Status Updates From More Everything Forever: AI...

“Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?” author Charles Stross asks. “It’s because these guys [tech billionaires] read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map.”

when the tech billionaires and their hangers-on look at the idea of colonialism, they don’t see genocide and exploitation. They see a frontier where they can escape regulation, along with any other consequences for their actions here on Earth.

"The rapacious logic of colonialism pervades the dreams of technological salvation in space."

(The understatement of the book).

The entire US tech industry is overwhelmingly white—68.5% of all people in the field—and overwhelmingly male. Less than 36% of all tech workers are women, only 7.4% are Black, and only 1.7% are Black women.

Technological salvation is being used as an excuse to steer society in a dangerous direction, in the service of an impossible future. Breaking free of these visions means understanding them. For the tech elite, these are visions of transcendence, of escape. But they hold no promise of escape for the rest of us, only nightmares closing in.

The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more—to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, to justify any action they might want to take—all in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come.