Immortal Billionaire Demi-Gods Or Greedy Delusional Spoiled Fucksticks? You Decide!
Jesus fucking Christ. This takes narcissism to a whole new level.
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OK, we all know the billionaire parasites are killing our planet, our country, and everything good in the world. But most of us don’t actually know WHY these rat fucks are doing it. Is it just greed? Jesus, I fucking wish that’s all it was. I would give anything to go back to the days of plain ol’ Reaganism greed.
No, we’re dealing with something so much worse. We’re dealing with a fanatical cult of delusional children with unfathomable power and unlimited money who think they’re living in either the first or last act of a sci-fi movie.
Holy fucking shit. As soon as I wrote that sentence, I realized who these people are. I’ll explain in a bit. Let me lay out what they believe first.
An uncomfortably large number of Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires are part of the TESCREAL movement. That’s a mishmosh of the following beliefs:
Transhumanism - The human race should be enhanced through genetic and cybernetic means to become more than human.
Extropianism - That humans will eventually become immortal, most likely by uploading their consciousness to a computer and becoming digital.
Singularitarianism - That humanity will, in the very near future, give birth to true AI, a sentient superintelligence.
Cosmism - The idea that humanity will, with the aid of AI superintelligence, colonize the universe.
Rationalist - The claim to use pure logic to avoid cognitive and emotional bias. Curiously, it seems to always support the viewpoint of racist white men. Weird.
Effective Altruism - The idea is to benefit the maximum number of people in the most efficient way.
Longtermism - The idea that the long-term survival of the human race is the most important consideration possible.
TESCREAL - The philosophical underpinning of a lot of what the billionaire tech bros have been doing.
Some of this stuff seems perfectly benign. I, personally, am not adverse to transhumanism. If we can replace missing limbs with stronger, better versions? Go for it. Eyes that can see in infrared? Sweet. Ears that can hear 500 feet away? Go for it. Clearly, I grew up watching the Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman.
Now, I’m not going to get into all of the many MANY (holy shit so fucking many) problems with TESCREAL. That would take a very long time and several lengthy articles. Suffice it to say, like many philosophies, it’s fine on paper. Communism is fine on paper. Capitalism is fine on paper. But in the real world, people are stupid, greedy assholes and what’s fine on paper rarely works that way in practice. People can’t just leave well enough alone. They have to make themselves the center of everything and that’s where TESCREAL fails. It goes from an interesting thought experiment that might have been a net positive for mankind into an all-consuming cancer killing everything.
The important part here is the immortality bit and the deranged impact it’s had on the ultra-rich.
Silicon Valley billionaires are obsessed, absolutely fucking obsessed, with living forever:
That’s where what enthusiasts called “super longevity” comes in. A number of billionaires have pumped money into research that aims to keep people fighting fit as they age. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have pumped millions into Calico, a secretive health venture which aims to “solve death”. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the billionaire Peter Thiel are backers of Unity Biotechnology, which hopes to combat the effects of aging.
A while ago, I wrote about “Freedom Cities,” the creepy project of the tech oligarchs to found and run their own city-states like god-kings.
Elon Musk Wants A "Freedom City" Of His Own To Rule Over Like A Deranged God
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A big part of what they’re doing in the ones that currently exist in other countries is extremely unethical medical research into, you guessed it, immortality.
So what’s the problem here? No one really wants to die, right? Everyone would like to live forever, yeah? Debatable. But that’s a discussion for another time. The problem is that these tech bro pieces of shit want to achieve immortality and they don’t give a rat’s ass if they kill us all to do it.
To be clear: The billionaires are not seeking to make the human race immortal. They want to make THEMSELVES immortal and the rest of us can fuck off and die.
They may need a true AI to achieve their goal. Getting there will consume massive amounts of resources and wreck the environment. Totally worth it! Even if a few billion die from starvation.
They require a free hand to plunder all the resources they need and the only way they see that happening is by ending democracy in the United States. Too many liberal do-gooders were asking too many questions about the abuses of Silicon Valley. And if the fascist government they put into power ends up killing millions? Oh well, the tech bros got what they needed: A clear path to keep working on becoming immortal!
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In the more sci-fi aspects of this, AI is extremely dangerous if not built and handled responsibly. But they really REALLY need a true AI to reach their goal of immortality. So, instead of moving forward with deliberative caution, the tech bros are rushing ahead as fast as possible. Sure, a huge amount of damage is being done and millions could die but, worth it if they create the sentient AI they need!
To clarify this again: The tech fucks are doing all of this because THEY want to be immortal. They’re not trying to lay the groundwork for the discovery of immortality for future generations. They don’t give two tugs on a dead dog’s tail about that. Unless they, personally, get to benefit from it, it’s all meaningless.
There’s a saying, allegedly an ancient Greek proverb, I once read. When I saw it, it clarified a lot about who I was and why I do what I do:
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Yeah. I have every intention of planting those trees as an old man, just as I plant seeds now that I do not expect to see bear fruit in my lifetime. I do not expect the Republican Party to cease to exist before I do. But I’ll go to my grave knowing I did my part to help make that happen down the road so my kids and their kids can someday live in a world free of their fascism.
But that is not who the tech fucks are. Their narcissism is so overwhelming that they cannot conceive of a world without them in it. Worse, they’re willing to sacrifice anyone, everyone, and everything to ensure their survival.
They’re crippled with main character syndrome. I think the worst insult you can say to a tech fuck is, “You’re not that important. No one will care when you’re gone. You’re not even going to be a footnote in history.”
So earlier, when I said I realized who these assholes are, you could say I had a, forgive the pun, revelation. They’re the science fiction equivalent of Evangelicals awaiting the Rapture. They truly believe that we are at the end of human civilization on Earth and they will be among the chosen future to ascend and populate the universe.
Like premillennial Evangelicals, the tech fucks believe, essentially, they will be raptured. Freed from their earthly bodies to live in eternal bliss with the AI gods they’ve created while the Earth burns. Then they can spend eternity exploring the universe and living a life of immortal bliss. Maybe, someday, the Earth can be reclaimed but, really, who cares? It’s an infinite universe and there are an infinite number of worlds to colonize.
If you haven’t quite grasped the full extent of the problem here yet, the tech bros, like the Evangelicals, are a full-on death cult. They frequently talk about the biological human race as a gateway species to AI. A necessary evolutionary step but a dead end. It’s OK if humanity dies off as long as digital humans and AI live on forever. Now, that’s not the worst way to look at things in the long run. A million years from now, I don’t expect flesh and blood humans to be running around the galaxy. I figure we’ll have long moved on to digital as a natural progression.
But that’s not good enough for the tech fucks. Evangelicals also have no desire to delay their promised glorious future. They could help preserve the world. They could clean up the environment and prevent wars and ease poverty and end hunger and leave a better tomorrow for their children. But why the fuck would they EVER do that? That would delay the coming of the Savior and the Rapture. That would delay their entry into paradise. Better to help make the world a worse place to bring about the promised reward faster.
And this is precisely what the tech fucks are doing and for exactly the same reasons. If, they reason, setting the world on fire means they can get what THEY want now, then that is a good thing because all that matters is what THEY want.
Like Evangelicals, they justify it as the ultimate moral good and anyone opposing them is, quite literally, evil for interfering with the greater good of all mankind. I am not joking about that. Longtermism is the most obscene justification for greed and narcissism imaginable. It should be an ideology based on making things better now to benefit future generations but the tech fucks have inverted it into a funhouse mirror that dictates the present is expendable as long as your actions ensure future success. The logical fallacies inherent in this thinking are legion. But this is how the billionaires make themselves the hero of the story.
And you know this part of the story. Once you make yourself the unassailable hero and everyone who stands against you irredeemably evil, you are free from all constraints. Nothing you do can be wrong because you’re the good guy struggling against villains out to stop your heroic quest to save mankind. I fucking kid you not, Elon Musk talks about the Sun wiping out all life on Earth as if this is an imminent threat instead of billions of years in the future. Get out of his way as he tries to save all of humanity by making himself an immortal god king!
These are drug-addled delusional manbabies with pretensions of divinity. They cannot be reasoned with. They can only be destroyed before they destroy us. Because here’s the most important thing to consider. A lot of these tech fucks are in their 50s and they are not going to become immortal. In 20 to 30 years, when their drug use and degenerate lifestyles catch up to them, they’re going to realize their dream of ruling mankind forever is not going to come true. They will not be the pioneers of immortality. Then they will do what all rich white men do when they are denied that which they feel they are owed: They will become bitter and resentful. They will look at the world they will leave behind and wonder if the rest of us deserve anything at all. If they can’t have it, why should the rest of us?
There are few things in the world more dangerous than a rich white man who cannot have what he wants. What will the richest men to ever exist do to punish us for daring to outlive them? I, for one, would prefer not to find out.
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As I was reading your very interesting article, I kept wondering about the power source. Everything needs a power source whether it be food, electricity, running water or something else. Then I imagined all these powerful men as immortal whatevers …floating brains, AI computers, etc., and then the cleaning lady coming along and accidentally unplugging them all. A happy if silly thought.
Imagine that, in order to attain the intelligence they are seeking, they will require access to to all of the diversity of thought that currently exists, and then quite a bit more. The longer it takes to get those perspectives as input, the longer it will take for the AI to process the data.
The more perspectives that are erased today, the less likely they are to wake to their dreams come true tomorrow.