👁️ Luigi Mangione: Disillusioned Techno-Rationalist?
Did the UHC assassin snap after a youth wasted on formal systems modelling?
Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news roundup, with apologies for slight lateness. This week’s edition was delayed so I could process some late-breaking revelations about Luigi Mangione, the alleged UHC assassin, which have a frankly uncanny resonance with my book on Sam Bankman-Fried.
For a time, you see, Mangione was seemingly influenced by strands of the same Silicon Valley “rationalism” that turned SBF into a degenerate criminal. Mangione, by strange contrast, may have realized the hollowness of the ideology, and broken from it in a very decisive way.
Read on for that. But first, some news in brief:
OpenAI Whistleblower Dead by Suicide; Elon Musk Mocks SEC Settlement Offer; How SoftBank Got Her Groove Back; FTX Repayments Scheduled; Readers Have Different Brains.
OpenAI Whistleblower Dies in Apparent Suicide
In a story which for I am sure reasons has not been covered much by the U.S. business press, a 26 year old OpenAI researcher named Suchir Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. According to the BBC, police found no evidence of foul play.
Read More: New York Times vs. OpenAI: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Balaji left OpenAI in August after four years as a researcher, and had participated in an interview with the New York Times, published in October, in which he stated that he believed the company had engaged in copyright infringement. OpenAI is, of course, tangled in numerous lawsuits from news organizations and others who argue that it used privately owned material as training data for its models.
In what may have been his final post on Twitter, Balaji made the interesting claim that he came to this conclusion as he belatedly learned how copyright worked. His forward-looking statemens and relatively light tone here seem notable under the circumstances.
Elon Musk Mocks SEC Settlement Offer in Twitter Probe
Elon Musk has disclosed a settlement letter sent to him by the SEC, the apparent conclusion of a lengthy investigation into his purchase of Twitter (now officially X, The Everything App).
As summarized by Ars Technica, this isn’t the first time Musk has treated securities laws as an optional annoyance, perhaps most notoriously in his dipshit joke that he was “taking Tesla private at $420,” when in fact he had no such “funding secured.” In this case, the allegation - now apparently proven to the SEC’s satisfaction - is that Musk didn’t properly disclose his intentions to buy Twitter before he started accumulating stock. This is, it turns out, a form of insider trading.
(Unrelated, but does anyone have recent proof of life on Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, the Everything App, Where It All Happens?)
SoftBank Plans $100B Investment in U.S.
I think we can all agree that Masayoshi Son is an investing genius, who turned an early bet on AliBaba into a huge Saudi-funded investment slush fund and, in turn, a majority stake in WeWork, which is now a successful international real estate arbitrage and development firm.
[Hand to earpiece] I’m sorry, you’re telling me what now?
Look regardless of setting several billion dollars on fire betting on a charlatan, Masayoshi Son is a genius. Masayoshi Son is a genius. And he is going to invest $100 billion in AI in the U.S. Or apparently it’s $200 billion, because Trump is a great negotiator. It’s not clear where the money’s coming from, because Softbank only has $30 billion in cash on hand. But anyway, those investments will all be big winners!
Because Masayoshi Son doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t make mistakes.
FTX Repayment Timeline Coming into Focus for Early 2025
FTX is expected to repay creditors starting within the first two months of next year. The first round of payouts will go to creditors with claims of under $50,000, who will need to set up an account and complete a KYC process at Kraken or BitGo, the exchanges being used to distribute the settlement. (As an old crypto head, Kraken’s role here is particularly delicious - they’re one of the oldest exchanges in the United States, and have been targetted by Gary Gensler’s SEC, despite having never lost customers’ money.)
This seems a fair time to reiterate that despite the claims of the lying, moronic sacks of shit at the New York Times and elsewhere, FTX victims are not getting a “full recovery” of their assets. They are getting a return of the U.S. dollar value of their digital assets in early November of 2022, which is roughly 85% less than those assets are worth today. They have been collectively robbed of, quite likely, multiple billions of dollars. Moreover, I have some visiblity into FTX creditor communities, and many, many of them have already been forced to sell their claims for significantly less than their face value.
Skilled Readers Have Different Brains
In a summary of academic phonetics research, researcher Mikail Rol reports that a survey of 1,000 participants revealed that stronger readers had more development in two left-hemisphere brain regions. One, the anterior temporal lobe, helps with associating and categorizing meaningful information, including not just text, but a cluster of visual, sensory, and motor inputs that constitute meaning. The other region that benefits from reading is Heschl’s gyrus on the upper temporal lobe, which hosts the auditory cortex, helping link sound to text.
In short, this is material evidence of the well-understood fact that reading isn’t just a process of absorbing and filing information, but one that connects many different data points, creates differential and related understanding, and even orients the reader in the physical world. Notoriously, Sam Bankman-Fried “would never read a book,” a viewpoint doubtless fueled and enabled by the Rationalist universe’s belief that information is nothing more than a catalog of facts, rather than a complex set of relationships that must be navigated by … reasoning.
Read More: What’s So Bad About Rationalism?
Luigi Mangione: Reformed Techno-Rationalist
Finally, there have been continuing developments in our understanding of Luigi Mangione, the alleged political assassin of United Healthcare CEO Bryan Thompson. I’m drawing here almost entirely from the work of Josh Citarella, who last week wrote the excellent piece CEO Murder and the Dark Enlightenment, which presciently argued that the extremist beliefs of figures like Curtis Yarvin led quite directly to broad-daylight murder, because its agenda entails the delegitimization of the rule of law.
Since that post, Mangione’s identity has become public, and there have been many revelations about his background and beliefs. This has primarily included debunking the fantasy that Mangione was some sort of Marxist revolutionary: in fact (and here’s why I’m writing about this at all), he was a well-paid technology developer from an elite background, and a seemingly very curious reader whose commitments, for a time, leaned hard into the strain of vaguely accelerationist, tech-utopian, rational-systems analysis that also defined Sam Bankman-Fried’s mileu at Stanford and MIT. In fact, according to Citarella, Mangione expressed sympathy for Effective Altruism.
Citarella appeared on an excellent episode of TrueAnon released Monday, laying out the details of Mangione’s political radicalization, to the extent that they have been uncovered, and making some reasonable speculative leaps. Citarella hasn’t yet written up his findings, so what follows is my rough attempt to summarize some highlights discussed in the interview.
Above all, as has been widely discussed, Mangione was from a very wealthy and privileged background, and had a promising future even in our increasingly foreclosed world. He attended an elite private high school, and founded a game-design startup. He graduated valedictorian, and gave a speech about artificial intelligence. Then he went on to the Ivy League, interned for the game design firm Firaxis, and eventually went to work as a full-time developer.
In other words, Mangione did everything he was supposed to do.
Then, as the Covid-19 pandemic set in, Mangione took advantage of the freedom of his work-from-home job to move to Hawaii, where Citarella reports he was a resident of the Surf Break co-living space. It was in a book club at Surf Break that Mangione read the Unabomber Manifesto, and, according to a Goodreads review, found some things to like about it.
Mangione was also something of a superfan of Substack writer Gurwinder Bhogal. Bhogal’s thought is very much in line with, if not formally a part of, the rationalist movement. Even more clearly, Bhogal’s thought dresses right-wing fascism up in techno-rationalist arguments, for instance using an odd TikTok subculture’s interest in the Menendez brothers to argue that empathy for the suffering of others is damaging and irrational - very much a “what are they giving themselves permission for?” moment. Gurwinder also argues that activists are irrational toddlers, which accords with Effective Altruism’s disdain for efforts at structural reform. Mangione was a high-tier subscriber, earning the privilege of exchanging emails with Bhogal, and even had a coaching call with the writer.
Read More: Making the Cages Bigger: The Peter Singer-Alice Crary Debate
This is, in short, another tentacle of the rationalist discourse that wants to morally justify the death and dispossession of the weak by the technology elite - the same message that eased Sam Bankman-Fried’s path to fraud. Mangione also followed the Twitter account “Based Beff Jezos” (ugh), one of the panderers willing to advance the argument that the world is like a piece of software, and that engineers should therefore be in charge of it. That these systems seem so often to fail was explained by Margaret Thatcher a half-century ago: the goal of rationalism, like neoliberalism, is not to change the system to serve the people, but to change people so that they interact with the system in the “correct” way.
These technical analyses of society, as Citarella rightly concludes, are also in service of massaging elite egos: “If you come from an elite background, you don’t want to accept a narrative of class conflict” as part of your understanding of history. Instead, the goal is a perfection that stands outside of, or perhaps against, history itself. This in turn is why many of the techno-rats are interested in evolutionary psychology: they want a source of truth beyond historical circumstance that provides evidence of “the nature of mankind.”
But Mangione’s interest in Bhogal and that ilk apparently peaked around 2021 or 2022. Citarella believes that something must have come after all of this, some further ideological turning, leading up to Mangione going “off the grid” in mid-2024. That is when he presumably devoted himself to crafting his 3D printed pistol and learning to use it. That 3D printed gun itself Citarella argues, was likely ideologically motivated, perhaps expressing for Mangione a final bit of hope that technology can enact some degree of reform - even if it the reform of destruction and death.
We will hopefully find out the truth soon enough, but I like Citarella’s theory of how Mangione was radicalized: maybe he realized that robots and AI were not in fact the solution to humanities problems, but have instead become part of our prison. Certainly it’s evocative that a onetime AI fan shot and killed a CEO known for putting AI in charge of health care decisions.
This, I think, is a path that could explain the genuine extremity of Mangione’s worldview and decisions. He spent his youth building the machine, then realized, with the shock of Neo awakening from the Matrix, that the benevolence of the machine is a lie.