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The new podcast Dystopia Now, hosted by comedian Kate Willett and philosopher Émile Torres, has been unveiling a disturbing new story from the tech world that comes straight out of The Matrix. It involves transhumanism, a tech-bro update to eugenics, in which billionaires can digitize their minds with AI, transcending humanity and achieving immortality.
If this sounds disturbing, just wait until you hear our full chat with Kate and Émile.
Useful Idiots: Can you define transhumanism?
Émile Torres: The key idea is this techno-utopian vision. And transhumanism is this ideology that says we ought to develop advanced technologies to radically re-engineer the human organism, ultimately creating a new and supposedly superior post-human species. Elon Musk is a transhumanist. His company Neuralink is all about merging our brains with AI. Mark Zuckerberg is a transhumanist. Peter Thiel has invested millions and millions of dollars into radical longevity research. The goal then would be to attain immortality.
Useful Idiots: Can you talk about network states?
Kate Willett: They wanted to have these little anarcho-capitalist communities. It was all about getting out of the United States to do this. But what seems to have changed recently is that a lot of these billionaire dudes seem to have decided that maybe the best way for them to realize their illiberal, anti-democratic vision of running the government more like a business is making the United States that versus leaving.
Curtis Yarvin talks about this idea he calls RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. And now we have DOGE, which is also a four-letter acronym for getting rid of the administrative state. It just seems like these dudes are making a lot of progress. Their previous vision was leaving somewhere and having these little tech utopias, network states. Now they're trying to do it here.
Émile Torres: DOGE seems to be RAGE in action.
Useful Idiots: What are some of the craziest, scariest ideologies, that come out of this movement?
Émile Torres: The one thing I would want people to know is that part of what it means for us to bring about utopia, to transition from our current human era to this paradisiacal post-human era, is for our species to be disempowered, marginalized, or eliminated. I think that at the heart of this ideology is a pro-extinctionist view.
They say once we create post-humans, our digital successors, then we should bow out. Because we're just going to be inferior beings that are using up valuable resources on Earth. So really, at the heart of this idea is this eschatological end times vision that we're going to transition from a biological world to a digital world. And our species is going to disappear.
Subscribe for the full interview with Kate and Émile where we discuss the pseudo-utopian autocratic book Abundance by the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, how older billionaires are cryogenically freezing themselves to be revived once the immortality AI is ready, why that tech may be ready a lot sooner than we think, and what the relationship is between transhumanism and Zionism.
Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Morning Joe Comes Out as a Bernie Bro
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