Moya Lothian-McLean

Tech visionaries are being brought down to earth

The new gods are running into a bit of trouble. From the soap opera playing out at Twitter HQ , the too-big-to-fail bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency space, to mass tech layoffs, the past month has seen headlines declaring a litany of woes facing the bullish tech boyos in Silicon Valley and beyond. Coverage of Elon Musk’s escapades and the interest in the FTX collapse go well beyond what you’d expect from a business story. This fixation has little to do with an interest in software engineering; rather it is the personalities who inhabit these spaces, and the philosophies propelling them. What is their end goal, we wonder. What drives them? It is easy to assume that money is all that motivates the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Musk and Jeff Bezos. Except, when you examine their mindsets, it’s clear that cash is not the whole story.

The concept of “effective altruism” has had its day in court after FTX, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced it was short of $8bn and would be filing for bankruptcy. As the dust – and fraud allegations – settle, the personal guiding principles of FTX’s millennial chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, have come to the fore. Bankman-Fried ostensibly was driven into crypto by an adherence to the “effective altruism” movement. Originally espousing giving as much targeted time and money to philanthropy as possible, EA has been morphed by its most prominent practitioners into getting very, very rich and then spending that money on projects that better the human race: it’s utilitarianism with a god complex.

Since Bankman-Fried’s spectacular fall from grace, it seems this doctrine may be doomed to the same downward spiral as its most famous disciple. It’s hard to argue that you possess the best instincts to improve humanity’s prospects when you can’t even keep your own affairs – or billions in customer funds – in order.

Then there was the allegation last month by the Insider journalist Julia Black that Musk, along with other billionaires, appear to be engaged in their own personal eugenics programme via a movement called “pronatalism”. Black writes that the ideology – centred on having children to reverse falling birthrates in European countries, and prevent a predicted population collapse – is “taking hold in wealthy tech and venturecapitalist circles”.

Musk has championed pronatalist ideas publicly. Privately he is, in his own words, “doing my part”; he has 10 children known to the public. But the ideas go beyond Musk; the world’s richest and most powerful people see it as their duty, Black claims, to “replicate themselves as many times as possible”.

Black’s subjects cite effective altruism, longtermism (prioritising the distant future over the concerns of today) and transhumanism (the evolution of humanity beyond current limitations via tech), as complementary philosophies. The concept of legacy is key to understanding tech pioneers. As one interviewee tells Black: “The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children.” Given that Musk’s “genius” business record is one of multiple nearbankruptcies before he even arrived at Twitter, this rather undermines the theory that the future will be safe only if populated by mini-Musks.

These companies believe that in order to make visions a reality, they require total control of the landscape around them. In his 2017 book World Without Mind, Franklin Foer wrote that Facebook – now Meta – was founded on a belief that sharing every facet of our lives will result in social good. The metaverse, in which we don’t just share our lives on social media but conduct them within it, is this idea’s logical conclusion. It has already lost the company $9.4bn.

Silicon Valley and its outposts are dominated not only by the pursuit of growth. The underlying raison d’etre tying these tech titans together is their fervour for enacting their own personal outlooks in supposed service of the wider world. To do this, they must remake society in their image, platform by integrated platform.

When we view these monoliths as businesses like any other, or allow them to claim global monopolies, we fail to realise that they are competing for more than our attention or our cash: they are competing for the right to dictate what our societies look like. So it matters a great deal when that vision falters, or fails altogether. It’s the emperors slowly shedding their clothes. We are watching would-be gods shrink back to being men once more