Silicon Valley

"Silicon Valley Is Trying to Make Humans Immortal—and Finding Some Success" - 2015

Silicon Valley is a nickname for the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay in California. It is home to many largest high-tech corporations and thousands of startup companies. It is arguably the transhumanist-style life extensionist capital of the world.

Key people

Highly notable names all based around Silicon Valley include:

• Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook, owner of your future ad-supported brain
• Jeff Bezos - Amazon CEO and life extensionist
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin - Google co-founders
  • Bill Maris of Google Venture Capital
  • Ray Kurzweil - popular futurist and Google employee specialising in AI
• Elon Musk - everyone's favorite futurist .
• Peter Thiel - Investor and Trump supporter. Thiel's prominence has created as strong association between the libertarian technocratic politics popular there and the transhumanist movement.
• Martine Rothblatt - Terasem founder and transhumanist activist
• Paul Allen - Microsoft co-founder
• J. Craig Venter - Biotechnology entrepreneur
• Larry Ellison - Oracle co-founder

Major names outside of Silicon Valley are Canadian clothing entrepreneur Peter Nygård, Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov and Japanese owner of multinational Softbank Masayoshi Son.

Reception

Silicon Valley the TV show parodies the ghoulish nature of parabiosis and the industry's (specifically Peter Thiel's) obsession with longevity.

This very association has come under scrutiny due to critics who are concerned about its potential for oligarchy and treating transhumanism as a religion:

It’s not surprising that transhumanism is popular amongst the Californian techno-elite; the idea that technology is a wholly positive force unfolding with its own inevitable logic is one that is very comforting to those who benefit the most from the current arrangements. Transhumanism is, in effect, the state religion of Californian techno-neoliberalism, and like all state religions its purpose is to justify the power of the incumbents.
— Professor Richard Jones

Criticism is often levied at prioritizing these new technologies over helping the poor and developing world:

It’s incredibly exciting and wonderful to be part of a species that dreams in a big way. But I also want to be part of a species that takes care of the poor and the dying, and I’m worried that our attention is being drawn away to a glittery future world that is fantasy and not the world we live in. - Laurie Zoloth

Businesses

In addition to be being the information technology centre of the world, Silicon Valley is home to a great many biotechnology startups such as Calico, as well as more overt life extensionist organisations such as SENS.

Alcor cryonics is relatively nearby in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Commentary

On blind techno-optimism:

"Silicon Valley will solve our problems via tech," she repeated from under the rubble, as the dueling plutocrats' Warbots ravaged the city - via Twitter

On ethics and power:

“Engineers don’t do ethics courses and this is why Silicon Valley...” is a classist slur designed to reallocate social status between engineers and virtuous paragons like journalists, MBAs, legislators, health insurance executives, lawyers, and others who take ethics classes.

On cryonics:

What did change, thanks to the tech bubble, was the combined net worth of the Silicon Valley software engineers who are in the demographic sweet spot of the Alcor business model. Here were young people possessed of the lust for eternal life, who required no PR blitzes to persuade them of technology’s ability to overcome the brute empirical facts of the human condition—many with the outsize ego to cast themselves as Christlike figures awaiting resurrection and the ample self-confidence to ignore all naysayers.

External links

• Silicon Valley on Wikipedia
• The Californian Ideology on Wikipedia
• Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever - Can billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech research succeed in making death optional?