tell themselves they’re taking a break. It is said that “data is the new oil.” But we are the data; the new oil is us. And unlike oil, we are a renewable resource.

And they fail to understand something that seems obvious to people from other parts of the world: as bad as things are, they can always get worse.

But there was one justification the government never backed away from: demonetization, it said, was modernization. India was leapfrogging toward a “digital and cashless economy,” with a big assist from some well-connected tech startups.

And Paytm had shown that Peter Thiel’s original dream for PayPal’s “World Domination” (his words)—digital, privatized currency—could be made real by fiat, should other methods fail.

The scary thing is that some inventions, once unleashed, cannot realistically be controlled. This is why decisions regarding the distribution and development of world-changing technologies cannot be left to the exclusive discretion of a few overconfident rich guys with Stanford pedigrees and a shocking disregard for history, politics, language, and culture, to say nothing of the struggles of the poor.

But if history teaches us one thing, it’s that complex problems often have simple solutions. Off with their heads.