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Marc's avatar

John, thanks for this post, my comment on the last post was a bit premature. The "cryogenic" era of life-extensionism certainly was fun, people would hand out laminated cards to (some) of their friends with a phone number to be called in the event of their death. Since most had yet to make their big score, all they could afford (for a big up front fee and a monthly "maintenance" fee) was to get their heads frozen. So, those of us who were unenlightened called them the "freezer heads". I assume there are still some freezers running somewhere in Marin with a few remaining occupants.

There is there was that weird set of followers of the "teachings" of Aleister Crowley, a convoluted thread that passed through L. Ron Hubbard, Robert Heinlein, Jack Parsons, JPL, Caltech, and from there into the early SF/SV engineering scene. And, of course the biggest SV cult of all, the followers of the Gospel of Saint Ayn Rand.

There are, I believe, a few things that may be hard to see except from an outsider (non-white) perspective. The first is the relentless "whiteness" of the proposed techno-utopias, at least until a PR person notices and darkens in a few faces. I don't think this is accidental, nor is it accidental that William Shockley was one of the founding "fathers" of Silicon Valley and a true believer in eugenics his entire life. Now let's move jump to Elon Musk and all those baby mommas, each required to take a genetic test before they could join the fun. Just what sort of genetic "impurities" would he be looking for? Looked at another way, we have white "engineers" engineering a white future, the one true religion of SV. How many non-white people were allowed into Galt's Gulch?

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Robert Andersen's avatar

Amen.

See David Noble The Religion of Technology and A World Without Women (Knopf).

My The View From Asilomar is on my Substack On Watch. Later this summer I will post a short essay on AI and San Francisco.

The political meaning thereof. See Gil Duran (Nerd Reich) at the Commonwealth Club.

Excellent essay. Kudos.

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