Conspiracy Theories, Left Futurism, and the Attack on TESCREAL
Some critics have decided futurist philosophies and their advocates are bound together in a toxic, reactionary bundle, promoted by a cabal of Silicon Valley elites. This style of conspiracy analysis has a long history and is always a misleading way to understand the world. We need a Left futurism that can address the flaws of these philosophies and frame a liberatory vision.
by Eli Sennesh and J. Hughes
In 2019 Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges. Two weeks later he was found dead in his cell. In the wake of Epstein’s arrest and suspicious death, stories swirled about his arranging the rape of underage victims for a network of wealthy men. People who had associated with Epstein included Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Harvey Weinstein.
Epstein’s story emerged as the far right QAnon conspiracy theory subculture was surging. A central claim of the QAnon conspiracy is that there is a secret network of rich pedophile Satanists running the Democratic Party and other institutions. Notwithstanding Trump and Murdoch’s associations with Epstein, Epstein’s story fed the QAnon culture and underlined a difficult issue for the reality-based community: elite conspiracies do exist, even if they are not as extensive or successful as imagined, or help us understand the actual drivers of politics. Wealthy people do hang out together and use their wealth to do bad things.
Epstein was also revealed to have been a committed transhumanist, cryonicist and eugenicist, at least insofar as he wanted to father a lot of children. He donated to transhumanist organizations, met with many prominent scientists to proffer funding for research in genetics and artificial intelligence, and helped found Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He feted renowned scientists at his Manhattan mansion and flew them to his private island for retreats.
For QAnon Epstein’s connections to transhumanism and eugenics ticked a conspiracy bingo square, linking these ideas to Satanism, pedophilia and the Powers That Be. Transhumanism had already been on the far right conspiracy radar for decades, suspected of helping Lucifer build human-angel hybrids for the End Times.
More notable has been the spread of conspiracy theories about futurist ideas on the Left. As transhumanists Peter Thiel and Elon Musk became powerful backers of MAGA fascism, the nexus of ideas swirling in Silicon Valley have come into focus for left-wing conspiracy theorists. These new left conspiracists cast all futurist philosophies together under the acronym of TESCREAL, linked in their minds to eugenics and racism. Again, there is a web of facts underlying their fantasies, just as Epstein was confirmatory for QAnon. But the conspiracy style of argumentation is bad intellectual history and bad politics.
The Conspiratorial Style of Analysis
Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum is an excellent introduction to the logic of conspiracy theories. The story involves a group of intellectuals who create an elaborate conspiracy theory as a form of intellectual game-playing. They weave together various historical and esoteric references, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated events and symbols. The assumption that a hidden cabal is trying to suppress the truth obliges them to piece together weakly tied links between people, ideas and events, guided by their confirmation biases. As recent scholars of “conspiritualities” like QAnon have explained, people find a sense of meaning and empowerment in the belief that they hold the key to understanding a complex world that the so-called “smart people” can’t grasp.
Of course there is a long history of conspiracy theory thinking in every part of the planet, and one might say that all social and political theorizing before the modern era was one variant of conspiracy or another. The unfortunate fact is that conspiracy theories continued into the modern era as well. The fictitious 1911 pamphlet Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purporting to outline the Jewish conspiracy to control the world through both banking and Communism, has been central to global anti-semitism ever since. American politics has been riddled with conspiracy theories, from the 19th century Illuminati, Freemasons, and Jesuits to our more recent JFK assassination, 9/11 was an inside job, and Obama Birtherism.
In all these conspiracies a handful of facts are pinned to the board, and connected by fantastic strings. There were indeed Illuminati and Freemason connections to the American founders. There have been both Jewish bankers and (a great deal more) Jewish communists. Lee Harvey Oswald tried to visit Cuba, and Jack Ruby had ties to the Mob. In this 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” historian Richard Hofstadter mused that conspiracists were rarely complete fabulists.
There are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” (Hofstadter, 1964)
None of us have a perfect picture of how the world works. We all fill in details between what we take for facts. But skepticism and empiricism generate better models of how things work than conspiracy theories.
Marxism, for instance, has a theory of how the world works that many consider a form of conspiracy theory, guided by the assumption that, in the end, capitalists and the capitalist system explain politics. But Marxists have always insisted that the focus should not be individuals and elite conspiracies, but the logic of profit maximization itself. For the best Marxists these theories had to be tested against reality, leading Marxists like Edward Bernstein to come to heterodox conclusions. Likewise the power structure analysts pointed to the critical role of elite clubs like Bohemian Grove, the Bilderberg Group, Davos and the World Economic Forum, while still insisting that these institutions don’t generate politics but instead reflect the interests of accumulated power and wealth. The rich will have the same impacts on the world whether they party at Ted Talks or country clubs. In Marxist terms, bourgeois futurism does little to shape outcomes, but serves a superstructural role relative to the economic base of society. This insight has driven the widespread recognition that conspiracy theory in progressive politics acts as a “socialism of fools,” a reactionary reimagining of capitalist dynamics as the exercise of direct, personal agency, a fight between good and bad ideas and people.
The TESCREAL Conspiracy
Ultimately, the TESCREAL label is an excuse for lazy scholarship and bad arguments. It allows people to thingify complex constellations of ideas, and then criticize them based on the ideas of one member of the group. It imagines that all the guys who think hard about the future and tech must hang out in secret bars plotting to bring about 10²⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ digital minds. No evidence is needed for such claims. (Bentham’s Bulldog, 2023)
In 2018 the computer scientist Timnit Gebru joined Google to work on artificial intelligence ethics, after decades of work with Apple and Microsoft. In 2020 she quit Google or was fired, depending on how you read the conflict, and became a prominent critic of Silicon Valley culture and politics. In 2022 she allied with the writer Émile P. Torres, author of Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. Torres had evolved from addressing their work to the growing community of AI risk thinkers, with disappointing results, into a trenchant critic of that community. Together Gebru and Torres have begun to promote the theory that Silicon Valley elites, and a global network of corporate, academic and nonprofit institutions, are invested in a toxic bundle of ideologies that they call TESCREAL, short for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Guided by this conspiracy framework they have tried to connect the dots between the advocates for these ideas, and support for eugenics, racism and right-wing politics.
As two participants in and critics of the real industries in which these ideologies are supposedly made manifest, we have some thoughts about how they are being understood through the TESCREAL lens. In general they have been thrust on a Procrustean bed, lopping off all the complicated history, messy debates and ideological diversity within. While we share some of their criticisms of the ideologies, and certainly of the elites in question, a better sociology and intellectual history reveals that each philosophy has a progressive political wing that has been ignored. Moreover the wholesale condemnation of these ideas has cast a pall over all thinking about humanity’s future when we desperately need to grapple with the implications of emerging technologies.
Mentions of Key Terms
Transhumanism
The full realization of the core transhumanist value requires that, ideally, everybody should have the opportunity to become posthuman. It would be sub-optimal if the opportunity to become posthuman were restricted to a tiny elite. (Bostrom, 2003)
The core idea of transhumanism is that people should be able to use technology to live longer healthier lives, and to have more control over their bodies and brains. Transhumanists take seriously cognitive and genetic enhancement, brain-machine interfaces and uploading personalities to computers, and that the adoption of these technologies will stretch the boundaries of “the human.” Transhumanism has been associated with Silicon Valley libertarianism for decades, but in fact has been a loose global culture that leans more to the political left than to libertarianism. The roots of transhumanist thought can be traced through Marxists like J.B.S Haldane and John Desmond Bernal for whom genetic engineering and cyborgs were a natural complement to historical materialism’s Promethean ambitions (Steinhoff, 2014; Armesilla, 2021). In 2004 James Hughes wrote Citizen Cyborg, an argument for a (social) “democratic transhumanism,” while serving as director of the World Transhumanist Association, now Humanity+. In 2014 many transhumanists around the world signed The Technoprogressive Declaration, calling on transhumanists and futurists to align with progressive social movements: “Our core commitment is that both technological progress and democracy are required for the ongoing emancipation of humanity from its constraints” (Hughes, 2022)
Today organized transhumanism barely exists outside of the plucky Mormon Transhumanist Association, which sees transhumanism as the fulfillment of Mormon prophecy. When a principal funder of Bay area transhumanist groups, Peter Thiel, decided to support Trump and MAGA he also appears to have cooled on his enthusiasm for organized techno-futurists for not sharing his Christian concerns. Nonetheless there is a libertarian transhumanist thread in Thiel, Musk and the other tech billionaires, and their wealth has given them a disproportionate visibility and outsized influence on the thinking of the transhumanist milieu.
We can draw a parallel to the spread of Darwinism in the 19th century. The ideas of natural selection were warmly embraced by atheists and the Left. In 1861 Karl Marx wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle that “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history…the death-blow dealt here for the first time to ‘teleology’ in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is empirically explained” (Marx, 1861). A version of the doctrine of natural selection also appealed to the captains of industry and the wealthy, Social Darwinism. Social Darwinists argued that social hierarchy is the product of evolved fitness and that 19th capitalism embodied natural selection. As with transhumanism, it would be a mistake to condemn all of Darwinism because Henry Ford read it as a warrant for his wealth and racism.
The issue becomes more acute as medical science makes genuine, real-world advances. Even a few decades ago, science fiction speculated about a “holy grail” of practical weight-loss drugs. Today, semaglutide injections are helping control the global epidemic of diabetes and obesity, saving millions of lives, and more such treatments are on the way. Already the reactionary debate has begun about whether weight-loss owed to an injection “counts”, or whether patients “deserve” to die of heart attacks if they cannot “discipline themselves” into “organic” weight loss by lifestyle choice, through a Nietzschean will-to-power over uncooperative bodies. The legitimate critique is whether the drugs are safe and effective, and how we can make them accessible to all who can benefit given their exorbitant price.
A few hundred years ago, the idea that medical care could alter someone’s gender presentation and its underlying hormonal physiology was the stuff of fairy tales. Today, gender-affirming care is available to millions, but threatened by reactionary political actors who consider it a violation of “natural law” and a step on the road to transhumanism. Trans rights can be seen as one of the first major political confrontations over transhumanism, with technology completing the feminist deconstruction of gender, as outlined in Martine Rothblatt’s 2011 From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto On the Freedom Of Form.
Zooming out to an ever longer timescale, slowing or stopping the aging process and achieving so-called “immortality” was the subject of history’s first known work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. However, examined with the skeptical eyes of modern science, most advances in life extension will continue to flow from the prosaic task of trying to prevent cancer, heart disease and stroke. Contrary to what appears in the press on the subject, the chief obstacle to “extended lifespans” is not our inability to keep people alive at any cost (as anyone unfortunate enough to care for a relative in hospice likely knows), but our ability to lengthen the “healthspan” of independent and dignified adulthood. Since “deaths of despair” are driving American life expectancy down for the economically precarious, maximizing healthspan requires both social reform and universal access to healthcare technologies.
At every step, the conspiracy theory of “transhumanism” imagines dramatic and quasi-supernatural acts, demanding dramatic debates on the ethics of extreme hypotheticals, rather than the slow but steady accumulation of individually moderate, incremental medical advances to solve existing problems. As the fights over birth control, trans rights and universal healthcare make clear, the progressives have argued the case that everyone should have access to technologies that have been proven safe and effective regardless of hypothetical future consequences like “the erosion of the traditional family.”
Extropianism
Max More was one of the libertarian thinkers (non-billionaire) who helped shape modern transhumanism. In the late 1980s More was part of a California milieu of radical futurists that coalesced around an especially anarcho-capitalist vision of the future, with a mission to become immortals and wake up all the matter in the universe. They adopted the term “extropy,” the opposite of the entropy. For the Extropians markets were brilliant self-organizing structures, and bureaucracies were clunky barriers to technological innovation.
As a meta-ethical starting point, asserting that the primary Good is creating and preserving order in a decaying universe is as good a fundamental principle as any. Unfortunately, like all first principles, there is no argument for why it is normative to create order. Yes, living things are counter-entropic, so affirming extropy affirms life and its products. But, as Hume observed, we can’t extrapolate from what is to what should be. Just because life is extropic doesn’t make it good. One could equally say that the highest goal should be making a beautiful universe.
Also, like all arguments from first principles, the Extropians encountered problems when trying to extrapolate derivative principles, like political economy. While the Extropian ideas went in an anti-state direction, their logic leads just as naturally to the Enlightenment Left’s conclusion that humanity should take our collective future in hand through democratic deliberation or the guidance of “scientific socialism,” replacing the anarchy of the market with conscious planning. Marx and Engels used the “theory of complexity” available to them, dialectics, to understand and predict the working of society; only a sociology grounded in the most advanced scientific principles could guide us to the best possible future.
For instance a common idea in science fiction today, with both Extropian and Cosmist resonance, is the typology of civilizations proposed by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in the 1960s. The Kardashev scale is agnostic about the kind of beings or technologies we may encounter and gauges civilizations by how much energy they can use. Type 1 civilizations can use all the energy available on a planet, so humans aren’t there yet. Type 2 civilizations use all the energy of a star, as with a Dyson sphere, and Type 3 can harness the energy of a galaxy. This model is “extropian” but in a way that is neutral about political economy, and thus perfectly consistent with capitalist, democratic socialist, or Soviet futurism. A similar story could be told about the enthusiastic Soviet adoption of Western “cybernetics” as a philosophy and method for the control of planned economies, despite its bourgeois origins. Efforts to ground meta-ethics in fundamental physical principles like feedback loops, extropy or quantum theory may be as unfruitful as appeals to God’s Word, but neither are they indelibly reactionary when applied to society or economics.
Singularitarianism
“They like to think they’re sensible people making sage comments, but they sound more like monks in the year 1000 talking about the Rapture,” said Baldur Bjarnason, author of “The Intelligence Illusion,” a critical examination of A.I. “It’s a bit frightening,” he said. (Streitfeld, 2023)
Singularitarianism starts with the idea that technological innovation is accelerating, especially in information technologies. These exponential curves shorten our horizon for being able to predict our future. Eventually we will reach, or at least see approaching, a point of complete unpredictability, named “the Singularity” by science fiction author Vernor Vinge in a paper for NASA in 1993. The message of the Singularitarians is that big changes are coming from technological innovation sooner than most expect, and we don’t know whether the consequences will be apocalyptic or utopian or beyond those categories. While there are varieties of Singularitarians that may include technologies like nanotechnology or genetic engineering, for Vinge and most Singularitarians that point comes when AI becomes “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) and capable of self-enhancement, leading to an “intelligence explosion.”
Singularitarianism, as many have remarked, shares features with religious millennialism and engenders some of the same cultic behavior. As with their religious cousins, Singularitarians range from fatalists about the ability of humanity to shape the Eschaton, to those who assert that all will be well if we can call forth a friendly Robot God before we are destroyed by the Terminator. Singularitarians even have their own version of theological ideas so dangerous they should not be discussed, such as Roko’s Basilisk, the idea that the coming robot god will punish those who delayed its creation.
Now AI anxiety has reached a fever pitch, with luminaries calling for moratoria and bans on AI innovation, and the Cassandras finally have a public hearing. Like a Doomsday prophet called to testify at a Congressional hearing on nuclear risks, the convictions of many Singularitarians appear ungrounded under interrogation. While most materialists believe the human brain can eventually be replicated in machines, there is no agreement about how self-interests might develop or be detected in machines, or whether they would be found in a supercomputer, or a system like the stock market. We have little basis for conjecture about how a machine mind would behave, or how easy it would be to control them.
Perhaps the best example of grounded, careful thinking on these topics is Nick Bostrom’s book 2014 Superintelligence, which has been widely influential in promoting AI risk assessment. Nick Bostrom runs the Oxford University Future of Humanity Institute, which has been the hub of global catastrophic and AI risk thinking for fifteen years. A basic point Bostrom makes is that even systems that are only pursuing what we tell them to do, without any self-awareness or interests of their own, could lead to disasters; the more powerful the tool, the more damage we can do intentionally or by accident. No matter how long it takes to create superpowerful AI we should start thinking about how to avoid these missteps, and be even more careful about creating self-aware machines with their own agendas.
The anti-TESCREAL conspiracy argues that even relatively cautious people like Bostrom talking about the risks of superintelligence is reactionary since they distract us from algorithmic bias and the electricity use of server farms. While we agree that techno-libertarians tend to be more interested in millennialist and apocalyptic predictions than responding to the problems being created by artificial intelligence today, we also believe that it is legitimate and important to discuss potential catastrophic risks and their mitigation. The anti-TESCREALists dismiss all discussion of AGI, ranging from “believers” to “doomers.”
Bostrom’s work has its critics, philosophical and scientific, but is as free from the Singularitarian’s religious eschatologies as possible. It turns out, however, that thinking about superintelligence and the future of all things leads into theological territory pretty quickly. Bostrom is also the best known proponent of the “simulation hypothesis” for instance, which proposes that there is a distinct possibility that we are living in a simulated universe created by a superintelligence. The problem with Singularitarianism is not that rational, secular thinking can converge with religious thought. The problem comes when we let go of empiricism and skepticism about each of the steps in the argument.
For instance, is “technology” accelerating, or are some technologies advancing while others are stalled? In his 2005 The Singularity is Near Ray Kurzweil gathered a lot of data about accelerating trends in computation and gene sequencing. The innovation of CRISPR gene editing and now chatbots has seemed to confirm exponential innovation. But critics of technological acceleration point out that we haven’t seen exponential improvement in transportation or agriculture; if we had we would be traveling to the stars and food would be free. Technological acceleration may be a matter of what you pay attention to.
A Marxist might say that the Singularity proposes that there will be a revolutionary rupture between the rapid development of the capitalist “means of production” and the social relations they determine. While scientific discovery has accelerated, what has decelerated is the ability of our present capitalist social relations to promote socially beneficial scientific research for widespread deployment. Far from living in an unstoppable singularity, we live in a period of relative technological stagnation, celebrating new cellphones and telling ourselves campfire stories of “the singularity” to avoid confronting our disappointment. The Singularity idea is simultaneously an acknowledgment of the limits of prediction, an expression of utopian aspirations, a demand for risk regulation, and a mythology that can distract us from the pressing demands of our times: to overcome and render obsolete the relations of production holding back the development of our scientific, technical, and industrial forces of production.
There are indeed existential risks and utopian possibilities ahead, and there is no necessary contradiction between short-term risk mitigation and the consideration of long-term opportunities and risks. There is no contradiction between trying to peer ahead at what will soon be possible, and trying to create the most free and equal societies today in preparation. That is precisely what the Marxist project was, and what we can learn from the Marxist experience is that we should neither sacrifice a better today to the promise of a better tomorrow, nor give up thinking about the future because we’ve reached the end of history.
Cosmism
The charge that Cosmism is common among Silicon Valley elites is probably the least credible part of the TESCREAL conspiracy. IEET Fellow Ben Goertzel wrote A Cosmist Manifesto in 2010, providing his own contemporary spin on the idea, and since then there has been a surge in mentions of “cosmism” according to Google Ngram. Most of this interest is simply historical curiosity about the original Russian Cosmism which is unlikely to take 21st century Silicon Valley by storm.
The term “Cosmism” was coined by Russian mystic Nikolai Fyodorov in the late 19th century combining Orthodox Christian ideas with scientific optimism. Fyodorov believed humanity’s ultimate purpose was to use advanced technology to physically resurrect everyone who ever died. Both Communist and non-Communist Russian thinkers then proposed their own Cosmist ideas, proposing that humanity should not only resurrect the dead, but strive for physical immortality and extend consciousness throughout the universe. Given the vast distances of space Cosmists argued that only an immortal human race could take on the project.
Like the Bolsheviks, the Cosmists saw technology as a tool for human liberation, a means to move past old barriers and achieve greater states of social being. For both the Bolsheviks and Cosmists, technology offered a way to conquer the barriers of nature rather than blindly follow them. However, one could say the Cosmists had a more ambitious goal: rather than merely the classless society of the Bolshevik future, the Cosmists wanted to conquer death itself and master the entire universe. (Cosmonaut, 2019)
Russian Cosmists also prefigured a version of eco-philosophy, emphasizing the unity of all living beings and the interconnectedness of the universe. Cosmists believed that all forms of life, including animals and plants, were part of a universal whole. They advocated for the ethical treatment of all living creatures and the preservation of biodiversity.
While Russian Cosmism was not an organized movement, it had a significant influence on Russian literature, art, and science during the early 20th century. Cosmism laid the groundwork for the “God Builders,” a group of anti-Lenin socialist futurists, including Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky. The God Builders believed the socialist project should supplant religion by developing its own myths, rituals, symbols and moral code, with God replaced by a future evolved humanity. Cosmist ideas were embraced by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a pioneer of astronautics, Alexander Chizhevsky, a biophysicist who studied the impact of cosmic forces on life on Earth, and people associated with the futurism of the early Russian Communist regime. The datum that Elon Musk once quoted Tsiolkovsky is the pin on the conspiracy board that allegedly reveals Cosmism’s influence in Silicon Valley.
A revived version of Russian Cosmism, the Izborsky Club, is in fact influential in Russia today. The Izborsky Club explicitly condemns the technocratic “transhumanism” of Western thought, including individualism, rationalism, democracy, capitalism and transgender rights, as contrary to their “technocratic traditionalist” Cosmism. The Izborsky Club reflects the swirl of NazBol ideas in contemporary Russia, attempting to merge Russian Orthodoxy, Bolshevik authoritarianism and fascist “Eurasian” racial-nationalism. The Club includes fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin and the Orthodox Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, and has ties to the Kremlin. In other words actual organized Russian Cosmists today despise TESCREAL ideas and their Western proponents.
Perhaps the anti-TESCREAL conspiracists see Cosmism as an easy target, associating the tech bros with Russian authoritarianism and mysticism. But in their sloppy approach to intellectual history they are again ignoring the creative flowering of downright weird ideas that came with a lot of 20th century Left-wing movements.
Rationalism
Throughout history, white men in power have used “science,” “evidence,” “reason” and “rationality” as deadly bludgeons to beat down marginalized peoples. (Torres, 2023)
Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the original leading thinkers of the Singularitarian community, and in the 2000s he began to preach the gospel of improving human rationality. On their LessWrong discussion board and other fora the subculture of rationalists urged self-reflection on how distorted our epistemologies are by cognitive biases such as the tendency to only hear evidence that confirms our prejudices. Torres and Gebru are correct that there is a significant, albeit only partial, overlap of this flavor of rationalists with the AI risk, transhumanist, effective altruism and longtermist communities. Of all the suspect philosophical movements though why would a commitment to rationality be seen as so dangerous?
An attack on rationalism has to be understood in light of the postmodernist critique of rationality. A commitment to rationality, including self-awareness of our tendencies to be biased, is central to the Enlightenment. As observed by Adorno in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, liberal, capitalist societies have massively developed the power of humanity to rationally master Nature in the service of instrumental usefulness and private profit. According to the postmodern critique, this commitment to rationality is intrinsically capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist and imperialist.
Rationalist assertions that some are more rational than others have certainly been part of debates over restricting or expanding suffrage and extending or ending colonialism. For the Left, as opposed to postmodernism, the problem was not the goal of rationality but the distorted ways in which we applied it. On the Left we affirm the Enlightenment as a project we intend to complete, that reason is a better guide than faith and emotion, and we look forward to sweeping away the mystifications that keep us bound in an irrational society. While the Left affirmed the rational capacities of the subalterns we haven’t extended suffrage to children because we do generally accept that rationality is required for being a full rights-bearing citizen.
On the other hand rationality fares no better than extropy as a meta-ethics, whether for philosophers or radical politics. For two hundred years people have tried to promote rationality as a replacement for religion, politics and morality, and those attempts always have failed. While a commitment to rationality is an intellectual virtue, and scientific empiricism is the best method for modeling the world, reason does not tell us what we should do and rationality does not lead to common understandings of the world. Rationality is a tool of the sentiments, and people have different sentiments and material interests. Even the collective commitment to solve problems through rational debate derives from values that have no base in reason.
The anti-TESCREALites are correct to criticize the quirky, arrogant way that the church of rationality conducts itself, its unwarranted faith in the power of reason and in their resulting “rational” social and political convictions. But while this rationalist subculture may flourish among Silicon Valley elites, we see its connections to reactionary (as opposed to liberal or centrist) political views as exaggerated and its influence on society at large as overdrawn. The average worker today, urged to “optimize” their daily routines to minimize bathroom breaks and maximize labor, knows that their problem is their Taylorist boss, not a blog on the “art of rationality.”
Effective Altruism
The EA community is rife with arguments in defense of things that conflict with our basic moral intuitions. This is because it is heavily influenced by utilitarianism. (Robinson, 2023)
The second boldest move by the TESCREAL conspiracists, after linking “rationality” to the conspiracy, is to frame all utilitarian thinking as also suspect. Utilitarianism or consequentialism is the idea that our moral goal should be maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number. It is consequentialist in that the consequences of our actions are more important than our intentions. Once we got away from a politics of “might makes right” or “this is the Church’s teaching” Enlightenment-influenced societies decided that utilitarianism was the best way to argue for public policy in a democracy. Consequentialism is the logic of cost-benefit analysis, priority-setting, and considering when the “cure is worse than the disease.” We are using consequentialist logic when we ask whether Communism or capitalism killed or enriched more people, or when we argue that massive investments in a green economy are worth the pain because of the long-term benefits.
Effective altruism is utilitarianism applied to charitable giving: we should give dollars to charities that do the most good in the world. The contemporary EA movement is often traced to the founding of the Giving What We Can meta-charity in 2009 by two Oxford University students, Toby Ord and William MacAskill. The godfather of effective altruism, the philosopher Peter Singer, has argued that we are morally obliged to give away all our wealth after we meet our basic needs, since the money that we don’t need could be keeping someone alive. The growing EA community urged members to donate 10% of their income to charities. Of 2500 “effective altruists” surveyed in 2019, three quarters were on the political left (Dullaghan, 2019).
Basic problems for effective altruism, and for all utilitarianism or consequentialism, are defining the good, whose good, and what are acceptable, realistic steps to achieve it. A classic problem for utilitarianism for instance is the “repugnant conclusion” that having 30 billion people living marginal lives is worth more than 5 billion people living wonderful lives. The recent paper “The Rebugnant Conclusion” poses a related problem: if the lives and feelings of insects get even a minuscule weight in the moral calculus, their interests outweigh ours through sheer numbers.
Likewise, a hedonic utilitarian can conclude that being high on meth is fine if that is what you prefer. In contrast, John Stuart Mill famously tinkered with the formula to weigh “higher pleasures” more than lower ones. For the effective altruist, money spent on bednets to stop malaria is far better than on a new pew at church, but is there no room in the calculus for promoting education or the arts?
The effective altruists are also both too timid and too over-confident in assuming they can predict how best to achieve the good, even if it is just more people in the future. They are too timid because they assume that the distribution of power and wealth in the world is immutable, so the only choice we can make is between charities. They rarely follow the logic to ask how much we should invest in changing the world, and which are the best ways to do so. Since weapons of mass destruction are a pressing threat to the future, is the best course to give to nonprofits building bomb shelters, or campaigning for global treaties to prevent their proliferation?
EAs are overconfident in making assumptions about how the present will impact the future. One common EA assumption, reflecting Enlightenment techno-optimism, is that technological innovation and economic growth, despite their risks, will be good in the long run. A climate campaigner might counter that sacrificing “growth” for a green economy, innovating only technologies that improve sustainability and civilizational resilience, would be best for a flourishing future. The EAs themselves are sharply divided over whether further development of artificial intelligence is an urgent goal or a grand folly that must be stopped.
Effective altruists are also prone to using the ends to justify questionable means, which is an old problem often addressed by utilitarians. A key consequentialist argument for individual and minority rights is that while throwing Christians to lions may maximize pleasure for the audience in the moment, in general we will be better off in societies where we don’t do that. But some effective altruists, most famously the crypto scammer and donor to the Democratic Party Sam Bankman-Fried, have argued that accumulating vast wealth through skiffy means is fine if you give enough away.
In “A Socialist Guide To Effective Altruism” Nikhil Venkatesh writes that effective altruism as a field has a lot in common with the Left, and acknowledges that most EAs describe themselves as left-wing or progressive liberals. Like the Left, EAs try to quantify suffering and well-being in order to prioritize public policy goals. Will MacAskill, in EA text What We Owe The Future, advocates for green technology, preventing nuclear war, and containing pandemics. MacAskill and Ord both call for stronger transnational institutions and political activism.
But Venkatesh says that EA ideas are a terrain of struggle, with affluent white men smuggling dubious right-wing ideas into EA as the simple products of reason, like capitalism being the ideal system for improving human welfare. EAs, even the most philanthropic, promote mostly individual strategies instead of collective ones. EAs use consequentalist rationales for bad behavior, and dismiss political change as uncertain while embracing much more speculative goals like friendly AI.
What attitude, then, should socialists take to effective altruism? I think it should be one of openness to mutual exchange and allegiance — for instance, on issues such as climate, and nuclear weapons — whilst retaining a critical view of EA’s individualism, its links with capital, its narrow and elite social base, and the reactionaries in its ranks. After effective altruism’s recent scandals, more people within the movement have become alive to these problems themselves, and socialists should hope that they win out in internal debates. (Venkatesh, 2023)
So again, the TESCREAL conspiracy theory brings out that consequentialism has been interpreted by billionaires as a rationale for accumulating vast wealth through questionable means so long as they give to charity. This is pretty much the logic of the robber barons building hospitals, universities and libraries more than a century ago. The conspiracists are also correct that far too many effective altruists come to the premature conclusion that all their dollars should go to reducing the risks of runaway artificial intelligence instead of toward a more diversified risk mitigation portfolio.
But the consequentialist logic of effective altruism is also central to left-wing thought. What is the central contradiction of our time, white supremacy, gender oppression or class inequality? Does focusing on fixing one social problem, like class inequality, do more to fix the others? Is the best method to fix these social problems through charity, democratic agitation, or violent revolution? Elite, white male effective altruists don’t ask those questions. But the rest of us should.
Longtermism
Many longtermists — students, researchers and members of the public, as well as donors — are sincerely committed to what they take to be a uniquely important moral enterprise. But their sincerity is no argument against the corruption of a movement that uses a bankrupt morality to justify profiting from the systems most threatening to the future it claims to secure.
Alice Crary “The Toxic Ideology of Longetermismm,” Radical Philosophy 2023.
Longtermism is the application of the consequentialism of effective altruism to far future speculation. Many longtermists trace the enquiry to philosopher Derek Parfit’s thoughts on the profound influence of acting in the present, the “hinge of history,” on the well-being of future people. In the immediate term we can all agree that anything that would extinguish the human race would be bad for us and our descendants. But for longtermists the interests of our trillions of hypothetical descendants outweigh our own. Not only might we be obliged to accept the repugnant conclusion that trillions of marginal future lives would be better than billions of flourishing future ones, but also that we should make huge sacrifices today for a populous future in 1 million A.D.
Clearly the longtermists are overconfident in their futurism, ignoring the radical uncertainty of the Singularitarians. Simple extrapolations of our early 21st century one-human-one-quanta will almost certainly be complicated by a growing diversity of robots and uplifted animals alongside our myriad forms of descendants. What if humanity being eclipsed by our animal and robot descendants is the best future for sentient life? What if we can never escape the solar system? What if neurotechnologies that provide instant pleasure or meaning upends our understanding of the Good? Should the Borg get one quanta of utility or a million?
Longtermist certainties lead to conclusions that “efforts to mitigate existential risk have astronomical value, far exceeding the value of competing interventions such as global health and development” (Thorstad, 2023). Longtermists’ seeming indifference to contemporary politics is only warranted if they assume none of the long term risks are made more or less likely by having dictatorships or democracies, stark inequality or egalitarian social democracy, today. While authoritarian governments may be able to move more quickly and decisively in response to threats, they are also more likely to suppress criticism and concerns about industrial and military policy. Ideally accountable democratic governments and freedom of speech are preconditions for the public policies most likely to mitigate risk, which would seem to make fighting the global rise of far right anti-rationalism and authoritarianism a longterm risk. Likewise social policies today are likely to tilt future risks. Schmidt and Jujin (2023) note that longtermists should both pursue equality in the short term for consequentialist ends, but also for the long term since inequality increases future risks.
“Income inequality might increase existential risk and negative trajectory change (by exacerbating) climate change, lower institutional quality, polarisation and conflict, and lower differential progress… Therefore…we have instrumental reason to favour income inequality reduction, regardless of our preferred time-horizon.” (Schmidt and Jujin, 2023)
So the TESCREAL critics are right to poke holes in the misplaced certainty about the longtermists’ wispy web of futurist assumptions. Since we are truly blind to any certainty about what action to take now to bring about the best possible future the best we have to fall back on is mitigating global catastrophic risks and suffering in the present, which we can be pretty certain will be good in the long term.
But the basic question remains: Should we take into account the interests of future generations, and if we should, how? The anti-TESCREALists are correct that the conclusions of the longtermists are at the end of a long train of questionable assumptions. But they are good questions to ask even if the conclusions are entirely speculative and often reveal the social and political biases of the thinkers. Environmental philosophers have been among the most adamant that we should take future generations into account, although they are mostly thinking of climate refugees in 2100 and not star children escaping the heat death of the universe. Progressives should include unborn people in our calculations, but with a great deal of humility about our assumptions about people who will likely have very different values than ours and what we should be doing in their interest.
Eugenics and Demography
Gebru and Torres show that the ideas of the TESCREAL bundle are closely associated with eugenics, racism and neoreactionary ideology. (Anarchasteminist, 2023)
Longtermism is eugenics under a different name. (Gebru, 2022)
So @nytimes platforms Nick Bostrom after Macaskill? Are they basically billionaire mouthpieces?…They can’t NOT help but platform these eugenicists. (Gebru, 2023)
Gebru, Torres and their allies have now added eugenics and racism to their TESCREAL conspiracy cocktail. Finding racism among MAGA-pilled elites like Musk, who asserts that free speech means tolerating neo-Nazis, is pretty straightforward. Implying that there is a serious cabal of wealthy people who want to use state power to control human reproduction and produce more white people requires far more imaginative connecting of the dots.
There certainly have been historical movements and elite networks that advocated for population control and eugenics before the Second World War, targeting colonial populations, people of color, people with disabilities and the poor. But the “eugenics movement” also included socialists, anarchists and feminists, like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, who fought for women’s access to birth control in order to reduce the burden of large families on women and the poor. It included liberal Unitarian ministers who believed family planning and reproductive rights would improve public health. Some proto-transhumanists, like J.B.S Haldane and Julian Huxley, were attracted to eugenics until the unscientific, racist and coercive aspects of the movement alienated them.
Eugenics also included those who imposed forced sterilization on poor and minority women in the U.S., and wholesale murder in the Third Reich. Today the anti-choice Right labels as “eugenics” both prenatal testing and abortion, practices that are widely accepted around the world. Depending on which definition of eugenics one uses almost everyone agrees with it, or nobody.
More problematic for the TESCREAL conspiracy is the implication that any discussion of future demography is implicitly eugenic. It is true that the far right is concerned that there aren’t enough of the “right kind” of babies, and even some transhumanists have mused about the dysgenic consequences of smart people having fewer children. The only response to such musings is to assert that most parents want what is best for their children, and if we reduce inequality and improve education we will maximize the abilities of the children parents decide to have. A future with universal access to genetic enhancement will allow people to choose whatever characteristics they prefer and that is as far as social policy should go.
But the TESCREAL conspiracists are tagging any discussion about the looming “old-age dependency ratio” as also being implicitly about the decline of white people. Although the accelerating pace of technological change may make the future harder to predict, demography has always been one of the most reliable trend lines. People are unlikely to radically change how many children they have, and progress in life expectancy has been incremental. When William MacAskill muses about the impact of dwindling birth rates on technological innovation in his longtermist text What We Owe the Future it is of course read by the conspiracists as sinister racist eugenics. When Musk says “if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble,” tech critic Paris Marx concludes “he’s very clearly laundering eugenicist and white nationalist views” (Marx, 2023). The decline in birthrates is real, driven in part by bad policies, and we should talk about it.
We already see in Europe and East Asia a shrinking number of young people taking care of a growing number of elderly. China, South Korea and Japan are already adopting pronatalist policies, to little effect, and indeed their policies are only concerned with creating more Chinese, Korean and Japanese babies. The clear answer for those societies, and the industrialized world in general, is to liberalize migration; let the world’s young people go where they will. Credit goes to Angela Merkel who let a million refugees into Germany, recognizing that the short-term cultural conflicts were worth the long-term payoff in population stability and economic growth. While liberalizing migration would ease youth unemployment in developing nations and fuel economies with labor shortages in the short term, it also drains talent and increases dependence on remittances.
In the long run we are almost certainly evolving towards a shrinking world population, with lower fertility and longer life expectancies. Automating work may fill in the labor shortage gap, but we will need comprehensive reform of our welfare systems in order to ensure intergenerational equity. We will need a universal basic income and universal healthcare, not just Social Security and Medicare for seniors. We will need free lifelong access to higher education, child allowances, and free childcare. (See for instance the “Family Fun Pack” of progressive pro-family policies from the People’s Policy Project.) Discussing demographic problems and policy solutions now is neither eugenic nor racist.
Liberating the Future from Bourgeois Futurism
Both of the authors are democratic socialists who have criticized the libertarian, apolitical and reactionary tendencies of these futurist communities. We both believe that more attention should be given to proximate risks like social media pathologies and technological unemployment. We completely support a ruthless deconstruction of the shallow, self-serving, and dangerous ways that some billionaires have adopted these futurist ideas. But reducing two hundred years of intellectual history and political reality to the sloppy musings of a handful of tech bros and a tenuous web of guilt by association is seriously misleading, like all conspiracy theories.
The real enemy is the political and economic system that allows billionaires to determine our future. It really makes little difference if the ideas selectively adopted by billionaires are Episcopalianism, Darwinism, Wahabism, MAGA or TESCREAL. Billionaires are going to interpret ideas in ways that valorize themselves and protect their interests.
Worse, the anti-TESCREAL conspiracy is reactive rather than proactive. The Left desperately needs new, positive visions of a liberatory future that take seriously today’s ongoing technological changes and actually-existing organization of social life. Rather than disparage all thinking about the utopian possibilities of the future and retreat into a Keynesian or Stalinist nostalgia, the Left should point to the limitations of bourgeois futurism in helping us achieve more equal, democratically accountable futures. Rather than follow Steve Bannon in imagining a politics “downstream of culture”, it should seize the means of future production and realize the abundant possibilities of a socialist future.
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Eli Sennesh is a PhD candidate at Khoury College, Northeastern University. He presently lives in Boston, MA with his partner Linden and their two dogs Amber and Jazz.
James J. Hughes serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and as Associate Provost at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg, and former director of the World Transhumanist Association.
