Longtermism, EA, and the crime scenes in DC

I've been calling Elon Musk's encroachments a coup. Musk is definitely part of a coup - a self coup if one will - but Elon's role is as criminal mastermind. He's undertaking the biggest data breach in history - in full view of the public and with permission from those paying fealty to his boss.

Stopping it is going to depend on the only thing that's ever stopped tyrants from stealing democracies - massive public protest. General strikes. Taxpayer revolts. This is civil society's moment.

The fact that the party in power is leading the coup makes it hard to understand and hard to see how to end it. But there is very little but power keeping this criminal operation together. It's an alliance of factions, some led by one of two megalomaniacs and their fans; others by fanatical and armed Christian nationalists; others by racists and Nazis; others still by GOP senators scared by death threats (try being a woman online. or a Black woman). There's some overlap but its mostly an alliance of opportunists. Injecting law, public pressure, humiliation, delay into the cracks between factions will eventually "frack" the group into pieces.

There are two very obvious aspects of what's going on. 1) Elon's prioritization as a chaos monkey is to attend to his own self interests first (he's got some big debts). Not surprisingly, Elon's problems are not those of the people. His efforts to destroy USAID, for example, backfired immediately on farmers. Which leads us to 2) He's screwing us all in the process. The richest man in the world is screwing over all American taxpayers, other billionaires, the financial system, the health system, medical research, etc. Meanwhile, the price of eggs just keeps going up and highly contagious and often fatal diseases such as measles, TB, and influenza circulate, morph, and spread.

If it feels like you are living in a science fiction that's because the genre has had an overwhelming impact on tech billionaires and effective altruists. Dorian Lynskey's book, Everything Must Go, is a romp - if a thousand year history of human's interest in the end of the world can be described as such. In it, one finds discussion of the many movies, books, mindsets, and Martian obsessions within which Musk and other marinated themselves as teenagers.

One thing, however, does set the apocalypse today's oligarchs are prepping for apart from those (global warming, nuclear, viral) that both came before and are very much still with us. The billionaires pushing us to the brink today politically are also pushing the source of their despair - AI. They're bringing this nightmare on. In doing so they're also drawing forward some of history's worst ideas - eugenics - while purporting to care about future humans.

The longtermism and utilitarianism that defines effective altruism is also at the root of oligarchian dreams of humanity's survival.* With the caveat that the oligarchs are focused only on themselves and on keeping the rich, the white, and the high IQ alive (and reproducing). Data extraction and AI - in its most apocalyptic form - is the source of both their riches and their fears.

*Yes, the same values that undergird effective altruism - probably the most successful (measured in dollars) "philanthropic vision" in recent times - are shared with the logic (and there is one) undergirding the destruction of a major world democracy. As Musk would say, let that sink in.