TESCREAL

I need to write something proper about Timnit Gebru & Émile P. Torres’ coinage “TESCREAL” to describe the weirdnerd ideological cluster of transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and longtermism. I find the acronym very useful in registering how these ideologies are entangled and reflect a shared lineage, though I think Torres’ tendency to suggest that these are Just All One Thing is a misleading overstatement. If we are going to confront this and neighboring movemements like neoreaction and Gray Tribe et cetera, it is important to make distinctions.

Key resources

• The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares is a brief introduction by Torres
• The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence — Gebru & Torres’ paper detailing their thesis
• What Is the “TESCREAL Bundle”? Answering Some Frequently Asked Questions — a long article by Torres linking to other resources
• Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through AGI is a video of a talk by Gebru & Torres

Useful commentaries

• The Californian Ideology talks about an adjacent precursor ideology; back in 1995 it presciently described and critiqued the culture of the “tech” industry; I recommend it to people every chance I get
• Reagan-Era Gen X Dogma Has No Place in Silicon Valleys places the current iteration of Californian Ideology tech pseudolibertarianism in historical context
• Aragorn Eloff connects TESCREAL to the Californian Ideology through Dr. Timothy Leary in a way I find illuminating
• The Eugenicists Are Always Oozing Out Of The Woodwork & Nick Bostrom, Longtermism, and the Eternal Return of Eugenics describe recognizing the scent of “scientific” racism in this sphere
• Extropia’s Children is a long exploration of the movement and its culture from Jon Evans, who is even more concerned than I am that Torres’ analysis lumps things together too much
• The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence is an accessible introduction to why this movement is so fascinated by the prospect of superintelligent artificial intelligence
• Morphological Freedom and the Construction of Bodymind Malleability from Eugenics to Transhumanism is a recent doctoral dissertation by Joshua Giles Earle which vigorously criticizes the moral & pragmatic assumptions woven deep into the ideology
• An Imagined and Incomplete Conversation about “Consciousness” and “AI,” Across Time from Damien P. Williams (my favorite single commentator on this territory) conjures a Socratic dialogue which starts with Descartes and ends with the the current iteration of the TESCREAL crew
• Among The AI Doomsayers is a generous-spirited portrait of the San Francisco Bay Area scene
• Notes on e/acc principles and tenets is a mortifying sort-of manifesto for “effective accelerationism” from within the scene, advocating “having faith in the dynamical adaptation process and aiming to accelerate the advent of its asymptotic limit; often reffered to as the technocapital singularity”, seeking to hasten as much as possible capitalist robots replacing the human species
• The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paideía of the American Tech Elite is not really about the specifically TESCREAL sphere, but is adjacent in a useful way
• The Guy I Almost Was is a delicious fictionalized memoir about brushing against the scene back in the early 1990s and realizing how it was more libertarian than libertine