👁️ J.D. Vance Wants to Turn Poor People into Biodiesel

We stan our first technofascist Veep! Also: was Synapse's bad AML as criminal as Tornado Cash's?

Nice eyeliner.

It’s been a hell of a weekend!

Obviously we had Joe Biden dropping out of the U.S. Presidential race and a likely Kamala Harris nomination. But far more interesting to me personally was the nomination of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential pick. This is of particular interest because, as Gil Duran writes for The New Republic, Vance is deeply influenced by Curtis Yarvin, formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, a self-described authoritarian, open racist, and generally grubby little worm of a man.

Moldbug is definitively not a “rationalist” (and he is rightly dismissive of A.I. Existential Risk). But he writes that he considers himself vaguely rationalist-adjecent, and there are certainly many common threads between Yarvin and the Yudkowskyite AI doomers.

The rationalists have been a major influence on Effective Altruism, all part of the “TESCREAL” ideological nexus pioneered by Ray Kurzweil, a man who, like Trump, loved making shit up. Kurzweil’s futurism and singularitarianism, in turn, has been a particularly major influence on Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who seem to have been the drivers behind Vance’s selection as VP.

According to Washington Spectator columnist Dave Troy, “This wasn’t Trump’s pick. This was Thiel and Musk, and was the condition of Musk's full endorsement and $45mm/month pledge. And ultimately they want to dispose of Trump and install Vance.”

In short, there is deep commonality between the techno-fascist right of New Silicon Valley and the techno-authoritarian center of Old Silicon Valley. That shouldn’t be surprising, since the fascists emerged directly from the ideological soil laid down by the centrists. And the centrists, people like EA founder Peter Singer, are very much about preserving power. If Sam Bankman-Fried weren’t in prison, it seems perfectly plausible he’d have gotten around to calling for the ethnic cleansing of San Francisco by now.

But back to Yarvin and Vance. As Duran points out, Yarvin has opined that the underclass should be liquified and turned into biodiesel, before clarifying that he was “joking.” His more serious idea, he clarifies, is to liquidate all poor people and upload their minds to a computer. This is only a slight variation on Kurzweil’s comically horseshit and deeply anti-human idea that eventually all people will be able to upload their consciousness to computers, a theory he developed mainly as a replacement for religion.

Anyway, it seems Yarvin has even less grasp of the relationship between computation and consciousness than a dumbass like Yudkowsky. Or, far more likely, Yarvin never cared about the feasibility of his plan and just enjoys fantasizing about killing people different than him, at scale. Because that’s where fascism really comes from – revenge fantasies driven by fear and ignorance.

Meanwhile, Musk himself may have crossed a certain kind of line with statements made during a taped conversation with noted stimulant addict Dr. Jordan Peterson. Musk said of his transgender child that she is “dead” after receiving gender affirming care. Of course, Musk’s daughter is very much alive, just disowned and alienated from her father.

I genuinely don’t think there’s much market in America for actively letting your own kid die on the street because they’re trans. Sure, there are plenty of people who will abstractly lobby to take rights from trans kids they don’t know, but force them to contemplate *never speaking to their child again,* as Elon apparently has chosen willingly, and they’re going to at least instinctively, if not consciously, find that repulsive.

All in all, it seems that between the Harris substitution and the Vance pick, the election game has entirely changed. Don’t get me wrong, Kamala sucks! But she likes to smile and she’s superficially relatable, while J.D. Vance is a 39 year old 5-foot-four man with zero swag who wants to spy on your menstrual cycle.

Admittedly I’m biased (or maybe the word is “hopeful.”). But there’s a real window here to drive a stake through the heart of these bizarre, neo-feudalist, techno-fascist freaks once and for all.

Is Synapse’s Lax AML Grounds for the same Criminal Prosecution as Tornado Cash?

In fintech news, Jason Mikula at Fintech Business Weekly continues to bear down on the Synapse/Evolve story, recently revealing that Synapse ran what amounted to a fake (or at best completely broken) AML/KYC system, including allowing overseas customers to sign up using registered agent addresses.

This is some crazy fuckin’ shit! It’s illegal under the Patriot Act! Which sucks, but still!

Apparently the bulk of the violations were related to crypto-onramp banking service called Juno, and some of the pressure to make the screening less diligent came from Mercury, an Andreessen-Horowitz backed banking middleware company.

I’ll let you read Jason’s meticulous reporting in detail, but in sum this demands we ask: should the people who created Synapse and Juno, and maybe the people who applied pressure to bypass AML controls, be criminally prosecuted for negligence?

Because what they did looks one hell of a lot like what the government is alleging of Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, creators of Tornado Cash. As I wrote recently for The Rage, Storm’s prosecutors are in essence arguing that his negligence in failing to stop North Korean hackers from using the service is tantamount to engaging in criminal conspiracy.

It seems like what Synapse did was a lot worse!

More Thiel-Backed Eugenics: Orchid and Noor Siddiqui

The politics of screening embryos for genetic disorders is really complicated. There is very contentious space for debate about exactly how much intervention is appropriate if you, say, discover your fetus has a genetic abnormality.

But none of those hard questions, please, for the Peter Thiel-linked Orchid, an embryo-testing startup featured last week in a writeup by The Information. Orchid is pretty explicitly about eugenics! And Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui proudly advertises that she’s a Thiel Fellow, which in theory means she never finished college. Remember our other Peter Thiel-affiliated eugenicists, the absolutely freaky-deaky Collins family.

Discouraging people from attending college is a good way for Thiel to make sure all his little subalterns are too ignorant to understand the stakes of what he’s doing, which is how you wind up with Siddiqui just straight up saying the goal of Orchid is not to reduce disease, but to make babies “genetically blessed.”

That’s just plain old Hitler shit. You’re just doing Hitler.

FTX Settles with CFTC for $12.7 Billion

The bankrupt FTX estate will hand over $4 billion in disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and $8.7 in restitution to victims to settle a CFTC-filed civil fraud suit. This is good news particularly for FTX’s many victims, who got royally screwed in the main bankruptcy proceeding, thanks to the practice of marking down assets to the dollar value on the bankruptcy date.

Despite misrepresentations so bad they look like a conspiracy involving New York Times reporters with undisclosed familial ties to the Bankman-Fried clan, FTX victims have actually been compensated for roughly 25% of the value of their stolen assets.

Worldcoin Misses its Goal of One Billion Users by 994 Million

When it was announced in 2021, Worldcoin said it would register 1 billion users by 2023. It recently reported it has actually registered 6 million, falling short by 994 million. Fundamentally, this is because Sam Altman, Worldcoin’s most visible founder, is a fabulist and huckster in the tradition of Elon Musk and P.T. Barnum, who to date continues to lie about OpenAI’s development of artificial intelligence just as creatively as he lied about Worldcoin’s plan to create a unique proof of human identity.

It’s worth pointing out that in this case Altman embodies the deceptive duality of the A.I. ecosystem. Worldcoin, you see, was superficially conceived as a way to fairly distribute “Universal Basic Income” after the robots OpenAI is building inevitably take over. So it’s a complete fantasy, on both sides, each fantasy constructing and supporting the other.

For what it’s worth, I predicted this specific failure back in 2021, because Worldcoin’s methods aren’t scaleable. Their use of a device to scan eyeballs to prove humanity requires staff and equipment at a scale that don’t make economic sense, and never did.