Eau de Oligarchy: The unmistakable stench of Silicon Valley

Plus: AI snake oil’s ominous rise, the casual racism of facial harmonization, and who the f*ck is LGB?

This one’s for my frag heads struggling to define the scent of Silicon Valley!

Also in this edition:

•  AI snake oil’s ominous rise

• The casual racism of facial harmonization

• And who the f*ck is LGB?

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There’s a sinister air emanating from Silicon Valley. It reeks of rotten Apple, putrid Musk, and the sweat of insecurity. It oozes from the pores of once tolerant institutions; the sweet promise of “think different” decaying in a dumpster of diversity. It may be harder to ignore, but it's not new. Over the past few decades, hate has been building in the blogosphere. Now it's wafting through the halls of our democracy.

So what exactly is that smell? And what does big tech’s presidential bromance have to do with a vegan death cult?

Birth of a cult

Late last month, news broke of a Silicon Valley cult tied to six different deaths in three different states. The Zizians, led by an enigmatic trans woman going by the name Ziz, are known for their radical veganism and extreme “rationalist” worldview.

Put simply, rationalists believe in improving humanity’s cognitive potential through the use of technology and logic. According to Mark O’Connell, author of To Be a Machine, the philosophy is a “quasi-religious worldview, in which reason takes the place of the godhead, and whereby all of our human problems are soluble by means of its application.”

Rationalists employ exhaustive thought experiments and obtuse equations to determine the best way forward for humanity. Many of them believe that the development of superhuman AI is inevitable and the only way for people to survive it is to become one with the machine. Achieving Singularity is apparently the most rational outcome for us all. If all goes according to plan, our distant descendants will be omniscient, immortal, digital beings floating in data centers across the universe. This line of “reasoning” has become wildly popular among Silicon Valley elite. Leaders at Tesla, Meta, Google, and Open AI have all been connected to rationalism and its sister philosophies.

One other thing about rationalists: they're almost all straight, white men.

Ziz came up in rationalist circles in 2019 but soon became disillusioned by the pervasiveness of misogyny and trans-exclusivity among the philosophy’s adherents. She began railing against the movement’s establishment and forming her own radical splinter group. For more than six years, the sect flew mostly under the radar, but last month it all blew up when police connected the group to a pair of murders in California and Vermont. Ziz is now a fugitive. Meanwhile, her history is shedding light on the little-known but highly influential theories driving AI innovation and right wing alliances in Silicon Valley.

Rationalizing Hate

Last week, I went down a Zizian rabbit hole. The spectacle of a trans-led, vegan death cult with connections to Silicon Valley was just too juicy to resist. I embraced the group’s bizarre history as a welcome distraction from the deluge of regressive orders pouring out of the White House . Countless podcasts, explainers, and labyrinthine blog posts into my online excavation, though, I found myself back in a Trumpian doom loop.

In a 2021 New York Times article, Cade Metz referenced an interview with Sam Altman, in which the OpenAI CEO gushed about a particularly influential publication called Slate Star Codex. A Bay Area psychiatrist named Scott Siskind (aka Scott Alexander) launched the blog in 2013, and soon became a thought leader amongst rationalists, atheists, misogynists, libertarians, white supremacists, engineers, developers, investors, and CEOs.

Altman said he was inspired, as many in Silicon Valley had been, by a 2014 post entitled “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup.” In it, Siskind separates the US into a series of three tribes. The writer belonged, not to the conservative red tribe or liberal blue tribe, but to the grey tribe, who were ‘typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football ‘sportsball’, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk.’

The grey tribe championed free speech above all else, putting them at odds with the “social justice warriors” of the blue tribe, whom Siskind and his acolytes believed were the actual oppressors. In December 2017, Altman, an openly gay man, wrote a blog post of his own, in which he made the roundabout argument that allowing homophobia to flourish was essential to technological innovation. Altman, like so many of Siskind’s followers, had come to see “social justice warriors” as enemies of progress.

He said that many of the brightest minds in “intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension” had left San Francisco due to “toxic” responses to their work. He made no mention of the eugenicists roots of their endeavors, instead focusing on the dangers of liberal language policing.

As I read Altman’s grey tribe defense, I sensed the origins of the odor blanketing the nation. It emerged on the Gold Coast and caught a westerly wind to DC. The chaos at the capital; the sudden allegiance to Trump; the about-face on DEI; the state-sanctioned attacks on LGBTQ+ rights; the free speech grandstanding; and the Zizian murders all sprang from the same murky well. This is the grey tribe writ large.

That smell? It’s the scent of intolerance cloaked in innovation.

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Can you smell what the Valley’s cooking: Have scent notes of your own? Don’t be shy. Leave a comment.

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FOLLOW THE THREAD

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The Revolution will be Sanitized

In a move that proves there are no limits to the current administration’s pettiness, the words “trans” and “queer” have been removed from the National Park Service’s online memorial to Stonewall. The site now uses the truncated initialism LGB, making it easier for fragile man-children to remember.

Transgender reference removed from National Park Service’s Stonewall website – The Hill

Bad Rationalism

Cade Metz reveals the mind and philosophies behind Slate Star Codex, a rationalist blog with outsized influence on the people driving AI innovation and regressive politics in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley’s Safe Space – The New York Times

The Brutal Roots of Facial Harmonization

Facial harmonization is so hot right now. The new cosmetic trend, which attempts to create balance in human faces via plastic surgery and TikTok filters isn’t just bad science, it’s another sign of history repeating itself. Jessica DeFino masterfully draws the line from hot girl harmonization to the racist skull-measuring techniques of 18th century eugenicists.

People Are 'Harmonizing' Their Faces. Why? – The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino

AI Snake Oil is on the Rise

AI is everywhere, or is it? Class-action lawsuits alleging “AI washing” more than doubled in 2024, according to a recent Cornerstone Research and Stanford Law School report. AI-washing, a nod to the phrase “greenwashing,” happens when a company overinflates or outright lies to investors about their use of artificial intelligence and its benefits. In one of the 15 suits filed last year, “thousands of low-wage offshore workers,” were found to be powering an allegedly “state-of-the-art” AI platform.

New wave of investor lawsuits targets ‘AI washing’ – Reuters