In Silicon Valley by Sam Frank
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Cockburn and Gray: u Exhuming u Daniel Mendelsohn: A New Cold War? Pablo Neruda Down on Downton HARPER’S MAGAZINE/JANUARY 2015 $6.99 POWER AND PARANOIA IN SILICON VALLEY BY SAM FRANK u LOVE CRIMES What Liberation Looks Like for Afghan Women BY JEN PERCY THE PROBLEM OF PAIN MANAGEMENT The Makers of OxyContin Play Dirty BY JOnaH CamPBELL anD SIMON LIEM REPORT COME WITH US IF YOU WANT TO LIVE Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley By Sam Frank ust by a quick show user input; in Neal Ste- “ofJ hands, has anyone phenson’s science-fiction heard of a D.A.O. or an novel Snow Crash, hu- agent before?” asked mans interact with one Jonathan Mohan. He another and with intel- was in his mid-twenties ligent agents within and wore a beige the more-than-virtual- Bitcoin T-shirt. As if to reality Metaverse. scratch my head, I half- “Imagine if you wrote way raised my right some program that arm. A dozen others could render a service, raced up past mine. and it generated enough Forty or fifty of us of a profit that it could were in a glass-walled cover its own costs. It coworking space at could perpetuate indefi- 23rd Street and Park nitely . because it’s just Avenue in Manhattan, the code running itself.” at a Meetup for a tech- “How much Skynet nology called Ethere- risk is there?” a young um. Invented by a man asked Mohan, us- nineteen-year-old Rus- ing sci-fi shorthand: sian Canadian named Could a few lines of Vitalik Buterin, and open-source code, still unreleased and un- meant to augment hu- der development on the man autonomy by obvi- day of the Meetup, in ating opaque institu- February 2014, Ethere- tions like Goldman um is intended to decentralize control “Effectively, what a D.A.O. is—or a Sachs and the federal government, me- of the Internet and anything connect- distributed autonomous organization, or tastasize into a malign machine intelli- ed to it, redistributing real-world power an agent, as I like to call it—is sort of gence, like Skynet in The Terminator? accordingly. Mohan was a volunteer this Snow Crash futuristic idea, and fun- That movie was released thirty years for the project. nily enough only a year or two away,” he ago, Snow Crash more than twenty; for said. An agent, in computer science, is decades, cyberpunks, cypherpunks, ex- Sam Frank is a senior editor of Triple Canopy. a program that performs tasks without tropians, transhumanists, and singu- 26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2015 Illustrations by Darrel Rees laritarians have imagined a world made ity and disputation, full-time in a vinced there’s irreconcilable fissure out of code, one in which politics is an world we were making. Then Mayor between deontological and conse- engineering problem and every person Bloomberg’s cops came in and quentialist camps). Aspiring rational- is a master of atoms and bits. The prom- cleared the park. Talk began to ist/Bayesian. Secularist/agnostic/ ise is a future in which we become more wear itself out. Reality resumed its ignostic . Hayekian. As important as than human. The threat is a future daily demands. what we know is what we don’t. Ad- without us. Some months later, I came across mittedly eccentric.” Then: “Really, “So you’re going to go from one the Tumblr of Blake Masters, who really excited to be in Silicon Valley D.A.O. to ten D.A.O.’s to one hun- was then a Stanford law student and right now, working on fascinating stuff dred D.A.O.’s to ten thousand tech entrepreneur in training. His with an amazing team.” D.A.O.’s,” Mohan replied. “Then, just motto—“Your mind is software. Pro- I was startled that all these nega- based off of profit maximization, gram it. Your body is a shell. Change tive ideologies could be condensed they’re going to start merging and ac- it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Ex- so easily into a positive worldview. quiring one another. tinction is approaching. Fight it.”— Thiel’s lectures posited a world in “But I don’t know if we’d ever get to was taken from a science-fiction role- which democratic universalism had Skynet,” he said. “Maybe in all our playing game. Masters was posting failed, and all that was left was a code we can say, ‘If Skynet rough transcripts of Peter Thiel’s heroic, particularist, benevolent lib- then exit.’ ” Stanford lectures on the founding of ertarianism. I found the rhetoric re- tech start-ups. I had read about pellent but couldn’t look away; I he first day of October in 2011, Thiel, a billionaire who cofounded wanted to refute it but only fell fur- twoT weeks into the Occupy Wall PayPal with Elon Musk and invested ther in. I saw the utopianism latent Street protests, I went down to Zuc- early in Facebook. His companies in capitalism—that, as Bernard cotti Park. I was no activist; rather, a Palantir Technologies and Mithril Mandeville had it three centuries democratic-socialist introvert, fond of Capital Management had borrowed ago, it is a system that manufactures Antonio Gramsci’s idea that every- their names from Tolkien. Thiel was public benefit from private vice. I one is an intellectual, even if society a heterodox contrarian, a Manichae- started CrossFit and began tinker- doesn’t allow everyone to function as an libertarian, a reactionary futurist. ing with my diet. I browsed venal such. I had gone to socialist summer “I no longer believe that freedom tech-trade publications, and tried camp; I had spent hopeless months and democracy are compatible,” and failed to read Less Wrong, writing utopian fiction in the first- Thiel wrote in 2009. Freedom which was written as if for aliens. person plural. So, that October after- might be possible, he imagined, in Then, in June 2013, I attended noon, I was curious and skeptical. A cyberspace, in outer space, or on the Global Future 2045 Internation- march began, and a chant: “We are high-seas homesteads, where indi- al Congress at Lincoln Center. The unstoppable / Another world is possi- vidualists could escape the “terri- gathering’s theme was “Towards a ble.” It all felt preposterous, charming, ble arc of the political.” Lecturing New Strategy for Human Evolution.” and I walked along in companionable in Palo Alto, California, Thiel cast It was being funded by a Russian silence. Three hours later I was in zip- self-made company founders as sav- new-money type who wanted to ac- tie handcuffs on the Brooklyn Bridge. iors of the world: celerate “the realization of cybernet- I spent part of the night in a holding ic immortality”; its keynote would be cell with some eco-leftists, one of There is perhaps no specific time that delivered by Ray Kurzweil, Google’s them a 9/11 Truther. Three quarters is necessarily right to start your com- director of engineering. Kurzweil of their ideas were bullshit, one quar- pany or start your life. But some times had popularized the idea of the sin- ter was not. They talked; I listened and some moments seem more auspi- gularity. Circa 2045, he predicts, we while pretending to sleep. cious than others. Now is such a mo- will blend with our machines; we ment. If we don’t take charge and ush- For the first time in my adult life, er in the future—if you don’t take will upload our consciousnesses into something seemed to be at stake charge of your life—there is the sense them. Technological development and available to anyone: how to that no one else will. So go find a will then come entirely from artifi- self-organize, how to be wholly frontier and go for it. cial intelligences, beginning some- democratic, what politics meant thing new and wonderful. without parties, what mutual aid Blake Masters—the name was too After sitting through an hour of and direct action could and could perfect—had, obviously, dedicated “The Transformation of Humankind— not accomplish, what another world himself to the command of self and Extreme Paradigm Shifts Are Ahead might be. I kept returning to the universe. He did CrossFit and ate Bul- of Us,” I left the auditorium of Alice park after my arrest. For weeks, letproof, a tech-world variant of the Tully Hall. Bleary beside the silver months, it felt like my life was on paleo diet. On his Tumblr’s About coffee urn in the nearly empty lobby, hold. My head was at Zuccotti page, since rewritten, the anti-belief I was buttonholed by a man whose when I wasn’t, and then I would belief systems multiplied, hyperlinked name tag read michael vassar, sprint over on my bike again to be to Wikipedia pages or to the con- metamed research. He wore a alone with everyone. This was how foundingly scholastic website Less black-and-white paisley shirt and a we were supposed to live, in solidar- Wrong: “Libertarian (and not con- jacket that was slightly too big for REPORT 27 him. “What did you think of that Less Wrong. Vassar had left to found “Should I assume that your shirt is talk?” he asked, without introduc- MetaMed, a personalized-medicine an accurate reflection of your abili- ing himself. “Disorganized, wasn’t company, with Jaan Tallinn of Skype ties,” he asked, “and start blabbing it?” A theory of everything fol- and Kazaa, $500,000 from Peter Thiel, math at you?” Eight minutes of proba- lowed.