Inside the dark, biohacked heart of silicon valley

April 10, 2021 11:47 AM

I think this is all a result of a complete detachment from authenticity by these tech founders. They present a version of themselves that isn’t real, and then, when they look in the mirror, they see how inauthentic they really are, and the only way they can handle the illusion they’ve created is through drugs,” said one Silicon Valley insider who often spends time with the biohacking-obsessed ultrarich. “It’s all synthetic and it’s all an illusion.” The pandemic only heightened this, with people slipping into more extreme activities in their quest for control.

One Silicon Valley founder who sold his company to Google years ago told me that the year that followed the sale—when he had gone from an average American worrying about paying rent each month to seeing seven zeros at the end of his bank account—was one of the most miserable times of his life. “You think it’s going to solve all these problems,” the founder told me, “but it just creates so many more issues, both psychologically and existentially. You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.”

posted by mecran01 (45 comments total)

In short, money didn't buy them happiness, so these folks are trying all kinds of other crazy things instead.
posted by moonbiter at 12:29 PM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Have they tried puppies? They should try puppies.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:35 PM on April 10, 2021 [32 favorites]

Just because you might be a brilliant programmer, for example, doesn’t mean that you can deal with sudden wealth, for example. That article reminds me of cult behavior, especially cult leader behavior. You have a great idea or insight. You want to share it with others. You do, and these others tell you how great your idea/insight is and how great you are. This idea/insight begins to generate wealth, for the others, but more for you. Now you are more than just a great thinker, you’re also rich, another major sign of greatness and success. More praise is lavished on you. At some point you begin to believe all this talk about you. In your own mind, you are the best. In a lot of cases, especially cults, these people go on to exploit the people around them, to continue the success and build it up even more. For some though, there is something in the back of their mind saying the opposite. You’re a fraud. How can you repeat that initial success? This doubt can turn into fear, and then something needs to happen to deal with that. The article seems to describe this situation. Authenticity begins with knowing who you really are and then being who you really are. We live in society that likes heroes, stars, people to look up to, admire, envy. The inauthenticity here begins when you start believing what others say about you. I worked at Apple, from 1980 to 1992. I never worked near Steve Jobs, but he was always in the background. What I heard about him basically led me to believe he was a jerk and an asshole. But for a whole lot of people, he was a genius, he had the great ideas and insights. The original Mac development group appeared to me to be more like a cult than an engineering department. And Jobs is still around with Apple execs dressing like him and trying to recreate his performances on stage. In another thread, here on the Blue, there is a discussion that keeps leading to “a job is just a job.” In the tech world, there appears to be added dimensions of a job is just a cult, and a job is just an authoritarian regime.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:36 PM on April 10, 2021 [17 favorites]

What's disappointing is how banal their depravity is. Microdosing and Soylent? That's just pathetic.
Our techno-Neros need to do better than this to keep us entertained.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:45 PM on April 10, 2021 [30 favorites]

This is the sort of thing that happens when people can't face up to the fact that, more than hard work, more than grit or talent or brilliance, nearly everything someone has in life came down to chance.
posted by tclark at 12:45 PM on April 10, 2021 [49 favorites]

I think SJV culture has also dug itself a trap by being soooo juvenophilic. And still, age comes.
posted by clew at 12:58 PM on April 10, 2021 [12 favorites]

Have they tried puppies? They should try puppies.

It's gonna be either puppies or kleenex boxes for shoes, and it's a crapshoot which one you're gonna get with each techbro zillionaire.
posted by rhizome at 1:04 PM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Puppies for shoes: do not want
posted by clew at 1:07 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Clearly fuzzy bunny slippers (no bunnies actually harmed) is the acceptable compromise.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:08 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

You have a great idea or insight. You want to share it with others. You do, and these others tell you how great your idea/insight is and how great you are. This idea/insight begins to generate wealth, for the others, but more for you. Now you are more than just a great thinker, you’re also rich, another major sign of greatness and success.

It's funny, and this snippet does it too: having a great idea or two doesn't make you a great thinker. Frankly, for a prominent example, Zuckerberg's only great idea was keeping 51%+ of FB shares. Everything else is who-gives-a-shit and could have been done by anybody else.

Watch how smoothly the discourse segues though: idea > wealth > thinker. Gonna have to stop you right there, partner. :)
posted by rhizome at 1:12 PM on April 10, 2021 [27 favorites]

This is what happens when you huff your own farts to the point you believe the bullshit.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:16 PM on April 10, 2021 [11 favorites]

Introducing puppies to these people will just ruin puppies.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 1:59 PM on April 10, 2021 [19 favorites]

Whenever these stories pop up I always think of Marcus Aurelius 'depriving' himself by sleeping on a board to show that he was above the pleasures he could afford as an emperor.

And then fucking off and leading armies and killing various people around the empire.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 2:02 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

I hate being one of those people who spots naive errors in drug journalism.
posted by Glomar response at 2:19 PM on April 10, 2021 [10 favorites]

Wealth is wasted on the rich
posted by polymodus at 3:03 PM on April 10, 2021 [22 favorites]

You are a person with a snow-job
You got a fancy "gotta go" job
Where the cocaine decisions that you make today
Will mean that millions somewhere else
Will do it your way

- Frank Zappa, "Cocaine Decisions"
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:04 PM on April 10, 2021 [16 favorites]

I feel like one of the means of dealing with the reality-shattering effects of sudden wealth would be to give away everything you don't need for you and your loved ones to live a comfortable life. Figure out how much you need to live relatively well for the rest of your days and the rest goes to making the world a better place. For the everything-is-an-engineering-problem set, there's even an organization to help you figure out where to put your dollars.
posted by treepour at 3:52 PM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Based on a quick Google, if investments grow at 3%, which I'm under the impression is conservative, you can pay yourself $1,000,000/yr for the rest of your life with ~$35,000,000. Which, in certain professions that don't require you to be a monster, is fairly possible to accumulate.
posted by rhizome at 4:16 PM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Becoming "rich", for no real reason,is weird.
posted by Windopaene at 4:19 PM on April 10, 2021

Or you could just swallow molten gold and get the job over fast and have both a use for your wealth and a get out plan in one go.

There was once an article in how the very, very rich in Rome spent their wealth, and it argued that as they couldn't actually spend it fast enough on what it was in existence, they just created new categories of desirable slaves to outbid each other on. And went big into fish ponds.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 4:20 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

Figure out how much you need to live relatively well for the rest of your days

If you knew what you needed to do to live relatively well, wouldn't this be a non-issue? That's what I got from "You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore." Like Buzz Aldrin facing depression and addiction after returning from the moon because his Mission was over, except in this case the Mission is earning a lot of money and you've already done that.

Also I really really dislike the portrayal of these Dark Extremes(TM) for a number of reasons, one being they're very obviously trying extremely hard to make fairly boring ones sound as edgy as possible.
posted by ToddBurson at 4:41 PM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

real-time sugar monitoring devices you inject into your arm

Are they talking about continuous glucose monitors such as Dexcom and the like? Because that's a weird way to describe it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:58 PM on April 10, 2021 [5 favorites]

Are they talking about continuous glucose monitors such as Dexcom and the like? Because that's a weird way to describe it.

Given some of the other Dark Extremes(TM) are drinking shakes, "calculating ketones", and hunting, I would not at all be surprised.
posted by ToddBurson at 5:05 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.

Like Mae West said, "I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better." Poverty sucks, and rich people without imaginations are still comfortable, at the end of the day. So long as they don't hurt anyone else in their drugged-out race to an inevitable death, it's hard to see what the problem is. At least Hsieh didn't kill anyone else, thankfully. And when the money gets spent on exploiting or hurting people — exchanging money for young people's blood, say, or sex trafficking for scholarships and MIT buildings — then society has an obligation to intercede and put a stop to it.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:28 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

So long as they don't hurt anyone else in their drugged-out race to an inevitable death, it's hard to see what the problem is.

Well, mainly, that they aren't paying out a decent amount of that money to taxes, with the result that the rest of us are suffering from a lack of things like upgraded infrastructure, free health care, adequate social and economic support for all, etc. etc. In other words they're either hoarding our country's money or wasting it on that sort of stupid crap. In my opinion they could kill themselves off for a lot less money, and let the rest of us have some of it to make everyone else's life better.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:37 PM on April 10, 2021 [25 favorites]

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

- William Gibson, Count Zero
posted by temancl at 6:02 PM on April 10, 2021 [34 favorites]

So when a tech bro tries to alter their body it's "bio-hacking" but when a trans person does it, it's "unnatural" and "an affront to god".
posted by SansPoint at 7:03 PM on April 10, 2021 [49 favorites]

In short, money didn't buy them happiness, so these folks are trying all kinds of other crazy things instead.

They are using money to buy the crazy things though. Probably still not making them happy.
posted by hrpomrx at 7:46 PM on April 10, 2021

IV drip bars for recovering from hangovers are becoming a thing.

" they just created new categories of desirable slaves to outbid each other on. And went big into fish ponds."
This reminds me so much of NFTs.

They should make some sort of bitcoin-y NFT where instead of owning people digitally, you sponsor them and help improve their lives. "My impoverished worker portfolio is looking great--my percentages of workers who don't take government assistance is SO MUCH BETTER than yours, Roger."

I suppose taxes could also serve that function.
posted by mecran01 at 8:28 PM on April 10, 2021 [10 favorites]

Seems to me like they're just trying to bullshit into reality the SF dreams of their adolescence, as they did with their capitalist ones, only--as with reality generally, e.g., hyperloops--it turns out it takes more than bullshit.
posted by praemunire at 9:05 PM on April 10, 2021 [6 favorites]

Wealth is wasted on the rich

If it wasn't being wasted then who would call it wealth?
posted by flabdablet at 9:29 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

I was watching Coffezilla's channel on Youtube and he was ripping pretty hard into Elizabeth "Theranos" Holmes, about how her entire public persona was a lie, including dressing black (a la Steve Jobs) and talk in deliberately slower lower voice (which is NOT her natural speaking voice)

One wonders if one HAD to be a psychopath to succeed in Silicon Valley.
posted by kschang at 11:15 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Dunno I microdosed LSD (not LED ducking autocorrect) and it was the opposite of escapism. More of a "wait why would I yoke even the antsy fringes of psychedelic experience under capitalism". Maybe it's different for CEOs.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:04 AM on April 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

"Microdosing," lol. Back in my day they called it "being a functional addict." My boss at one of my first office jobs used to microdose from a flask all the time.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:57 AM on April 11, 2021 [24 favorites]

Mammon
posted by DJZouke at 5:18 AM on April 11, 2021

One thing I really became aware of while living in the Middle East is how piles of loose money really attracts armies of consultants and other upscale hucksters.

This interesting review of longevity research attempts to draw clicks by drawing upon the narcissistic mad scientist view of the silicon valley wealthy: "Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will"

It's a really interesting overview of longevity research, but the web version title sort of invokes images of Silicon Valley CEOs wandering the streets of San Francisco at night and feasting on young clubbers.
posted by mecran01 at 6:57 AM on April 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

mecran01: "Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will"

So that's where Qanon got it from. Take something that's actually happening, change most of the details so that it becomes scientifically ridiculous, and say that Tom Hanks and Nancy Pelosi are doing it.
posted by clawsoon at 8:21 AM on April 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

So long as they don't hurt anyone else in their drugged-out race to an inevitable death, it's hard to see what the problem is.

That for anyone to be the thing known as rich, a whole lot more have to be the thing known as poor.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:28 AM on April 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

This whole bio-hacking and trans-humanism and the obsession with the singularity etc., is giving me the vibes of eugenics. It's all going to end badly. Now with Crispr becoming more mainstream; how long before these guys start funding all kinds of nonsense with their money?
posted by indianbadger1 at 11:04 AM on April 11, 2021 [5 favorites]

indianbadger1: This whole bio-hacking and trans-humanism and the obsession with the singularity etc., is giving me the vibes of eugenics. It's all going to end badly. Now with Crispr becoming more mainstream; how long before these guys start funding all kinds of nonsense with their money?

The best evidence we have so far is that 1,271 genetic variants all added together explain 7-10% of variance in cognitive performance, and 40% of that effect goes away when you take siblings into account, and those variants don't explain anything about non-European populations, and CRISPR keeps editing genes it shouldn't when it's tried in mammals...

...which is all to say that I'm not too worried about actually-successful bio-hacking eugenics any time soon. You're going to have to edit hundreds of genes to have even a tiny effect, and each of those edits is likely to introduce hundreds of harmful mutations.

Although... even if it fails, the attempt to do eugenics is likely to have horrible effects. So... yeah... can't argue with that.
posted by clawsoon at 11:47 AM on April 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

the new drug of choice, dimethyltryptamine (DMT)

The sad thing is that DMT has been revived every few years as "the new drug" and "the 10-minute trip" and "a year of psychotherapy in a day" and so on for the last 60 years. They always think this time it's different...
posted by meehawl at 12:53 PM on April 11, 2021 [7 favorites]

@clawsoon: Although... even if it fails, the attempt to do eugenics is likely to have horrible effects.

I am more worried about the failures than any successes from this, to be honest. Even if not outright failures, at least unintended consequences.

The main thing I have come to realize is that people trained as Engineers (me being one of them) are really terrible when it comes to thinking about and dealing with biological systems; especially at a macro level. The complexity is really overwhelming, especially the interconnectedness (which is where a lot of the unintended consequences come from). When the first instinct is to always reduce the problem to : assume a spherical cow …
posted by indianbadger1 at 1:49 PM on April 11, 2021 [10 favorites]

In the minds of some software engineers, biology is mostly done by people who were too stupid for a CS degree, so they don’t take it seriously enough as a discipline to be able to tell whether they’re in Dunning-Kruger land.
posted by en forme de poire at 6:28 AM on April 12, 2021 [6 favorites]

They should make some sort of bitcoin-y NFT where instead of owning people digitally, you sponsor them and help improve their lives. "My impoverished worker portfolio is looking great--my percentages of workers who don't take government assistance is SO MUCH BETTER than yours, Roger."

This too was kind of done in ancient Rome via the patron-client system. Beyond slaves and physical holdings, another way for the wealthy to show off their wealth was to maintain vast networks of clients, people who were given food, loans, legal representation, etc. in exchange for loyalty and service. The excellent History of Rome podcast has an episode about the daily life of an average Roman citizen, which starts with making the rounds of your patrons for the day's food.

In fiction, this reminds me of the (also excellent) SF book The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It's set in the near-future and there the rich have developed a kind of investment indentured servitude whereby they sponsor the life/education of promising young poor people in exchange for labor/a share of their future earnings/developments.
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:42 PM on April 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

the rich have developed a kind of investment indentured servitude whereby they sponsor the life/education of promising young poor people in exchange for labor/a share of their future earnings/developments.

This is fascinating. Reminds me of Substack.
posted by mecran01 at 2:44 AM on April 13, 2021