Techno-Authoritarianism Part Two: Shockley, Silicon Valley, and TESCREAL
Press enter or click to view image in full sizeStill from the film Gattaca (1997).Please note: this is part two of a multipart series of essays on techno-authoritarianism. You can read part one here.Silicon Valley tech companies vying for defense contracts is not new. Silicon Valley has long been linked to the military-industrial complex. The development of semiconductor, microwave electronics, missile, and satellite technologies in Silicon Valley not only shaped the region’s economy but also influenced manufacturing methods.¹ Many attribute the creation of modern Silicon Valley to William Shockley, Jr., a Bell Labs alumnus and the inventor of the junction transistor.² Shockley worked during WWII on the development of self-guided bomb and missile systems, research centered on a novel approach to guidance which comprised an ordinance with an embedded system that could compare stored images on a roll of film with the real-time input from its camera, allowing the system to steer the bomb or missile via a feedback loop.² Work on this control system informed much of Shockley’s subsequent work in automation, significantly inspired by Norbert Wiener’s publication of Cybernetics (1948).Although a brilliant engineer, William Shockley, Jr. was a notorious racist, so obsessed with race and IQ that he took a position at Stanford after failing in business, and there he turned the focus of his research entirely toward scientifically proving white supremacy.³ Shockley later parlayed his notoriety as a Nobel prize winner (physics, 1956) into media appearances and opportunities to give “expert” testimony, which he used to expound racist ideas masquerading as science. In 1970, Shockley testified before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Education, informing them that it was pointless to pursue further any progressive education initiatives in public schools due to the differences in intelligence between the white and black races, to which the mainstream media clambered to give Shockley newer and bigger pulpits from which to preach his white supremacy.³Eugenics and scientific racism are likewise not new concepts in Silicon Valley, and Shockley was hardly an outlier; these views were promoted by industry and academia alike. Stanford University established an early bionomics lab, whose goal was to understand the supposed “great men” society produces and to explain the inferiority of “degenerate” races.³ This brand of scientific racism fit neatly into existing narratives about whiteness, the American West, and Manifest Destiny:Without new leadership, the species would surely degenerate; the fate of humanity hung in the balance. The implicit Goldilocks solution was white America, particularly in the West, where genius wasn’t neurotic or tragic but unalloyed in the achievements of strong, well-rounded Anglo-Saxon settler men.³One of the most infamous products of Stanford’s bionomics group was the intelligence quotient (IQ) test, the most prominent of which is the Stanford-Binet test, peddled by a Stanford School of Education researcher named Lewis Terman, who was captivated as a child by a book on phrenology.³ Despite having little scientific efficacy, Terman’s IQ tests and the achievement tests he subsequently developed made him wealthy and earned him high-level appointments, such as president of the American Psychological Association, from which he could further promote his search for “genius” through eugenicist testing methods.³As the dominant providers of education technology, the techno-authoritarians’ thirst for wealth, power, and political favor provides a wealth of troubling contradictions that educators and policymakers must resolve. Their ongoing quest to supplant the likes of Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin as the principal defense contractors to the United States is deeply concerning, given a set of ideologies centered on the second wave of modern eugenics that animate the techno-authoritarian’s actions. As such, it is impossible to understand the negative impact on humanity of the continued use of the tools the techno-authoritarians control without thoroughly examining the underlying belief systems they espouse and fund with billions of dollars. In contrast to the eugenicist beliefs of Shockley, which are themselves racist and horrific, the philosophical underpinnings of today’s Silicon Valley CEOs and VC heavyweights are eugenicist and profoundly hostile to humanity, focused on fantastical ends of the world, simultaneously longing for and fearing the extinction of humanity.In contrast to first wave eugenics, which focused on “positive” eugenics (e.g., encouraging groups with desirable traits to have offspring) and “negative” eugenics (e.g., restrictive immigration or forced sterilization programs), second wave eugenics has a clear techno-solutionist bent: “Whereas first-wave eugenicists strove to improve the ‘human stock’ by altering society-wide patterns of reproduction, a process that would require many generations to work, second-wave eugenics arose in response to new technological possibilities associated with genetic engineering and biotechnology”.⁴ Researching the underlying ideologies behind the race to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres coined a single neologism that encapsulates these ideologies, known as TESCREAL.⁴ Gebru and Torres refer to this grouping as the “TESCREAL Bundle,” which encompasses Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.⁴ Gebru and Torres’ work is crucial for researchers, educators, and policymakers laboring to understand the animating philosophies of the techno-authoritarians of Silicon Valley, grouping a diverse yet related set of beliefs under a single neologism.Transhumanists and Extropianists seek to develop humanity into new and better forms through enhancement.⁴Although the provenance of the term “transhumanism” is still in question, it is widely attributed to English biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley (older brother of Aldous), who advocated a nihilistic techno-revolution that “will begin by destroying the ideas and the institutions that stand in the way of our realizing our possibilities.”⁵ Peter Thiel advocates for a post-human existence for those who can afford it and has invested heavily in embryo screening/selection startups, as well as longevity research.⁵ Jeet Heer points to Thiel’s frustration with perceived stagnation in innovation in Western societies and the lack of return on investment in his enormous support of Donald Trump, leading to his transhumanist desire to secede from society, humanity, and the planet:Thiel has long been an advocate of various post-human technological solutions that will allow him and his fellow plutocrats to free themselves from the stagnant mass of humanity: cryonics (to overcome death), sea-steading (to create sea-board libertarian utopias), colonizing Mars, and artificial intelligence.⁶The Extropian Movement was the first organized group of modern transhumanists, founded by Max More and T.O. Morrow in 1988, gathered under the term “extropy,” which More defined as “the extent of a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement.”⁴Made famous by computer scientist Ray Kurzweil and, to a lesser extent, AGI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, Singularitarianism is an ideology that simultaneously yearns for and fears an always-on-the-horizon event known as the technological singularity.⁴ This singularity has alternately been described as the moment when machine intelligence eclipses human intelligence, leading to a self-replicating artificial superintelligence beyond human control, and as a calamitous conjuncture caused by the rapidity of technological progress.⁴ Regardless of which conception of the singularity one prescribes to, Gebru and Torres note that the Singularitarianists are “confident that it will supposedly constitute a transformative moment in human history, with the resulting superintelligence(s) enabling us to become posthuman and colonize space.”⁴For Cosmists like Ben Goertzel, founder of the transhumanist research organization singularitynet.io, a cyborgian near-future in which humans merge with technology leads neatly to the ultimate goal of uploading our consciousness to digital immortality, where humanity can “leave biology behind”.⁴ SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, ostensibly fearful of humanity’s extinctionthrough a third world war, insists that a Cosmist approach is the only path to human colonization on a highly inhospitable and deadly planet like Mars.⁷ According to the mission statement of Musk’s brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, the goal is to “restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today, and to unlock human potential tomorrow”.⁸ While a brain-computer interface, such as those sold by Neuralink, could provide medical benefits to some who need it, a host of ethical considerations abound; what guarantees of privacy can those with Neuralink implants expect, and how can they protect themselves from instances of hacking researchers call “brainjacking”?⁸Rationalists arose in the 2000s around the blog LessWrong (founded by Yudkowsky), where members gather to celebrate reasoning and neo-Positivism in their quest to steer AI development in a direction that benefits humanity.⁴ The Rationalists movement overlaps considerably with the Effective Altruism movement (the E and A in TESCREAL, discussed next). Their members, such as Jaan Tallinn, the creator of Skype, and Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that build AI and work to make it safe for people.⁹ The Rationalists gather in a compound called LightHaven, a group of buildings occupying a full city block in San Francisco, to network and discuss Yudkowsky’s collection of essays, known as The Sequences, which for them serves as both a manual for proper living and a liturgical text.⁹ Perhaps the most infamous Rationalist is fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who was convicted in 2024 for stealing $8 billion from his customers.⁹Followers of the Effective Altruism movement tend to focus on the eternal future, rather than funneling money and resources into solving or mitigating present-day issues, effectively abandoning their founding principle of eradicating global poverty.⁴ In that vein, one of their central founders and thinkers, Nick Bostrom, imagines a post-human universe in which planet-sized computers host 10⁵⁸ virtual people occupying the entire accessible universe.⁴ Bostrom, like many Effective Altruists, fears a planet-wide cataclysm that ends humanity once and for all — they frequently name a rogue AGI as the most likely destroyer of our world.¹⁰ OpenAI, whose original mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” was founded and initially funded by a group of Effective Altruist techno-authoritarians, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.¹⁰Longtermists, like Effective Altruists, focus on solving the hypothetical problems of the future rather than the real problems of our present. Echoing Huxley’s transhuman visions of a post-human future, Longtermism holds that the development of a super AGI is the most crucial step in achieving what they see as humanity’s potential.⁴ One of the movement’s primary philosophers, William MacAskill, considers the work on behalf of the trillions of potential future humans the next stage in the civil rights movement, but shows little regard for the welfare of those in the present.¹¹ Indeed, Longtermists like MacAskill think individuals like themselves should not be taxed at all, leaving the rich elite to donate to causes working on behalf of potential people and little, if anything, for social services to aid actual people.¹¹ Techno-authoritarians, including Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have adopted Longtermism; Musk noted that the ideology is “a close match for my philosophy” and has donated billions of dollars to ensure Longtermist principles reach other like-minded elites.¹¹Lest anyone glean from the above that TESCREAL is merely the domain of a few racist philosophers operating at the periphery of influence, Gebru and Torres list many techno-authoritarian adherents, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jaan Tallinn, Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz, Vitalik Buterin, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Marc Andreessen.⁴ As such, TESCREAL is a convenient and powerful encapsulation of the varied, yet often interrelated ideologies that dominate Silicon Valley and underlie the actions of the techno-authoritarians largely centered there. Gebru and Torres note that the throughline of TESCREAL ideologies is profoundly eschatological, manifesting as both utopian and apocalyptic, similar to Christianity and many other religions.⁴ This paradoxical duality between paradise and doom is prominently centered on AGI, which helps explain the simultaneous quest to develop AGI while maneuvering through financial and political means to control its development.The racist and discriminatory belief systems of the central minds behind TESCREAL ideologies are well known: Bostrom declared on a listserv that “Blacks are more stupid than whites,” before using the N-word; the same year, Yudkowsky wrote that “Superintelligent robots = Aryans, humans = Jews. The only thing preventing this is sufficiently intelligent robots”.¹² The followers of TESCREAL ideologies share common cause and connections with many scientific racists and anti-statist neoliberals. For example, Bostrom and other proponents of TESCREAL ideologies have either cited or expressed public support for scientific racists like Charley Murray, who occupies the F. A. Hayek Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.⁴ Murray’s most famous work is The Bell Curve (1994), in which the authors attempt to prove an intelligence gap between races empirically and argue that this supposed gap invalidates the viability of social programs.The techno-authoritarians of Silicon Valley are obsessed with many forms of exit: a utopia for the ultra-wealthy (and those they deem worthy) on Mars; private city-states freed from democracy and ruled by the ultra-wealthy; a collapse of the current AI bubble through a massive government bailout. But the ultimate exit is from their own humanity. Rather than invest in technologies and social programs that would help us become more deeply human, tech CEOs like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Larry Page dream of sacrificing all of us to their coming machine god and transferring themselves into planet-sized computer servers to live forever.¹³The consequences for the rest of us are dire.***Next: In the following piece, I’ll detail the anti-democratic philosophies espoused by the techno-authoritarians, a super-charged dystopian neoliberalism that merges political science, sci-fi, meme culture, and trolling.(1) Heinrich, T. (2002). Cold war armory: military contracting in Silicon Valley. Enterprise & Society, 3(2), 247–284.(2) Brock, D. C. (2024, August 15). How William Shockley’s Robot Dream helped launch Silicon Valley. IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-william-shockleys-robot-dream-helped-launch-silicon-valley(3) Harris, M. (2023). Palo Alto: A history of California, capitalism, and the world. Hachette UK.(4) Gebru, T., & Torres, É. P. (2024). The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. First Monday.(5) Ripatrazone, N. (2025, July 28). Peter Thiel just accidentally made a chilling admission. Five decades ago, one man saw it coming. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/technology/2025/07/ai-artificial-intelligence-peter-thiel-dangerous-marshall-mcluhan.html.(6) Heer, J. (2025, June 30). The billionaires are abandoning humanity. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/peter-thiel-billionaires-abandoning-humanity/.(7) Cohen, E., & Spector, S. (2022). Comparative visions of cosmic expansion: implications for sustainability. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 30(9), 2207–2222.(8) Gordon, E. C., & Seth, A. K. (2024). Ethical considerations for the use of brain–computer interfaces for cognitive enhancement. PLoS biology, 22(10), e3002899.(9) Metz, C. (2025, August 4). The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion. The New York Times. Retrieved August 20, 2025, from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/rationalists-ai-lighthaven.html.(10) Gebru, T. (2022, November 30). Effective altruism is pushing a dangerous brand of ‘AI safety.’ WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence-sam-bankman-fried/.(11) Marx, P. (2023, October 12). Elon Musk’s useful philosopher. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/11/elon-musk-william-macaskill-useful-philosopher.(12) Torres, Émile P. (2023). “Nick Bostrom, longtermism, and the eternal return of eugenics,” Truthdig (23 January), at https://www.truthdig.com/articles/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-.(13) Torres, Émile P. (2025, July 11). Digital eugenics and the extinction of humanity. Tech Policy Press. https://www.techpolicy.press/digital-eugenics-and-the-extinction-of-humanity/
已Opublikowany: 2026-01-21 17:41:00
źródło: medium.com
