Silicon Valley has always been a dull hybrid of political libertarianism and woo-woo New Age practices. Nothing reveals this better than Douglas Rushkoff’s recent insights about the misanthropic stink emanating from deep within the boardrooms of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and the rest.
It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.
It was especially rich to learn that the meeting place for this origin story was Esalen, that historied nexus of Northern California mysticism. Leaving aside how it seems more obvious by the day that everything wrong with the world somehow originated from Russia, Rushkoff here is drawing from his new book, Team Human, to preview a fascinating thesis: that because the richest and most powerful people in the world fear death just like the rest of us, they are driven by visions of the future that include uploading human consciousness to a robot and living forever zooming through the reaches of the cosmos.
With dreams like that, where humanity itself is a problem to be “fixed,” it’s not as difficult to understand why these companies see present-day humans (“users” or “consumers”) as nothing more than programmable machines, to be leveraged and productized to further the agenda of a techno-utopian death cult.
As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.
In their ambition to be among the class of individuals who somehow get to transcend this messy biological existence into a blissful Forever beyond our wildest imaginations, the tech business leaders driving the global economy and fate of the world will do whatever it takes to be sure they are not among those — that is, the rest of us — who get left behind. As in other fundamentalist faiths, any price or business practice is justified if it reflects or advances the vision of a technological future that has infected their minds.