What happens when people become so obsessed with technological salvation that they stop seeing society as a society? You don’t have to wonder anymore! In this episode, we examine the strange world of the Zizians and their connections to the broader cultures of Effective Altruism and AI boosterism.
We also talk about Rationalism , which feels like a religion, but it’s not.
We argue that while many of these movements begin with the language of reason, which of course would lead to efficiency and then that would just naturally help humanity, they often end up reproducing a deeply, DEEPLY DEEPLY anti-democratic politics, pretty much authoritarian, that treats human beings as variables to be managed rather than citizens with rights and power. Through a Law and Political Economy lens, we ask whether the crises these movements claim to solve, economic insecurity and even AI risk, are actually products of political and economic choices rather than natural conditions. Yeah, they look like all the people explaining how this is awful are explaining how awful it is by standing on our necks; they COULD get up at any time.
Scarcity is increasingly manufactured through privatization and concentrated ownership, so why is the proposed solution always more technology rather than more democracy? Why are billionaires promising Fully Automated Luxury Communism while accumulating unprecedented private control over the infrastructure of everyday life?
Most importantly, we explore the collapse of the distinction between the virtual and the real. Online ideologies now shape markets, elections, institutions, and violence in the physical world. The internet is not separate from society. The virtual world is the real world, and the politics emerging from it deserve serious scrutiny.
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