Techno-Rationalism and the Denial of Death

There's a dark secret at the root of Effective Altruism and related ideas. Also: a new forum for supporters.

Happy Sunday, and welcome to Dark Markets. As you may have heard, I now have a contract for the Sam Bankman-Fried book.

This is a book with a minimal advance (basically a symbolic courtesy), which anyway only comes when the manuscript is delivered. So your support remains essential - and not just financially. Supporting members will now get access to The Money and Death Social Club, a Discord server for discussing the ideas behind the book, reading related work, and generally connecting over a shared interest in deep analysis of financial fraud and tech hype.

A link to the M&D server is behind the paywall below. I hope you’ll join us. (Please note that if you use a trial subscription to access the link, you will only have server access for the length of your trial.)

Today’s entry is fairly significant. Over the past two years, I’ve puzzled over a core mystery of Sam Bankman-Fried: his seemingly complete state of denial over the reality of his own actions. The answer I’ve arrived at involves the opposition between two worldviews: one that acknowledges the unknowability of both human motivation and the universe, and one that insists on the knowability and predictability of both.

In essence, the core moral failing of SBF and his allies is the same as their core intellectual failing: an inability to reckon with the contingent nature of human existence, and ultimately, with the inevitability of death.

One last treat for everyone: I’ll also continue to use this newsletter to talk about the writing and research process, hopefully in a way that’s helpful to subscribers on their own projects. One challenge of this project is that it brings together a massive number of threads from philosophy and real life, which relate to each other in complex ways.

Here, at least for now, is my approach to that challenge: Index cards.

The concepts, facts, and etc. recorded here are the basic building blocks of the book. Soon I’ll start arranging them, probably in a Charlie Kelly-style pinboard, as a way of outlining. Until then, they’re accumulating, willy-nilly, in a little box on my desk.

The chunk on stimulants is going to be very fun.

Effective Altruism and the Denial of Death

As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t particularly follow Sam Bankman-Fried’s trajectory in the years of his ascent, mostly because for those of us serious about the decentralized technology and cypherpunk ethos of cryptocurrency, a centralized exchange operator is perhaps the least interesting person still nominally within the industry.

And of course, Sam was fairly open about not really caring much about crypto per se, instead having seen it merely as a good opportunity to make money - his open cynicism about this was, as Matt Levine has written, a perversely reassuring signal to members of the public who already (mistakenly) viewed crypto as nothing but a scam. That probably included many policymakers on Capitol Hill - but I digress, a privilege I reserve for myself in these dilatory sketches.

Even after his downfall, Sam wasn’t immediately all that interesting. For technical reasons relating to their distance from the center of the crypto ethos, centralized exchanges fail all the time, and those failures are usually boring thefts or hacks whose perpetrators disappear (for as long as they can). At best, they’re pedestrian mysteries like the disappearance of QuadrigaCX head Gerald Cotten. Sam was, in other words, a dime-a-dozen rug-pull artist … until he started talking.

Because the most interesting thing about Sam Bankman-Fried was always his denials. We now know that many of these were strategic lies - for instance, based on Can Sun’s testimony, we know that Sam’s argument that the missing funds were the result of margin lending losses [https://protos.com/sam-bankman-fried-lied-to-ftx-lawyers-about-using-customer-funds/] was based on a “hypothetical” but untrue scenario laid out for him by Sun.

More broadly, though, Sam’s lies seemed far less strategic than they were compulsive, which became most clear when he took the stand in his own defense and repeatedly perjured himself. At this and other moments, he seemed to genuinely believe his own lies. In everyday terms, we could call this compulsive self-deception “delusion,” or as I’ve become increasingly convinced, “sociopathy.”

More fundamentally, though, it suggests that Sam must be understood in terms of depth psychology, a.k.a. psychoanalysis. At the broadest level, psychoanalysis is the idea that “we know not what we do” - that humans are driven by anxieties, traumas, and animal instincts that don’t surface in the conscious mind.

But the goal of this book isn’t primarily to psychoanalyze Sam Bankman-Fried - it’s to understand the ideas and organizations that smoothed his commission of one of the biggest financial crimes ever. And those ideas - the related cluster of techno-utopian concepts including Effective Altruism, Longtermism, and Transhumanism – reveal themselves to be projects of self-delusion and psychic repression.