Robot Cultist Eliezer Yudkowsky's Ugly Celebration of Plutocracy

[Let us begin the new year, you and I, with a long, but not longing, backward glance. In the Moot to a post yesterday my friend Jim Fehlinger drew our attention to an essay from 2008 from robocultic Singularitarian, would-be sooper-genius, wannabe-guru Eliezer Yudkowsky. I vaguely recall having glanced at this piece once, but I can't say that I really gave the piece the real attention it deserved before now. Eliezer Yudkowsky is hardly what you would call a celebrated figure, but he is taken seriously by people who are taken seriously, for whatever reasons, to the extent that one admits the "Thought Leaders" of that amorphous aspirational blob called "tech" are taken seriously, folks like "philosophers" Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson, and reactionary "techno-progressive" skim-and-scam gazillionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and the like. It is well known that I find Yudkowsky a ridiculous person, but I must say that upon reading the linked piece I found the apology for plutocratic elitism that followed frankly flabbergasting in its infantile foolishness, lack of standards, and truly gross indecency. Even I did not think so little of Yudkowsky to think he would write something like this. Perhaps he no longer would. I would like to think so. It is true that over the years venture capitalist techbros of the Valley of the Silly Cons have regularly been exposed by journalists and then mocked by majorities for making clueless bigoted asshole exhibitions of themselves and it is also true that the object of Yudkowsky's piece is, in a nutshell, to declare this very cohort of VCs as ethically and organismically and, hell, apparently cosmically superior sorts of beings, and so the awfulness of the following has a certain dismal inevitability about it. For the whole piece you should follow the link, my own comments are bracketed and interspersed and, I do assure you, were quite involuntary reflex actions of a shocked conscience. Yes, shock is the way we should begin...--d]

I was shocked, meeting Steve Jurvetson, because from everything I'd read about venture capitalists before then, VCs were supposed to be fools in business suits, who couldn't understand technology or engineers or the needs of a fragile young startup, but who'd gotten ahold of large amounts of money by dint of seeming reliable to other business suits.

[My own (possibly over-general) generalized impression of VCs is that they are mostly privileged upward failing opportunists unscrupulously hyping vaporware for short-term cash from credulous marks or exploiting collective labor and intelligence via the shar(ecropp)ing economy with little awareness or interest in the costs or risks or suffering of others involved in their efforts. "[S]eeming reliable to other [VCs in] business suits" might describe this sociopathic state of affairs, but I do think better descriptions are available. I must add that many of these people seem to me to have "gotten a-hold of large amounts of money" by being born with it or with enough of it to schmooze others born with it, which is to say that they are "self-made men" in the usual way.--d]

One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

[Since Yudkowsky has interposed this curious framing at this point in his narrative himself, I think it only fair to offer it up as a question for the reader rather than a premise we will all simply uncritically accept: Do we agree with Yudkowsky, admittedly a man veering into middle age at this point, that he has indeed "moved out of childhood" at all, let alone "into the real world"? Given the embarrassing narcissism, the simplistic conceits, the facile hero worship, the infantile wish-fulfillment on display, are we all quite ready to admit Yudkowsky into the ambit of adulthood? Or is his superlative futurology yet another, more than usually palpable, symptom of superannuated infancy?--d]

Now, yes, Steve Jurvetson is not just a randomly selected big-name venture capitalist. He is a big-name VC who often shows up at transhumanist conferences. But I am not drawing a line through just one data point.

[Quite a lot of the material I snipped from the beginning of Yudkowsky's piece involved his praise of Steve Jurvetson in particular who may, for all I know, actually be a bright and worthy person (although, contra Yudkowsky, I cannot say his attendance at robocultic transhumanist conferences, if that is true, inspires confidence in his judgment) or may, again for all I know, simply be someone Yudkowsky is buttering up in hopes of some collection plate action for his robocultic causes.--d]

I was invited once to a gathering of the mid-level power elite, where around half the attendees were "CEO of something" -- mostly technology companies, but occasionally "something" was a public company or a sizable hedge fund. I was expecting to be the youngest person there, but it turned out that my age wasn't unusual -- there were several accomplished individuals who were younger. This was the point at which I realized that my child prodigy license had officially completely expired.

[Can there really be people who refer non-derisively and non-satirically to groups of the rich as "the power elite"? Can there really be people who refer to themselves -- setting aside the question of people in their thirties who refer to themselves -- affirmatively as "child prodigies"? With much discomfort and sadness, let us soldier on.--d]

Now, admittedly, this was a closed conference run by people clueful enough to think "Let's invite Eliezer Yudkowsky" even though I'm not a CEO. So this was an incredibly cherry-picked sample. Even so...

[Even if this hyperbole is meant to signal irony, the boasting in it is so transparently a compensation for insecurity it is actually painful to observe.--d]

Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions. 

[Again, with the "Power Elite" business. The capital letters and, if I may say so, simple commonsense make we want to assume the phrasing is parodic -- but nothing anywhere else suggests this. Indeed, one has the horrified suspicion that the letters are also capitalized in Yudkowsky's head. We will set aside as too horrific to contemplate the suggestion that it was simply their likely whiteness and maleness that made the Power! Elite! gathered in that room seem "visibly much smarter than average mortals." Notice that we must take Yudkowsky's word that the topics under discussion were "deep" and "difficult" and that they spoke of them "sensibly" and "intelligently" and "made fewer mistakes" (he would have caught them if they had). Were they "speaking quickly" because they had so much to say and were excited by their topics -- or just because they are used to fast-talking salesmanship and bullshit artistry? Were they "adopting each others suggestions" because they were open to intelligent criticisms or because they are yes-men flattering and cajoling each other for networking's sake or because groups of people like this are already largely in agreement about what matters and why it matters especially when it comes to "tech" talk?--d]

No, even worse than that, much worse than that: these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive.

[There you go. Read it again. Hedge fund managers and tech VCs are happier and more alive than other people. MORE ALIVE. The rich are not like you and me. They are tapped into exquisite joys and alivenesses unavailable to majorities, they they are more real. This bald endorsement of reactionary plutocratic superiority is so ignorant of the richness of the lives and intelligence of the majorities it dismisses and is so flatly pernicious in its eventually genocidal political entailments, I must say it is a rare thing to see in a public statement... Although, again, I have already noted that such public statements are indeed comparatively more commonplace, and notoriously so, among these very same sort of rich "tech" VCs and banksters. But there it is. Of course, Yudkowsky doesn't really mean "worse" or "much worse" in anything like the conventional sense, when he declares these (are we meant to think reluctant?) truths. No, Yudkowsky is relishing the awfulness of what he is saying, he is savoring the ugliness in his mouth, tonguing his anti-democratic morsel from tooth to tooth, smacking his lips in an unseemly dance of contrarian "political incorrectness," drinking in the imagined opprobrium of the unwashed useless eating masses he cheerfully consigns to computronium feedstock here. One is all too used by now to these online spectacles of man-child id celebrating racist police violence or rape culture or what have you in the faces of the vulnerable, smearing their feces on the walls of the world. What it is useful to recall at this juncture, again, is that mild-mannered "tech philosopher" Nick Bostrom at Oxford and widely worshiped celebrity "tech" CEO Elon Musk are discursively, sub(cult)urally and institutionally connected to this person, are conversant with his "ideas" and "enterprises," are his colleagues.--d]

This, I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can't talk about it in public. This is something that reporters must not write about, when they visit gatherings of the power elite.

[Again, nothing could be clearer than that Yudkowsky does not find this "truth" to be in the least horrible. He is palpably relishing it -- his enjoyment is so rich he does not even care about the perverse contradiction of describing as absolutely prohibited the speaking of the very truths he is in the act of megaphoning about at top volume -- and to the extent that he has already figured himself as adjudicating this gathering of rich happy genius elite superbeings, he is also making a spectacle of confirming his own status as such a being himself. Again, one doesn't have to scratch too deep beneath this ungainly superficial boasting to detect what look to be the rampaging insecurities desperately compensated by this embarrassing self-serving spectacle, but I do not so much discern in this so much a cry for help as an announcement of a punitive rage for order putting us all on notice. Such dangerous and costly performances of insecure personhood do not elicit my sympathy but ready my defenses. It is amusing to note that in the comments to his post, an early one responds to Yudkowsky's observation that "This [elitism], I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can't talk about it in public" by assuring us "Charles Murray talked about [it] in The Bell Curve." Quite so! A later comment adds, "And Ayn Rand wrote about it repeatedly." All too, too true. I will add myself that while it is true that few reporters write about tech billionaires that they are literal gods the rest of us should be so lucky get pooped on by, the endless fluffing these people get in informercial puff-pieces and think-tank PowerPoints and TED ceremonial ecstasies are all premised on only slightly more modest variations of the attribution of superiority Yudkowsky is indulging here. That he takes this praise to such bonkers extremities doesn't actually make his argument original, in particular, it just makes it even more than usually stupid.--d]

Because the last news your readers want to hear, is that this person who is wealthier than you, is also smarter, happier, and not a bad person morally. Your reader would much rather read about how these folks are overworked to the bone or suffering from existential ennui. Failing that, your readers want to hear how the upper echelons got there by cheating, or at least smarming their way to the top. If you said anything as hideous as, "They seem more alive," you'd get lynched.

[Yudkowsky was not lynched for saying these very things, and of course he is lying when he pretends to expect anything remotely otherwise. Dumb emotionally stunted smug straight white assholes aren't the people who have historically been lynched in this country, as it happens. Charles Murray didn't write about that in The Bell Curve nor did Ayn Rand devote a chapter to it in one of her execrable bodice-rippers. You know, I would be surprised if many, indeed if anybody has even been meaner to Eliezer Yudkowsky about his horrible screed than I am being right now in the near-decade since he wrote all these awful ugly things he has never since recanted nor qualified. Of course, one expects straight white techbros to lose themselves in grandiose fantasies of imagined victimhood for just innocently being themselves in the world of politically correct oversensitive naturally inferior social justice warriors blah blah blah blah blah. It is indeed evocatively Ayn Randian of Yudkowsky to presume that we sour-smelling masses contemplate our rich productive techbro betters with envious projections onto them of misery and ennui -- but of course the truth is that such protestations about the lives of stress and stigma and suffering and risk suffered by our indispensable beneficient entrepreneurial Maker elites are usually self-serving rationalizations for bail-outs and tax-cuts and ego-stroking offered up by themselves rather than those of us, Takers all, they so relentlessly exploit and disdain. In any case, nothing could be clearer than that Yudkowsky and his readership do not identify in the main with such envious errant mehum masses, but largely consist instead of useful idiots who fancy themselves Tomorrow's Power Elite awaiting their own elevation via the coding or crafting of the Next! Big! Thing! That! Changes! Everything! and hence they actually identify with the pretensions of the plutocrats Yudkowsky is describing and disdain in advance those who in disdaining them disdain their future selves -- the poor pathetic suckers! I leave to the side the fact that many do not expect merely to Get Rich Quick soon enough, but in the fullness of time expect, given their robocultishness, to live in shiny robot bodies in nanobotic treasure caves filled with sexy sexbots when they are not rollicking in Holodeck Heaven as cyber-angelic info-souls under the ministrations of a history-ending super-parental Friendly Robot God.--d]

[There is much more evil crapola to be found in this vein in Yudkowsky's e-pistle. One particularly crazy utterance several more pages into the screed asserts that "Hedge-fund people sparkle with extra life force. At least the ones I've talked to. Large amounts of money seem to attract smart people. No, really." Oh, how our rich elites sparkle! As I said, it is really just more of the same -- including more of these faux "No, really" protestation against objections to all this objectionable idiocy that never really arrive nor are really, no, really, expected to from his readership.--d]

[By way of conclusion, it is interesting to note that like many who lack training in structural critique Yudkowsky finds himself indulging in a rather romantic misconception of the complexities of historical, social, and cultural dynamisms -- investing heroized protagonists with magickal force and indulging in frankly conspiracist mappings of power.--d]

[For what I mean by magick--d:]

Visiting that gathering of the mid-level power elite, it was suddenly obvious why the people who attended that conference might want to only hang out with other people who attended that conference. So long as they can talk to each other, there's no point in taking a chance on outsiders who are statistically unlikely to sparkle with the same level of life force. When you make it to the power elite, there are all sorts of people who want to talk to you. But until they make it into the power elite, it's not in your interest to take a chance on talking to them. Frustrating as that seems when you're on the outside trying to get in! On the inside, it's just more expected fun to hang around people who've already proven themselves competent. I think that's how it must be, for them. (I'm not part of that world, though I can walk through it and be recognized as something strange but sparkly.)

[For what I mean by conspiracy--d:]

There's another world out there, richer in more than money. Journalists don't report on that part, and instead just talk about the big houses and the yachts. Maybe the journalists can't perceive it, because you can't discriminate more than one level above your own. Or maybe it's such an awful truth that no one wants to hear about it, on either side of the fence. It's easier for me to talk about such things, because, rightly or wrongly, I imagine that I can imagine technologies of an order that could bridge even that gap. I've never been to a gathering of the top-level elite (World Economic Forum level), so I have no idea if people are even more alive up there, or if the curve turns and starts heading downward.

[As I said, one is left questioning more than Yudkowsky's intelligence after reading such stuff, but wondering -- to the extent that we take this stuff straight, and not as a bit of pathetic but probably lucrative self-promotional myth-making -- if his many accomplishments (writing Harry Potter fan-fiction, writing advertizing copy about code that doesn't exist, extolling rationality while indulging in megalomaniacal crazytalk) will one day include an arrival at either basic competent adulthood or basic moral sanity. Yudkowsky ends his missive in what seems an ambivalent bit of loose-talking guruwannabe-provocation or possibly ass-saving: "I'm pretty sure that, statistically speaking, there's a lot more cream at the top than most people seem willing to admit in writing. Such is the hideously unfair world we live in, which I do hope to fix." We are left to wonder if the reference to "hideous unfair[ness]" is ironic or earnest. It is hard to square his conventional meritocratic rationalization for inequity with the belief that this state of affairs is really so very unfair after all, so far as it goes, though who of us can say just where the balance finally falls once one ascends to the Olympian heights from which we are assured that Yudkowsky, elite above the elites, hopes finally to "fix" things? The ways of self-appointed godlings are mysterious.--d]