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The Woo-Woo Idiocy of Our Tech Overlords

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Peter Thiel, pictured above, is hardly the only Silicon Valley techbro whose life is completely dominated by woo-woo weirdo stuff about bodies and aging and, well, anything about life itself. In fact, our techbro betters are a group of total fucking morons:

There’s the rise of what you could call popular neo-Jungianism: figures like Jordan Peterson, who point to the power of myth, ritual, and a relationship to the sacred as a vehicle for combating postmodern alienation — often in uneasy alliance with traditionalist Christians. (A whole article could be written on Peterson’s close intellectual relationship with Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron.) There’s the progressive-coded version you can find on TikTok, where witchcraft and activism and sage cleansing and “manifesting” co-exist in a miasma of vibes. There’s the openly fascist version lurking at the margins of the New Right, where blood-and-soil nationalists, paleo bodybuilders, Julius Evola–reading Traditionalists like Steve Bannon, and Catholic sedevacantist podcasters make common cause in advocating for the revival of the mores of a mystic and masculinist past, all the better to inject life into the sclerotic modern world.

But the specific postrationalist version of this tendency is all the more striking for the fact that its genesis lies in a subculture ostensibly dedicated to the destruction of all thoughts non-rational. For example, when I was writing a piece on the rationalists for Religion News Service in 2018, I attended a rationalist-affiliated “Secular Solstice” in New York — a non-theistic version of Hannukah in which a series of (battery-operated) candles were lit and subsequently extinguished to represent the snuffing out of superstitions. The ceremony culminated (or would have culminated, if a stubborn candle hadn’t refused to go out) in total darkness, during which we were invited to meditate upon the finality of death, the non-existence of God, and the sole avenue for hope: supporting — financially, intellectually, or otherwise — quixotic scientific initiatives capable of prolonging life, or of eliminating death altogether.

It’s possible, of course, to look at the rise of the postrationalists as merely the kind of development you’d see in any online subculture that lasts more than a couple of years: the replacement of one model of discourse or fandom by its younger, self-proclaimedly punker cousin. And, certainly, there’s something even more extremely online, and extremely 2020s,about postrationalism’s freewheeling eclecticism. If rationality culture arose out of a very specific early-2000s blog culture — big-name essayists like LessWrong’s Eliezer Yudkowsky and Slate Star Codex’s Scott Alexander, meticulously parsed by hyper-serious interlocutors in the comments section — “postrat culture” is no less wedded to its own particular medium: Twitter, along with a backchannel network of private group chats and Discord servers and Zoom rooms.

Like their rationalist forebears, the postrationalist community has its own blogger-luminaries — Venkatesh Rao at Ribbonfarm; Sarah Perry, also a Ribbonfarm contributor and author of the anti-natalist manifesto Every Cradle Is a Grave; and David Chapman at Meaningness. But the postrationalists also have a more anarchic side, marked by the ubiquity of pseudonymous Twitter micro-celebrities — like eigenrobot (43k followers), and Zero H. P. Lovecraft (98k), who has rejected the postrat label but is widely followed by them — whose accounts, like Vogel’s, sometimes blend sincerity and shitposting. They share some of rationality culture’s shibboleths — a fondness for speaking in obscure jargon, a commitment to an Overton Window so wide it might as well be a glass house, a contempt for the “wokeness” they see as stifling free intellectual discourse.

But they’re also far more likely to embrace the seemingly irrational — religious ritual, Tarot, meditation, or the psychological-meets-spiritual self-examination called “shadow work” — in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment, and a vision of life that takes seriously the human need for beauty, meaning, and narrative. Today’s postrationalists might be, for example, practitioners of Vajrayana Buddhism, or they might adopt the carefully choreographed practices of self-proclaimed radical agnostic and ritual artist Rebecca Fox, who designs bespoke rituals she refers to as “psychospiritual technology.” The movement’s defining maxim — according to at least one person familiar with the movement I spoke to — might be a proclamation by writer Sarah Perry: “It is better to be interesting and wrong than it is to be right and boring.”

I don’t know about you all, but I definitely trust these people to create their own money to compete with the dollar and to push artificial intelligence on us.

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