Ted Gioia isn’t impressed with the changes we’ve seen over the years among the Silicon Valley leadership:
Yes, I should have been alarmed when this cult-ish ideology took off in Silicon Valley — where the goal had previously been incremental progress (Moore’s law and all that) and not being evil.
When I first came to Silicon Valley at age 17, the two leading technologists in the region were named William Hewlett and David Packard. They used their extra cash to fund schools, museums, and hospitals — both my children were born at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital — not immortality machines, or rockets to Mars, or a dystopian Internet of brains, or worshipping at the Church of the Singularity.
Tech leaders were built differently back then. When famous historian Arnold Toynbee visited Stanford in 1963, he had a chance encounter with William Hewlett. Afterwards Toynbee marveled over his new acquaintance, declaring: “What an amazing fellow. He has more knowledge of history than many historians.”
In other words, Bill Hewlett had more wisdom than ego. He invested in the community where he lived — not the Red Planet. Instead of promulgating social engineering schemes, Hewlett and Packard built a new engineering school at their alma mater, and named it after their favorite teacher.
They wouldn’t recognize Silicon Valley today. The FM-2030s are now in charge.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invested in engineering, not social engineering
Another warning sign came when Google hired cult-ish tech guru Ray Kurzweil — a man who had once created a reasonable music keyboard that even Stevie Wonder used.
But Kurzweil went on to write starry-eyed books of utopian tech worship which come straight out of the weird religion playbook (The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity is Near, etc.)
What does tech look like when it gets turned into a religion? Kurzweil summed it up when asked if there is a God. His response: “Not yet.”
In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team.
I note that, when Forbes revisited Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, they found that almost every one went wrong.
So what does he do?
Kurzweil follows up his book The Singularity is Near with a new book entitled The Singularity is Nearer. Give the man credit for hubris. This is exactly what religious cults do when their predicted Rapture doesn’t occur.
They just change the date on the calendar — Utopia has been delayed for another 12 months.
But, of course, Utopia is always delayed another 12 months. Meanwhile the cult leaders can do a lot of damage while preparing for the Rapture.
And despite the techno-elite’s apparent endless quest for perfection in their own lives, the enshittification of the technology they deliver to us proles continues relentlessly:
Here’s a curious fact. The more they brag about their utopias, the worse their products and services get.
Even the word upgrade is now a joke — whenever a tech company promises it, you can bet it will be a downgrade in your experience. That’s not just my view, but overwhelmingly supported by survey respondents.
For the first time since the dawn of the Renaissance, innovation is now feared by the vast majority of people. And the tech leaders, once admired and emulated, now rank among the least trustworthy people in the world.
It was different when Linus Pauling was peddling his horse pills — he eventually set up shop in Big Sur, far south of the tech industry, in order to find a hospitable home for his wackiest ideas.
Nowadays, Big Sur thinking has come to the Valley.
And when you set up cults inside the largest corporations in the history of the world, we are all endangered.
Just imagine if Linus Pauling had enjoyed the power to force everybody to take his huge vitamin doses. Just imagine if Bill Shockley had possessed the authority to impose his racist eugenics theories on the populace.
It’s scary to think of. But they couldn’t do it, because they didn’t have billions of dollars, and run trillion-dollar companies with politicians at their beck and call.
But the current cultists include the wealthiest people in the world, and they are absolutely using their immense power to set rules for the rest of us. If you rely on Apple or Google or some other huge web behemoth — and who doesn’t? — you can’t avoid this constant, bullying manipulation.
The cult is in charge. And it’s like we’re all locked into an EST training sessions — nobody gets to leave even for bathroom breaks.
There’s now overwhelming evidence of how destructive the new tech can be. Just look at the metrics. The more people are plugged in, the higher are their rates of depression, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, mental illness, and other alarming indicators.
If this is what the tech cults have already delivered, do we really want to give them another 12 months? Do you really want to wait until they deliver the Rapture?
