There are a few men in Silicon Valley whose intelligence, despite popular opinion, does not depend on business or, indeed, computers. Balaji Srinivasan is one of them. Usually, you can recognize them by two signs, they arouse public controversy & they quote political philosophers. Both are signs that these people aren’t liberal, because latter-day liberalism has outlawed serious thinking, but it is a necessity to any serious thinker to find someone with whom to compete intellectually—this is not something liberalism can offer anymore… Maybe three signs—the interesting men are leaving Silicon Valley.
Balaji is a dedicated transhumanist, he claims to believe that the purpose of technology is to achieve immortality. Of course, you might ask, give this man everything he wants, what then, what would there be left to do with technology? Well, read his essay—he claims value comes from scarcity: We’re only worried about everything because we’re running out of time, because death is imminent. This, certainly, is true, that all our concerns are tied up somehow with mortality, though in different ways… Of course, if value comes from scarcity, then overcoming scarcity means wiping out all value; we would still need things to administer immortality, but it wouldn’t be worth anything by reason of abundance, & immortality means abundance—the short time during which we are powerful is our greatest limit to getting everything we want. Gods are above necessity, or almost. So if we’re oriented by mortality to achieve self-protection, success would leave us purposeless: Nihilism, in short, would ensue. Now, maybe Balaji has never thought about these obvious problems, but then he’d be a fool—I wouldn’t call him a fool, so I assume he’s noticed the obvious: He must have noticed that, whether he believes it or not, it does seem technology is an immortality machine: We cannot say for what it is without specifying a need we have, which is a weakness power can fix. But if it is the case that our thinking is controlled by our problems & our ability to fix them, it follows that you can judge any man’s beliefs by his deeds, if he is not mad or silly, & Balaji is neither spending his life nor his money on learning biology. He spends his time figuring out crypto & other related technologies—he worships not the health of the body, but the Network as the new Body Politic. Balaji is a humanist.
Here’s an interview Balaji gave the other day, explaining his vision of history. Mankind lost God in the 19th c. & substituted the state, which turned out to be a much more bloodthirsty master, so in the 20th c. it was abandoned, too. In the 21st c., we’ll have the Network instead, i.e. digital souls, human machines. The question throughout has been, why not steal? The answer all the time was, because you don’t need to—but it was misunderstood when man mistook himself & thought only God or later the state was above need—man will finally know himself through the Network & only as the Network. Man cannot reasonably be expected to steal from himself. Listen to Balaji:
My high-level answer is that technology is the driving force of history. Technology favored centralization in the U.S. 1754-1947 (join or die in the French & Indian War, unified national government post-Civil War, railroads, telegraph, radio, television, movies, mass media in general, & mass production) & is now favoring decentralization from roughly 1947 to the present day (transistor, personal computer, internet, remote work, smartphone, cryptocurrency).
So technology has to have a unifying principle that brings together this contradiction between centralization & decentralization. Balaji is all on the side of interpreting centralization as a means toward decentralization. You may call this one of the contradictions of history that is resolved by the cunning of reason, following Hegel. The reason for this is obvious: We’re all human & we need each other, but we’re distinctively human in our thinking, & thinking is done by individuals, not by communities, so reasoning always must eventually lead to individuality. Further:
Many of the ideas on how to organize human society have been around forever, but technologies make them feasible & infeasible by turns. A political ideology that requires total centralized control may seem unstoppable when technology favors this & then may become untenable when innovation turns things in the direction of decentralization.
Thus, the unity of reason is saved, but at the price of a dangerous division between political science & natural science, institutions & technology! Balaji can bring about the unity of man in speech, but he does so through historical consciousness, which forces us to face a contradiction perhaps never before forced on people: Mankind has not hitherto had synchronicity. Consider the double meaning: The makeup is the structure of something, but then you can also make something up—an illusion! This problem cannot be fixed by philosophy, by coming up with ideas that as ideas cannot compel action, cannot make anything happen: It can only be fixed by bringing ideas in accordance with technology instead, on the way to a permanent alliance of thought & deed, the synchronicity of knowledge & making.
The implication here is that the machine is beyond good & evil. It is not morally neutral in the sense in which our silly liberalism claims to be—the people who talk about what the science shows; it is not morally coercive in the sense in which liberal Progressives claim to be—the people who demand obedience in accordance with the moral imperatives of victimhood; the machine is beyond science as now understood, because that understanding of science is merely part of the transition, its only purpose to create machines that will be able to be part of the future of mankind.
The full essay is twice as long, but it is only available to paying subscribers. This is the first in a series on God & Machine—next week’s essay is about Mark Zuckerberg’s proposed AR/VR revolution, an alternative vision of the Network.