Effective Altruism and the Logic of the Code

Give me a lever long enough, and I can move not just the world - but the future.

Hello Dark Markets subscribers, and welcome to your weekly draft preview of “Stealing the Future: SBF and the Tech Utopians.”

One element of writing a book that’s different from writing an essay, is that you have both more space and more obligation to lay a firm foundation - to describe in detail, weight, and contour each of the building blocks that will form the final whole. This section is my first and partial pass on setting up “Effective Altruism” as a continuation of the neoliberal mode of Silicon Valley ideology, one centered on measurement, value, prediction, and, above all, the market.

As always, I’m eager for your feedback. For premium subscribers, a fresh invitation to the Money and Death Social Club can be found below.

Reading time: 11 minutes

Prompt: A charitable robot manipulating the flow of time through a 3-d model to ensure that the future is beautiful.

What Was Effective Altruism?

During his fleeting arc across the public eye, Sam Bankman-Fried’s character was presented to the public as a duality in familiar tension - a rich guy whose real desire was to make the world a better place. This was an aging trope by 2020, one rooted deep in the history and mythos of Bankman-Fried’s Silicon Valley milieu. He seemed destined to walk in the footsteps of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, whose wealth and power were mere side-effects of their world-changing creative passions. Later, Bankman-Fried would come to look more like Adam Neuman of WeWork, or Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, who leveraged the tech world ethos, but couldn’t deliver the goods.

But while times were good, Bankman-Fried went to the world with a more refined and formalized version of the uniquely Californian idea of “doing well by doing good.” It was called “Effective Altruism,” and it made getting disgustingly rich seem like the moral equivalent of becoming a monk.

First and foremost, Bankman-Fried appeared in the media as a youthful business genius, exuberant and fresh-faced, yet possessed of insights about finance and the world that let him, it was often implied, run circles around stodgy traditional finance institutions. This genius was rooted in mathematics, and specifically in the art of asset trading, where ratios and probabilities formed the foundation of strategies that could make a man rich just by moving some numbers around on a very bespoke spreadsheet. It took only two years, though, before this 30 year old mathematical genius blossomed into an authority on other subjects, notably visiting Washington, D.C. repeatedly to speak to U.S. regulators on financial regulation, where he was regarded as an ‘adult in the room’ on the contentious question of cryptocurrency.

As it broadened in scope, Bankman-Fried’s genius reinforced the second thing the public knew about him: that he wanted to do good. In fact, while he had found himself the head of a large offshore financial entity, Bankman-Fried told anyone who would listen that his work was entirely subordinate to his mission to improve the world.

In this two-sidedness, a genius and a do-gooder, Bankman-Fried embodied the latest iteration of a Silicon Valley archetype that stretched back to the 1970s, when figures like Andy Grove and Steve Wozniak burned their ties and used speculative venture capital to start idea-driven companies that genuinely revolutionized the world. Since that era, the duality of the California hippie and the California tech genius have been twinned scars on the American national consciousness, aspirational figures whose core value proposition was that they could “do well by doing good.” As we will see, this duality occluded other figures: The California weapons contractor and the California eugenicist were equally constitutive to the psychic cast of Silicon Valley.

Bankman-Fried took the hippie-capitalist California Ideology to a new extreme. He had only founded his cryptocurrency empire, the story went, because he thought that crypto was a big opportunity to make a lot of money, which he could then channel to charitable causes. This principle, known as “earn to give,” had become one of the major tenets of a philanthropic movement known as Effective Altruism, which had grown out of academic philosophy, and had become incredibly appealing to many in the worlds of technology. But a concept even more core to EA was right in its name: the movement broadly held that a great deal of philanthrophy and charity around the world was being used ineffectively. They believed that there was a duty, particularly for those in the developed and rich parts of the world, to spend their resources as wisely as possible.

The Life You Can Save: Reading Peter Singer

This imperative - in fact, the entire EA movement - was inspired by an ethical thought experiment put forward by philosopher Peter Singer in the 2009 book The Life You Can Save.

“Imagine you’re walking across a park,” as Singer explained the thought experiment to Ezra Klein, founder of the news website Vox in 2019. “Somewhere in that park there’s a pond. You know the pond is quite shallow, but you see something splashing in the pond. When you look closer, you’re shocked to find that it’s a small child … Your next thought is, I better run down to the pond, jump into the pond, and grab the child. Not hard to do. No risk to me because the pond is shallow.