Introducing the Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter

Documenting the ongoing collapse of civilization in realtime!

Hello, friends! Welcome to what I’m now calling the Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter. Its motto will be: “Stop doomscrolling and just read this!”

We’ll explore a wide range of timely, pressing, important issues: the TESCREAL ideologies and their massive influence within Silicon Valley, the ways in which tech “utopians” are pushing a pro-extinctionist worldview, the societal implications of generative AI systems like ChatGPT, as well as sundry other topics like catastrophic climate change, the sixth mass extinction event, microplastics and environmental toxins, the global rise of fascism, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the genocide in Gaza and its connection to Big Tech, etc. If it’s dystopian, then you can read about it here: your one-stop shop for all things relating to the secular apocalypse!

Put differently: some people have suggested that we might be the first species to document its own extinction. The aim of this newsletter is to provide that documentation as it happens: to catalogue, systematize, archive, and examine the various ways in which the Silicon Valley elites and Trumpian fascists in DC are catapulting us over the precipice of oblivion.

Toward this end, I will provide a mix of news and personal reflections about our collective proximity to global catastrophe — a kind of realtime Doomsday Clock. We’ll also explore crucial philosophical questions like: What does it mean to live a good and meaningful life in the midst of collapse? How does one maintain a degree of equanimity as civilization inches toward the sinkhole of ruination? If our species were to go extinct in the coming decades, how tragic would that be and for what reasons? Might there even be — gulp! — an upside to our disappearance?¹

Over the coming months, Realtime Techpocalypse will grow into a sizable book — each chapter being a few articles published serially in this newsletter — that future historians can peruse to better understand what was going on in the mid-morning of the 21st century. By subscribing, you can read this book as it’s being written and influence what is written, as I’m perpetually interested in differing views about the future, how I might be wrong in fundamental ways, and why things might turn out much better than I, based on my understanding of science, philosophy, and politics, currently expect.

(I’m reminded of Lewis Mumford’s statement that he’d die quite happy if his tombstone epitaph were to read: “This man was an absolute fool. Everything that he predicted would come to pass, has not come to pass.” I very much agree!)

TESCREAL Apostate (A Little About Me)

I’m a philosopher and historian with a master’s degree in neuroscience. For the past 15 years, my work has focused primarily on existential threats to humanity and civilization, although I’ve also written a good deal about AI ethics. My latest book is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. I published a short summary back in 2023, and also recorded myself reading it, if you’d prefer to listen:

From about 2009 to 2019, I was an active participant in the TESCREAL movement, where “TESCREAL” — a term I coined during a collaboration initiated by Dr. Timnit Gebru — stands for transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism. I was a true believer in the TESCREAL worldview. I really was convinced that our ultimate goal as a species ought to be developing advanced technologies to radically reengineer humanity, create a new posthuman species, spread beyond Earth and climb the Kardashev scale, and ultimately establish a sprawling multi-galactic civilization full of trillions and trillions of digital people living “happy” lives in high-resolution virtual reality worlds. I thought this would lead to utopia.

Why did I find this eschatological vision compelling? Because there’s a certain seduction to big numbers (“trillions and trillions”) and grand utopian visions of the future, and TESCREALism offers to fulfill the very same promises of traditional religion: immortality, the abolition of suffering, endless pleasures, radical abundance, and cosmic delights beyond our wildest imaginations. As someone who grew up in a deeply religious evangelical community, TESCREALism perfectly fit the religion-shaped hole left behind when I apostatized my Christian faith. For a discussion of the TESCREAL ideologies and religion, see this interview with Gil Duran (of The Nerd Reich) and Rev. Otis Moss III:

By 2017, I had become a research assistant for Ray Kurzweil, who was writing The Singularity is Nearer at the time (a title that always reminded me of the sequel to Dumb and Dumber), and I spent several months in 2019 as a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. In case anyone doubts my street credibility, I’m listed as the sixth most prolific contributor to the “existential risk” literature, just behind the execrable Nick Bostrom, and I used to write for the Future of Life Institute, which has since scrubbed my name from their website.

Why? Because I very publicly lost my faith in the TESCREAL religion. I’m now extremely critical of its cockamamie techno-eschatology built around a utilitarian worship of “future value” (in the form of digital people living in vast computer simulations), and have published extensively on how the TESCREAL ideologies are philosophically flawed and profoundly dangerous. Indeed, as I’ve emphasized in many recent articles, they are intimately bound up with a pro-extinctionist vision of the future in which posthuman beings, most likely taking the form of AIs, disempower, marginalize, and ultimately replace our species. See below for a talk on why I left the TESCREAL movement:

Fun fact: in late 2022, I stumbled upon a racist email from Bostrom, which catalyzed the closure of his Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford last year. Am I proud of this fact? Yes. I was also the first to draw attention to and criticize Nick Beckstead’s claim that, from a longtermist perspective, we should prioritize the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. These are now routinely mentioned in critiques of TESCREALism.

No One Is Steering the Ship of Civilization

Although I think it’s important to focus on the TESCREAL ideologies because (a) they have become enormously powerful and influential within Silicon Valley and the US government, and (b) it is a relatively neglected topic, the Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter will critically examine issues far beyond this. As noted above, we’ll also explore geopolitics, the environmental crisis, and the aforementioned philosophical questions about living well in a rapidly unraveling world. (Reader input is very much welcome — if there’s anything you believe I should cover, email me at philosophytorres@gmail.com.)

In my view, our contemporary predicament can be described something like this: everyone is busy rowing the ship of civilization while almost no one is keeping an eye on where exactly this ship is headed. We desperately need more big-picture, bird’s-eye accounts of where we are right now, how we got here, and where the hell we’re going. That’s what I aim to do in this newsletter. I will alternate between zooming in to the details and zooming out to the broader context, in hopes of familiarizing ourselves with both the trees and the forest.

I’m reminded here of the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars’ famous metaphilosophical claim (that is, a claim about the nature of philosophy itself) that “the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”² This has inspired and influenced my 15 years of research and journalistic writing, and it will guide the Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter moving forward. It’s also, I hope, what will make this newsletter a unique voice in the cacophony of bloggers, commentators, political analysts, and public intellectuals, all of whom are screaming for your attention.

Paid Subscription Mode

Finally, I’ll be transitioning the newsletter to a partly subscriber-only model. I am hoping to support myself entirely through writing, and would need only about 300 paid subscribers at just $7 per month ($3 below the average monthly charge) to live on writing alone. (That’s it!) If you’re already subscribed to the newsletter and have an extra two or three cups of coffee to spare each month, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.³ The benefits to paying include:

• Subscriber-only articles, which will be about 50% of all articles. I plan on publishing once or twice a week, alternating between reflections articles and a news articles.

• A monthly Zoom chat with me and other paid subscribers about anything relating to the eschatological themes of this newsletter. (Should be, you know, “fun”!)

I may also experiment with recording 20-minute weekly “round-up” videos in which I summarize key developments and conclusions from the most recent articles.

I’m excited about this new endeavor, and hope you’ll join me for the sinuous journey ahead. You can also listen to me and the comedian Kate Willett talk about these issues on our Dystopia Now podcast. We poke fun at the ideologies of Silicon Valley, because in a laugh-or-cry situation, we choose to laugh!

Wishing everyone all the best, and see you on the other side.

1. Alarmingly, a growing number of philosophers are suggesting that there might be. See, for example, this book by Todd May, and this article by Roger Crisp.

2. Italics added.

3. If you don’t have the money to pay for an article that you’re very interested in, email me and I’ll send it to you for free. :-)