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

by Corey Pein

The Singularity—a theoretical point in the future when computational power will absorb all life, energy, and matter into a single, all-powerful universal consciousness—is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to an official religion, and it is embraced wholeheartedly by many leaders of the tech industry. But more on that later! Along with the cloistered military agencies that underwrote the research for the smartphone, the personal computer, and the internet, these institutions—yes, even NASA—shared a set of overarching goals: to extend the reach of machines to all spheres of human activity; to ensure those machines remained under private control, unaccountable to the public at large; to automate the countless individual political and economic decisions that constitute a nominally free society; and, oh yes, to get richer than the Medicis. The tech tycoons who ruled this land elevated their profane designs with a sacred mythography. The Singularity was its theological expression, but they wrote their own history, too, as I had seen at the Computer History Museum. Their preferred discourse was reverent contemplation of the lofty arc of scientific progress and homilies on the fortitude of a few pioneers of industry—Father Gates, Saint Musk.