Tech plutocrats are the high-budget expression of the “everyone is twelve now” theory. You wanna go to Mars? Of course you do, you’re twelve. You think you can merge your consciousness with machinery and unlock the key to immortality? Hell yeah my twelve year-old homie. You’re gonna invent an Artificial Superintelligence God who will solve all our problems? Bless your twelve year-old heart.
Their visions for the future of humanity are never particularly wise or intelligent. It’s just a bunch of drugged-up rich guys using their vast fortunes to chart a course for our species that would sound totally awesome to the average preadolescent boy.
You ever hear about Jeff Bezos’ vision for our future? He brings it up once in a while. He wants to ship most of humanity offworld and have us all living in these giant spinning space tubes called O’Neill cylinders while only a few lucky individuals get to remain on humanity’s home planet. It’s true, look it up.
This is the best these freaks can come up with. Transhumanism. Space colonization. Virtual reality. ASI. Immortality. These are all visions which revolve around escape. Escaping from the human condition. Escaping from our planet. Escaping from reality. Running, running, running away in a mad scramble to get anywhere but here.
These aren’t positive visions for the future, they’re signs of deep psychological immaturity. They’re the symptoms of an inability to be with what is. Whenever you hear these guys bloviating about transcending our humanity or colonizing space they’re just telling you they’ve got a lot of unresolved early childhood trauma which led them to construct an entire personality around avoidance and restlessness.
They don’t know how to be at peace. Not with themselves, and not with the world. These are very emotionally primitive individuals. They are not wise. They are not kind. They are not happy. They are not even especially smart. They just have a particular kind of cleverness which has enabled them to succeed as parasitic middle men siphoning wealth off of other people’s labor in the specific type of dystopia we happen to live in.
And yet these are the men we’re allowing to rule our world. These are the people to whom we have handed the steering wheel of human destiny. A bunch of emotionally stunted manchilds who are drowning in a nonstop internal deluge of shame and inadequacy and unresolved mommy issues.
These are the men who have become our kings, because capitalism elevates whoever is wounded enough to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top.
You trust these guys to shepherd us into a healthy world? They can’t even be here now, at peace in their own skins. Mainstream culture worships these people because they have a lot of money, but they’re walking train wrecks.
This isn’t going to cut it. We can’t led these infantile narcissists lead humanity into the future. We’ve got to create a better system for ourselves.
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Feature image by Daniel Oberhaus — Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99823440
