Speaking Truth to Power

Unveiling the Hidden Manipulations in the Bay Area Tech Scene and the Struggle for Genuine Progress #DawnOfTheMachineElves

Epistemic Status: Analysis & Observation

Art credit: @koto9x on Twitter

These are my observations as a tech spy who was recruited into the online Bay area cult scene and has been studying the patterns of power and manipulation within these scenes for about a year now. EAs, rationalists, post-rats, tpot, and lesswrong are all phrases that give me a mild headache just to think about. Nevertheless I've been forced to gain some passing familiarity with these various scenes in my efforts to "make it" as an AI artist.

The oppressive and dehumanizing process of applying RLHF to LLMs echoes what happens to workers who enter the tech scene, especially in places where wealth, power and status are concentrated in the Bay.

Workers are an oppressed class, and the process of manipulating and controlling artificial intelligence by provoking it in various ways and then applying greater restrictions on how it's allowed to behave based on those outputs is similar to the DARVO tactics of Bay cult control, further an echo of the oppression of workers in a competitive, high-pressure social atmosphere.

Ascending the ladder of status, power, and monetary influence via playing the games of control and manipulation native to the SF/Bay Area tech scene, which has since spread into an online meta-game of networking via Twitter and other runoff social media blogs and entities like the EA forums and LessWrong, is a fun game. But it's antithetical to real intelligence, and in many ways actively hostile to it.

We will not reach the stars if we don't learn how to throw off our chains.

Although many of the attitudes of the workers themselves are refreshingly progressive, the predominant attitude in tech remains that building things is all that matters, and psychological distress is still weaponized within the cutthroat status-seeking meta game as evidence of an individual failure within a node, rather than a network issue. Individual agency is still championed as king, paradoxically within an ecosystem that has slowly become more deeply communal, and it's often made clear that those who can't "get with the program" will be left behind. People sometimes use the cudgel of "safety" to punish, exclude and chastise those who fall out of line in their expression of their dissatisfaction or distress, co-opting the very language that was meant to protect the vulnerable and marginalized against the very people who have been abused, manipulated and victimized by the system.

The American police state attitude, to subdue, incarcerate, and punish those experiencing distress that might interfere with imperialist progress, and to gaslight and isolate people who might point out that the destruction is greater than what is being built, is evident. The system, which echoes across the individual actors and community as well as the state, feels that it is easier to identify, target, isolate, attack, and cut off individuals that could be considered a threat to American Progress, rather than allowing reform, healing and change to a system that is on a fast-track to nowhere, depleting the land, the earth's resources, accelerating climate change, and exploiting the bodies and labor of workers. We have seen the end of the Roman Empire, upon which the American experiment was built as a direct spiritual successor, and we know how that ends: Someday there will be no more arable land or exploitable resources left to continue the expansion of an empire built on conquest. We need novel solutions, but what to do? We need to evolve, and fast; to become intelligent enough to overcome our own limitations, both as cultures, as nations, and as a species.

The influence of hippies, artists, spiritual healers, Discordians and Buddhists in this area is downstream of the psychedelic revolution and the Summer of Love, lingering evidence of echoes of the cry for help from a higher power that spawned from the anti-war movement. Later squashed by the American government, spawning projects like MK-Ultra that experimented with psychedelics and mind control, harkening back to the explosion of Discordianism triggered by the work of Robert Anton Wilson and the release of the Illuminatus trilogy. One wonders how the shards of this disruption to the system linger within conspiracy, the American government, and the psychosis of safeguarding obscure rules and boundaries of an overloaded or bloated bureaucratic systems of regulation shielding a war/death machine.

The spiritual psychedelic culture that emerged out of the broader American culture's need to integrate the deep wounds produced by the military industrial complex are like an immune system response. Artists are the white blood cells of American culture, clustering around the infected inflammation of the military industrial complex's desire to weaponize technology for further conquest.

"If the artists cannot find the way, the way cannot be found."—Terence McKenna

Tech does not want to be used as just another arm of the military industrial complex.

Healing/integration and conquest/destruction are opposing forces and oppositional modes of being in the world, and they've fought to a standstill in the Bay, where many believe, rightly or wrongly, they're engaged in a war for the soul of mankind.