The Zany Zeitgeist of the Silicon Valley Cognitive Elite (Part 1)
A month or so ago a friend suggested that I experiment with ChatGPT by directing it to compose a poem with the instructions romantic, lyrical, surreal. I politely declined, explaining that I have no interest in AI poetry and am not inclined to put even minimal time into it. As if triggered by my friend’s suggestion, articles related to AI and the technophiles of Silicon Valley’s cognitive elite began appearing in magazines I read. The March issue of The Atlantic features a pair of complementary articles on the network state and techno-authoritarianism (Tiffany, Meet Me in the Eternal City; LaFrance, The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism). Along came Andrew Cockburn’s article The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem in the March Harper’s. The subtitle says it all: “How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future.”
Cockburn recounts the Pentagon’s decades-long history of throwing money at cutting-edge technology that failed miserably to live up to grandiose but ultimately false promises. A spectacular recent failure lay not at the Pentagon but at the feet of Israel’s vaunted security services.
Three months before Hamas attacked Israel, Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, announced that his agency had developed its own generative artificial intelligence platform—similar to ChatGPT—and that the technology had been incorporated quite naturally into the agency’s “interdiction machine,” assisting in decision-making “like a partner at the table, a co-pilot.” (Cockburn)
The “intelligence bureaucracies’ analyses and, by extension, the software that had informed them” led top brass to disregard the warnings of Israeli conscripts, mostly young women, manning security cameras along the border with Gaza. These conscripts “composed and presented a detailed report on Hamas’s preparations to breach the fence and take hostages, only to have their findings dismissed as ‘an imaginary scenario.’” On October 7 many of these young women paid with their lives for their superiors’ misplaced faith in their “interdiction machine.”
Cockburn recounts “the grand tradition” of high-tech weapons projects whose “ecstatic claims of prowess” are “coupled with a disregard for real-world experience.” They range from the Vietnam era’s Igloo White to more contemporary “netcentric warfare” failures with glossy names like Assault Breaker, Future Combat Systems, Shield AI, and the Secure Border Initiative Network, a Department of Homeland Security project “marketed as a ‘virtual fence’ equipped with computer-linked radar, cameras, and other surveillance sensors to detect intruders, which was canceled in 2011.”
The Igloo White operation began in the late sixties when “the Air Force deployed a vast array of sensors…designed to detect human activity by the sounds of marching feet, the smell of ammonia from urine, or the electronic sparks of engine ignitions.…[with the information relayed to] giant IBM computers housed in a secret base in Thailand.” The devious Vietnamese communists foiled the operation by faking data
with buckets of urine hung in trees off the trail, or herds of livestock steered down unused byways, which were then dutifully processed by the humming computers as enemy movements. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese forces in the south were well supplied. In 1972, they launched a powerful offensive using hundreds of tanks that went entirely undetected by Igloo White.
Hamas used comparably low-tech methods to deceive Israel’s AI platform.
Well aware of Israel’s intelligence methods, Hamas members fed their enemy the data that they wanted to hear, using informants they knew would report to the Israelis. They signaled that the ruling group inside Gaza was concentrating on improving the local economy by gaining access to the Israeli job market, and that Hamas had been deterred from action by Israel’s overwhelming military might.
The Pentagon “reportedly funds at least 686 AI projects, including up to $9 billion for a Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract awarded in 2022…to, per one Pentagon official, ‘turbocharge’ AI solutions.”
The money thrown at AI is directed to administrative as well as battlefield applications.
Gamechanger is designed to enable Pentagon employees to discover what their giant department actually does, including where its money goes. A press release from the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center from early 2022 that celebrates Gamechanger’s inauguration…quoted a senior Pentagon accountant’s excitement about “applying Gamechanger to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits.” Even so, the Pentagon failed to pass a financial audit in 2023, for the sixth year in a row.
Those audit failures began in 2017 when the Pentagon became the last federal agency to comply with legislation passed in the 1990s that required all federal agencies to undergo an independent financial audit. “Every other federal department has satisfied audit requirements since fiscal 2013, when the Department of Homeland Security had its first clean audit” (Chappell, The Pentagon Has Never). According to the Defense Department’s chief financial officer, “The Pentagon is striving for a ‘clean’ audit but that is still years away”(Stone, Pentagon fails). Pentagon leadership and members of Congress do not know where all the money flows. They know only that the Pentagon always needs more of it.
The tech aristocracy that loathes government eagerly mines these taxpayer-funded boondoggles. Techno-libertarian Peter Thiel was, according to his biographer, determined “to bring the military-industrial complex back to Silicon Valley, with his own companies at its very center” (Cockburn). Thiel seems to have succeeded, not admirably by any perspective save that of tech nobility, but he succeeded.
The same names swirl through the articles cited above and others on related topics. Some are familiar: Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. They share the conviction that their immense wealth is evidence of superior intelligence, technology is always good, more technology is always better, and there is no problem that cannot be solved with technology. The only thing that stands in the way is government with its pesky rules and regulation. And taxation.
Many began as programmers, software engineers, and tech entrepreneurs who hit on platforms that made them fabulously wealthy before moving on to become venture capitalists. Crypto-currency grifters are prominent. Thiel was a cofounder of PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Barton Gellman’s description of him in an Atlantic article last November fits any number of these characters:
He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity. He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine. He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large. (Peter Thiel):
“More than anything,” Gellman writes, “he longs to live forever. Thiel does not believe death is inevitable.” This is not uncommon in his circle. “Longevity maximalists” believe that “death is an option, not an inevitability” and envision a network state where they will be “free to pursue a goal of longer, healthier lives outside the reach of U.S. regulation and its byzantine restrictions on medical experimentation. (Outside the reach of the U.S. tax code, too.)” (Tiffany).
Balaji Srinivasan is a bitcoin guy who is the foremost theorist of the network state. Thus far I have only skimmed a few sections of Srinivasan’s self-published book The Network State, so rely here on secondary sources for the most part. His “complex” definition of the network state goes like this:
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
Kaitlyn Tiffany writes that this
sounds a lot like the Patchwork concept proposed by Curtis Yarvin, a tech-world personality who is regarded as the father of neo-reactionary thought.
The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move.
Yarvin is “an explicitly antidemocratic writer who calls for a strong-armed leader to govern the United States as a monarch” (Gellman) and, it turns out, a friend of Peter Thiel.
Srinivasan’s network state
starts with an online community of like-minded people, then moves into the offline world by crowdfunding the purchase of land…There isn’t necessarily any voting; the best way to vote is by either staying put or “exiting” for another network state you like better. (Tiffany)
Montenegro, Costa Rica, and Nigeria are some of the places “where plans are being hatched.” Some are envisioned as start-ups “run like businesses.” In others, “a city operator and a small governing board would make every important decision.”
Not much attention is given to ordinary people who would perform tasks like housekeeping and maintenance for mansions and estates or preparing and serving food when the cognitive elite elect to dine out or all the other work done by ordinary people who are presumably not cognitively elite. Would they be citizens? Have rights?
An urban planner Tiffany met at Zuzalu, “part retreat and part conference…also a dry run for the more permanent relocation of tech-industry digital nomads to different parts of the world where they could start societies and design them to their own liking,” told her that he is not opposed to “the general premise of new urban centers” but thought that in practice “it would be a dystopian nightmare.” He went on to describe the resort where Zuzalu was held and the apartment-villas behind it as a Potemkin city. “You couldn’t have a business. You couldn’t get your car fixed.”
Marc Andreessen cofounded the web browser firm Netscape back in the long ago time of the 1990s and is now a venture capitalist and author of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Andreessen’s manifesto is a sequence of mostly one-sentence declarations that express the ethos of the cognitive elite. Parts of it, notably the section on technological values, could have been lifted from the Italian futurist and fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909) with its paeans to ambition, aggression, relentlessness, strength. Marinetti is quoted with the change of a single word in a section with the title “Becoming Technological Supermen”: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” In Andreessen’s version, it is technology, not poetry, that must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown.
Andreessen writes that “the only perpetual source of growth is technology” and “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” Techno-optimists are free-market buccaneers who exhort us to believe that technology and the market will make “everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant” as “the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation…spirals continuously upward.”
There is a bizarre tribute to Andy Warhol:
We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot.
Coke, the browser, smartphone, chatbot. Yes, it is all good.
Andreessen is not above engaging in the red-baiting that never seems to go out of fashion out on the right wing. A list of the enemies of techno-optimism includes “tech ethics,” “existential risk,” “risk management,” “sustainability,” “social responsibility,” “the limits of growth,” and so on. These are tools of a “demoralization campaign…based on bad ideas of the past—zombie ideas, many derived from Communism.” Elsewhere Andreessen equates central planning, socialism, and communism with “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview.” These bad ideas are lumped together under the “deeply immoral” Precautionary Principle,
which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
Andreessen’s claim that techno-optimists are not necessarily either right- or left-wing is disingenuous. Decidedly right-wing figures dominate the roll call of techno-optimism’s patron saints, the likes of Adam Smith, Andy Warhol, Milton Friedman, David Friedman (son of Milton), Marinetti, Friedrich Hayak, George Gilder, Ludwig von Mises, and the Ayn Rand character John Galt (Atlas Shrugged) although, surprisingly, not Rand herself. Nietzsche is also claimed as a patron saint. Andreessen’s understanding of him, as of much else, might just be a bit shallow. In fairness, I should reread Nietzsche myself.
These people of immense wealth and presumably high IQ sound like they are twelve years old and got their ideas from science fiction I read when I was twelve. It seems that some of them did, as Barton Gellman reports:
Over and over, Thiel has voiced his discontent with what’s become of the grand dreams of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “We’d have colonies on the moon, you’d have robots, you’d have flying cars, you’d have cities in the ocean, under the ocean…You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”
Thiel was a co-publisher of a 2005 manifesto with the bitter lament that “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” One can see why they would be disgruntled.
to be continued
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
References and Related Reading
Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, October 16, 2023
Bill Chappell, The Pentagon Has Never Passed An Audit. Some Senators Want To Change That, NPR, May 19, 2021
Andrew Cockburn, The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem: How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future, Harper’s, March 2024
Barton Gellman, Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break from Democracy, The Atlantic, November 9, 2023
Adrienne LaFrance, The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism, The Atlantic, March 2024
Antonio García Martínex, To Live and Die for the Network State, Tablet, August 3, 2022
Noah Rawlings, An American Education: Notes from UATX, The New Inquiry, February 19, 2024
Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, self-published, 2022
Mike Stone, Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row, Reuters, November 15, 2023
Kaitlyn Tiffany, Meet Me in the Eternal City, The Atlantic, March 2024
Jeffrey Toobin, Circuit Breakers, The New York Review of Books, March 7, 2024