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#siliconvalley

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"The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new conservative consensus. Both of those are now fading (though Torenberg has invested in a company called ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).

Since Elon Musk turned X to the right and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack, “a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman. “It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”

And Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape. You can see it on X, where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices, and where Srinivasan has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.

“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,” said Rufo. “There’s a big split on the tech right.”

The polarity of social media has also reversed, and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media, “now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said.

By mid-April, Sacks had had enough with Chatham House: “This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,” he wrote, shorthanding “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Then he addressed Torenberg: “You should create a new one with just smart people.”

Signal soon showed that three men had left the group: The Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, the bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, and Carlson."

semafor.com/article/04/27/2025

www.semafor.com · The group chats that changed AmericaBy Ben Smith

Fascinating conversation between Laleh Khalili and Paris Marx on Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son.

He doesn’t get the attention of more visible tech executives, but he’s had a massive impact on the model that shapes tech start-ups.

If you are interested in #tech, #AI, #SiliconValley and the curious individuals and institutions that exert such disproportionate power over our lives, check out this podcast.

techwontsave.us/episode/273_ho

Tech Won't Save UsHow Masayoshi Son Shaped the Tech Industry w/ Laleh Khalili - Tech Won’t Save UsA left-wing podcast for better technology and a better world.

"Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful “Armageddon Lobby.” It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a “secular” vision of humanity’s grand future — though it shares many similarities with traditional religion, including a belief in “God” and the promise of immortality through cryonics. The renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this vision “The Mindset,” whereas the computer scientist Timnit Gebru and I refer to it as “TESCREALism,” which I have discussed in previous articles for Truthdig. I will mostly stick with Rushkoff’s term in what follows.

Advocates of The Mindset claim that the world as we know it will soon expire. In its ashes, a new era dominated by digital lifeforms — that is, artificial intelligences — will emerge. These beings will stand to us as “gods,” though by merging our brains with AI or “uploading” our minds to computers, we may become gods ourselves: Homo deus — the “human god” — as Yuval Noah Harari puts it.
(...)
Importantly, this isn’t just a utopian dream among the super-rich built on eugenic fantasies of transcending the biological realm; it is a claim about what is cosmically inevitable. Our world is becoming more and more digital. We are increasingly embedded in a vast network of computational artifacts, some of which are now impinging on the intimate boundaries of ourselves as they become integrated into our brains and bodies. (Consider the pacemaker and the neural implant.) If you extrapolate this trend into the future, they argue, it’s just obvious that our current world of biological beings will soon be wholly replaced by a new world of digital ones."

truthdig.com/articles/the-endg

Truthdig · The Endgame of Edgelord Eschatology - TruthdigPowerful figures in Silicon Valley advocate a new-age religion that sees humanity as a transitional species — one whose time is almost up.

You stare in awe and disbelief as the child one more time, after many attempts, place their hand on the oven element. "*sigh*... that searing pain? Yeah, that's gonna happen again and again."

In this analogy I look at the average #SocialMedia #user as a child that just doesn't learn, because they keep trusting #SiliconValley #TechBros instead of going to #WebSocial.

Angry, disappointed users react to #Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system - Neowin
neowin.net/news/angry-disappoi

NeowinAngry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification systemBluesky, the decentralized social network, is working on a new verification system, and users are not happy.

"Regulation that impedes the operation of US digital behemoths – anything short of blanket permission to do as they please – will apparently be treated as a hostile act and an affront to human liberty.

This is an imperial demand for market access cynically camouflaged in the language of universal rights. The equivalent trick is not available in other sectors of the economy. US farmers hate trade barriers that stop their products flooding European markets, but they don’t argue that their chlorine-washed chickens are being censored. (Not yet.)

That isn’t to say digital communications can be subject to toxicity tests just like agricultural exports. There is wide scope for reasonable disagreement on what counts as intolerable content, and how it should be controlled. The boundaries are not easily defined. But it is also beyond doubt that thresholds exist. There is no free-speech case for child sexual abuse images. The most liberal jurisdictions recognise that the state has a duty to proscribe some material even if there is a market for it.

The question of how online space should be policed is complex in principle and fiendishly difficult in practice, not least because the infrastructure we treat as a public arena is run by private commercial interests. Britain cannot let the terms of debate be dictated by a US administration that is locked in corrupting political intimacy with those interests.

It is impossible to separate the commercial and ideological strands of Trump’s relationship with Silicon Valley oligarchs. They used their power and wealth to boost his candidacy and they want payback from his incumbency. There is not much coherence to the doctrine. “Free” speech is the kind that amplifies the president’s personal prejudices. Correcting his lies with verifiable facts is censorship."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

The Guardian · In Trumpland, ‘defending free speech’ means one thing: submission to the presidentBy Rafael Behr

"Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.

The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”"

vanityfair.com/news/story/dona

Vanity Fair · Donald Trump, Silicon Valley, and the Neoliberal Roots of an Unlikely AllianceBy Jon Skolnik
Replied in thread

@minimalparts This is central to our present day political issues. AI is the fastest rising factor of #technofascism. Refusing to look at AI if you are not a specialist is like asking us to simply renounce democracy, because none of us is a specialist of everything. We need to worry about it, all of us. It's not really a language? Well, too bad. But it's still working quite well for the digital #neoliberalism launched by the #siliconvalley #techbros who are now dominating the 1st world economy.

The Breakthrough Prize rewards achievements in science and mathematics, and is a red-carpet event, attended by Hollywood's finest, plus tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Marc Andreesen and more. Canadian actor Seth Rogen called out the tech titans for their support of the Trump administration when he presented an award alongside Ed Norton at the "Oscars of Science" — and his remarks were cut from the YouTube video that went live a week later. @THR shares what he said about science, Silicon Valley and RFK Jr., and how the "full video" was edited.

flip.it/o2CG0P

Seth Rogen and Edward Norton speak onstage during the 11th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at Barker Hangar on April 05, 2025 in Santa Monica, California.
The Hollywood Reporter · Seth Rogen’s Criticism of Silicon Valley’s Support for Trump Was Cut From the “Full” Stream of Breakthrough PrizeBy Julian Sancton
Replied in thread

@simon_brooke that assumes several things that are proven wrong:

  1. #TechBros didn't knew their #Algorithms (they do!)

  2. #GAFAMs were unable to change what gets #boosted by their own Algorithms. (OFC they can!)

  3. The same companies didn't knew the directly-linked damage they can if not cause, at least amplify (see #RohingyaGenocide in #Burma)

  4. #TechBro|s in #SiliconValley weren't #facist to begin with (I mean, #PeterThiel is more of a #norm than #exception!)

  5. That they never before sided with a #POTUS (In fact, they platformed #Trump and his #cult|ist #followers even after their failed #Coup and #HighTreason!)

  6. Said #CEO|s and #CTO|s are powerless to stop any of this (in fact, they could force Trump to resign if they wanted to!)

  7. That Trump exerts control over them (He could as.per #CloudAct but let's be honest, they control him more than he can control them!)

  8. That #TechCompanies from the #USA didn't endorse and platform #facists and #authoritatians (espechally in the #EU) until then.

  9. That the #US became hostile over night.

"Consciousness is the only reason life has value. It’s the only reason anything matters. Otherwise life would just be physical materials getting whipped about by natural forces without anyone feeling, sensing or experiencing any part of it. Suffering wouldn’t matter because it’s not being felt or experienced. Joy wouldn’t matter because it’s not being felt or experienced. There’d be no good reason not to torture someone, because there wouldn’t be any conscious experience of pain. There’d be no good reason to love anyone, because there wouldn’t be any conscious experience of love. Consciousness is the only reason life is worth living.

There is no basis on which to believe AI will ever be conscious. Consciousness isn’t some minor detail that science will easily work out once it gets around to it; it’s an all-encompassing phenomenon which has always been a complete mystery to all scientific fields. Science has no idea what consciousness is or why it happens, much less how to replicate it. It’s the single most important and fundamental aspect of every second of our waking experience of life, yet it remains a complete unknown to all of science. And this somehow gets left out of so much of the conversation about the future of artificial “intelligence”."

x.com/caitoz/status/1910886574

X (formerly Twitter)Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) on XOn AI And Consciousness

In 2016, journalist Carole #Cadwalladr helped break the data abuse by #Facebook with the Cambridge Analytica Story, effectively taking on all of #SiliconValley . She was sued, digitally stalked, and paid a huge price for speaking truth to power, as you can see in this new talk at TED, a venue she has chosen very consciously. Her dire warning: Cambridge Analytica was chicken feed compared to the #broligarchy coup happening today
m.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8Ab #musk #trump #putin #surveillance #privacy