The End of the Beginning

Entering the home stretch of "The Boy Who Wasn't There."

Welcome to the Sunday edition of Dark Markets. For those new here, generally Sundays are either a draft excerpt of “The Boy Who Wasn’t There,” my book on Sam Bankman-Fried; or an essay on some other finance, tech or cultural topic. By and large these are paywalled for supporters, though some essays are free to all subscribers.

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I find myself in the awkward position of sitting on extremely cool potential news - a quantum indeterminacy of megaton-load celebration that I can neither allow myself to fully believe in and enjoy, even as it rests fairly firmly in my grasp; nor share any details of, for any number of professional, legal, and superstitious reason. But this non-happening, this un-thing, even in its waffling Schrodingerian being-and-unbeing, presents such a transformative potentiality that it’s, like, really tripping me out, man.

If you’re reading this, you already know I have an insane ego, a tendency towards narcissistic self-mythologizing that makes the back teeth grind. So this in-betweenness is particularly challenging for me.

So I can’t say much, but I can’t refrain from saying a tiny bit: I’m very close to finding a publisher for the Sam Bankman-Fried book which I’ve been drafting in these pages over the last year. The prospective publisher, moreover, is *exceedingly* prestigious and storied (making it perhaps the hardest thing for me not to share).

But these things are never certain until the ink is dry (in several senses). So that’s that on that.

Regardless of which way it goes, this potential breakthrough coincides with the next stages of “The Boy Who Wasn’t There” (which is very likely to end up with a different title as things move forward, by the way). Since Sam’s final sentencing hearing in March, I’ve been expanding my research into ancillary issues, but now that research has also reached a stage where I’m ready to integrate it all into one great golden braid.

That subsequent research has been in support of the book’s emergent central thesis: That Sam Bankman-Fried was motivated to commit one of the biggest financial frauds of all time by the same set of ideologies that guides Silicon Valley as a whole. These include both the Effective Altruism that Sam vocally subscribed to, and the array of associated ideas about existential risk and, more broadly, the nightmare frontier of “Longtermism.” I’ve also caught up on the Rationalist movement that is aligned with Effective Altruists; and surveyed research on the broader “TESCREAL” movement of esoteric, cultish eugenecists masquerading as tech dorks preoccupied with sci-fi hallucinations of artificial intelligence.

The implicated philosophies also include a deeper set of beliefs about the nature (or even existence) of human free will, self-determination, or even true conscious subjectivity. Ultimately, the questions at stake really are about the fate of the human species as a whole, but not in the sense that the longermists frame that question. Because implied in the TESCREAL bundle are an array of incredibly nasty long-term agendas including, most notably, eugenics.

In short, if you haven’t already noticed, this will be a book of philosophy and politics as much as journalism or finance. Because I believe Sam Bankman-Fried’s crime to be a very rare example of philosophy having a direct impact on the world - in this case, a really bad impact.

The Coming Months

While I may (please, please God) be spared the nightmare of shopping a proposal to agents and publishers, I still have to turn all of the above into a coherent, concise, accurate, and hopefully somewhat entertaining book.

That means contributing supporters of Dark Markets will probably start getting a LOT more drafts and segments to read on here - and it also means I will need your help. Keep an eye out for updates on a planned community Discord where I’m hoping we can do a little collaborative crowdsourcing.

I’ll also tease that a new “season” of the Dark Markets podcast is on the way, with a bit of a conceptual revamp. The plan is to focus a package of podcasts on a single topic or constellation of topics, and the first of these packages will be focused on the role of time in finance, and of finance in influencing the future.

This is one way I’ll be pursuing perhaps the most intellectually challenging topic I have planned for the book - the question of how well we can predict the future, and how we should even approach that question.

The Effective Altruist ethos posited that we can consciously direct the future, but even our own human financial professionals don’t buy it. If you can't buy insurance for an event ten years from now, it seems strange that the EAs believe we can influence the far future by our present investments. Somewhere in that disconnect is the key to understanding an insidious thought virus - a meme so appealing, and yet so completely false, that it threatens to derail the project of human society itself if we breathe too deeply of the pleasing vapors of its narcissism and hubris.

This fantastical relationship to time and prediction is the subject of the following draft excerpt. Like much of what I’ll be dropping here over the coming months, this is wild and woolly - a chance to witness the writing process in full. The following is quite literally a snapshot of my progress on one particular section of the book - an attempt to talk through in much more detail my theory of Sam Bankman-Fried’s implicit rationale for his crime.

There will be many errors, missing names, missing dates, spelling mistakes, and provisional language everywhere. This is the stage of fleshing out the “bones” of the book by getting it all down. After that, we whip it into shape.