Say it isn’t so: Hipster Eugenics

where the dark side of EA, transhumanism, longtermism and bloody Elon intersect

Big Statement: The most disturbing thing about everything we face on the planet today is the way we - as a species, as nations, cultures and cohorts - are responding to that everything.

There is big, problematic stuff going down. Sure. But our fixes are f*cked. They are a kind of whack-a-mole, knee-jerk dumping of the same consciousness that caused the problem in the first place. Our responses are not only making the problem worse, they make the OG problem look almost benign.

I’ll illustrate with the latest demented and self-defeating response to a crumbling world.

Meet the pro-natalists

Population growth is about to stall. Life is more competitive and complex than ever. Kids born today will face untold challenges. And so… a bunch of elite couples have responded by…oh dear…breeding to produce a “super race” of designer babies, using eugenics practices that select for various mental, and otherwise, traits.

There we go. That’ll fix it.

These breeders call themselves pro-natalists. Their obsession has been dubbed hipster eugenics. And, of course, they are getting a lot of attention. Britain’s Telegraph and Guardian profiled the phenomenon, ditto Entrepreneur and Bloomberg.

Siobhan Costigan here in the membership crew alerted me to the pro-natalist movement. I’d picked up on whiffs of it. Then I dived in…

Far out.

The pin-ups for the movement are Simone and Malcolm Collins, a 30-something couple with three kids - Torsten, Octavian and Titan Invictus. The Collinses will tell you they offer a service to humanity by increasing the birth rate and optimizing the sort of new humans being born. They will have at least eight kids who will then, apparently, have eight kids and so on, such that in 11 generations the world will ooze with this superior bloodline. Malcolm told Business Insider that if they succeed (a heavy dose of fascism might do it!), "we could set the future of our species." Pretty generous of the guy, right?

Malcolm helpfully added:

"I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn't fix the problem, we could be gone."

The Collinses, both Republicans, used genetic testing for their embryos and, as Bloomberg reports, “created a spreadsheet with each embryo’s scores, weighting them according to their desired mental health traits”.

I find it gross. I find it un-human.

Separation - from nature, each other, the flow of life - has planted us here in this sadness. It’s left us feeling disconnected, lonely and put us in peril. The Collinses are applying separation - on spreadsheeted steroids - to “fix” it.

There’s also the inherent misogyny. It sees women as breeding machines whose job it is to repopulate the Earth.

It also has echos of Nazism. Although, Simone is careful to clarify:

“I’m not eliminating people. I mean, I’m eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me.”

😳

Of course it originates with the Tech Bros, is wholly Conservative and Elon has a part to play

Elon Musk and Joe Rogan have championed pro-natalism. Ditto Jeffrey Epstein who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Elon, who has 10 kids, told Tucker Carlson abortion and birth control will lead to the end of civilisation. He’s apparently obsessed with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a significant portion of the human population, and there are several interviews where he’s indicated the ambition to populate the world with his offspring.

A rash of tech bros, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, who is also a big pusher of the anti-ageing movement and is said to have sought blood transfusions from the young, are investing in reproductive technology startups.

It’s all so creepy.

I’ve watched a number of TV interviews with these guys. They nod to unsubstantiated claims that we need to increase the birth rate (!?), but mostly their enthusiasm smacks of an obsession with producing heirs.

I’ll leave it to you all to click on some of the links to read more about ALL THE LAYERS OF WRONGNESS going on here. But I want to get to my next and main point…

Mia Culpa: It’s part of a movement I’ve been sucked into somewhat

We can see parallels here with the tech billionaire prepper movement, as well as the “pissing off to Mars when we’ve broken things” movement. Indeed, it’s the same people investing in and driving it all. In all cases, it’s ultra-rich guys responding to the uncertainty and despair of the world by separating even further, conflating all the problems (they largely created) with the same consciousness they used to get us into the mess in the first place.

But less obvious are pro-natalism’s ties to some other connected movements, all of which I’ve covered here and on my podcast and that I’m now realising have spawned a sinister side.

The first is transhumanism.

The Collinses declare they are transhumanists, a movement that aims to merge human and machine capabilities to create superior beings.

Now, of course, I interviewed a leading transhumanist on Wild a few months back.

I did so at a stage of my enquiry where I sensed the whole thing smacked of eugenics, but I wasn’t quite confident in my understanding to really press the point. I did raise the concern I’ve flagged here a few times, namely that transhumanism also tries to fix the problem with the same consciousness…blah blah. My guest, Elise Bohan, largely sidestepped this point, using the argument that the horse had bolted, mere humans can’t solve the AI etc problems we’ve created, so we will need to apply more AI etc to fix the mess.

Which kind of confirmed the point, right?

The next is effective altruism, or EA.

Again, I’ve interviewed Head Honcho of this movement too - Will Macaskill.

And again, I ignored the niggling fear that applying a dogmatically utilitarian lens to problems is potentially problematic. I sipped the KoolAid somewhat, along with a lot of other podcasters, including Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. Wow, an approach that ropes in the ultra-rich tech dudes to give money to those in need! Cool!

But taken to an extreme, effective altruism is an excuse for getting as rich as possible, supposedly in order to give away as much as possible. And indeed, it’s been taken to its extreme. Exhibit A-Z, crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who was coached by Macaskill. After the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange company FTX, he admitted his professed devotion to EA principles was “not true, not really.”

Macaskill does not claim to be pro-natalist but he writes about declining birth rates and argues in his book - the one I travelled to Oxford to interview him on - for cloning or genetically optimising a small subset of the population to have "Einstein-level research abilities" to "compensate for having fewer people overall."

Finally, pro-natalism is longtermist

Longtermism holds that the welfare of future humans is as morally important – or more important – than the lives of current ones. Taken to extremes (again as it already has been) a little mass starvation now is justified if we can save the planet for later, engineer superior beings.

And, yep, I interviewed the main bro in this realm, too.

Again, the Collinses, Elon and others call themselves longtermists. It all fits with the idea of certain lineages surviving the apocolpse.

So, is there a problem here?

Well, yes, to the extent all of it - pro-natalism, EA, transhumanism, longtermism - is in many ways the One Movement and this One Movement could be described as one that sets out to take control of human evolution.

And who’s taking the control? Oh, that would be the one interconnected, vested crew of billionaire tech bros. The same ones hoarding resources to piss off to Mars and prep for the apocalypse.

The Business Insider article explained:

What these movements all have in common is a fixation on the future. And as that future starts to look more and more apocalyptic to some of the world's wealthiest people, the idea of pronatalism starts to look more heroic. It's a proposition uniquely suited to Silicon Valley's brand of hubris: If humanity is on the brink, and they alone can save us, then they owe it to society to replicate themselves as many times as possible.

These bros are also driving the AI movements. And the movement to put a six-month moratorium on "training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4”. The letter, signed by thousands of tech bros, was initiated by none other than longtermist organization The Future of Life Institute, which has a board stacked with…rich tech bros, including Elon.

The letter sounds like a moral idea. Except it’s not. I’ve been deep-diving down that hole, too (perhaps I’ll share some links on Sunday). As critics of this call for a moratorium have flagged, at no point is there a discussion happening in this vast, knotted movement about the concentration of power, the reproduction of systems of oppression, about damage to the information ecosystem, and about damage to the natural ecosystem (through profligate use of energy resources).

And this is the point of this whole rant, TBH. I wanted to flag how interconnected and powerful this One Movement has become. And highlight the misogynist, fascist undertones to it all. And to own the fact I’ve “platformed” some of these voices.

That said, I don’t think the thinkers, the academics, in this space are sinister. Will Macaskill’s intentions are good. Ditto Elise and Holden’s, I think. They are not making vast sums from their work. But their ideas have been co-opted by these powerful forces. A bit like Nietzsche and the Nazis. Like most of everything else.

I’m not sure how to round this all off. There is no pithy advice or philosophy I can plant. Yet.

Gotta run,

Sarah xx