Supremacy in Silicon Valley

Forgetting the soil for the stars

Last week I interviewed artist John Wild about the relationship between technology and “imaginaries”, the stories we live in that shape our thinking. We discussed this in relation to A.I, with John revealing the fascinating and disturbing legacy of thinking which is currently shaping some of the most important decisions being made in Silicon Valley. He referenced Nikolai Federov, the founder of the Cosmism movement in the late 18C which suggested humanity’s collective destiny was to eradicate death and resurrect the dead, which is why we need to colonise other planets—we need to make room for new humans.

Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. Ray Kurzweil, principal researcher and A.I visionary at Google, has openly stated he wants to resurrect his dead father. And don’t forget about the Effective Altruism movement, a favourite among Silicon Valley elites, which promotes making immense personal wealth at any cost in order to benefit the unborn future trillions of humanity. These trillions mean it is necessary to figure out how to colonise space—even if doing so takes a toll on people and planet today.

Throughout the conversation, John and I reference the themes of domination and hierarchy infusing these beliefs and motivations. John points out that the idea of a “general intelligence” came from eugenicist Charles Spearman who wished to rank human intelligence. No matter these ugly origins, companies like OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, are racing to develop A.G.I: Artificial General Intelligence. And what drives these Silicon Valley technologists? The belief that God “doesn’t yet exist”; that they are mere stepping stones in the evolution of intelligence, on the path to creating a superintelligence, a superior intelligence.

Alarm bells should be ringing. I’ve written before about the bizarre offshoot of Effective Altruism, an elite dating service by Simone and Michael Collins who want to “take control” of human evolution. The technologists themselves have committed to having 10 babies, and encouraging each of their children to have 10 babies, in the hope their bloodline will outnumber the current human population in just 11 generations. They offer professional match-making services for other elite pronatalists because they think investing in the top 0.1% is more important than investing in the bottom 10%. Critics like Nandita Bajaj have called the Collins’ ideology—and the Effective Altruism movement more widely—white supremacy. 

It may seem surprising to see supremacist arguments infusing conversations in Silicon Valley, an environment which allegedly espouses progress and access and improving people’s lives. The valley is even housed in California, a fiercely proud Democratic state. Yet, this state does little about some of the worst inequality in the country and technologists like Musk and Bezos have revealed their right-wing impulses by moving to Texas. This is a country whose Overton window collapsed on itself after the Trump presidency and Democratic crack-down on protests. Even the wider political environment that we all live in, the competitive race to success which creates more oligarchs and monopolies than it does dollars that trickle down, is infused with the idea of hierarchy, domination and supremacy. The idea of a scale of betterment and thus deserving can be traced back to Plato (as well as the desire to flee the earth for eternal life). 

We need to understand these stories because they’re in our DNA; they infuse our cultures invisibly, promote an ever narrowing vision of what can be. They limit our imagination when we cannot see them because we forget they are just one set of frames and confuse them for vision. They are like fishing lines stretching back through time, catching us on their invisible linearity and casting us into the future. Much in the way Western enlightenment taught us to atomise pieces of knowledge in order to understand, so each iteration of the idea gets smaller and smaller, more focused, more fixed, blurring out the big picture to zoom in on a vision that is just a miniscule part of a wider understanding. These are not “traditions of thought” but live stories, living ecosystems of beliefs which wrap tendrils around the possibilities of imagination. Our thoughts did not begin with us, they began aeons ago. When we forget this, we forget to see what is right in front of us; we cannot understand the stars without remembering the soil. 

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