33. After Us (w/ Émile P. Torres)

We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book (buy it, wtf!) (becoming.press/exocapitalism-economies-with-ab…)-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trillo) but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release.

Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You'll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance between venture capital and Silicon Valley. We strongly recommend their podcast Dystopia Now! (youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6P6ekhshLnQAaA7Jff…) (w/ Kate Willett) and their newest book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

The T in TESCREAL is 'transhumanism,' a frequent topic of the pod, which tends to mean an application of technology to human bodies and in such a way that allows humans to transcend human limitations (e.g. speed, efficiency, senses, mortality). From there, the rest of the ideologies follow from a relationship between the human and its 'rationalized' extensibility through technology: E (extropianism), S (singularitarianism), C (cosmism), R (rationalism), EA (effective altriusim), and L (longtermism). Here's (youtube.com/watch?v=txok0XY2ePU) a gentle and clean explainer of all of the above.

In this episode, we talk extensively about some elements that aren't actively represented in TESCREAL but sit beneath it: accelerationism, extinction-neutrality, and left-adjacent positions with respect to both (e.g. l/acc, xenofeminism, ahumanism -- this episode might pair really nicely with our interview with Patricia MacCormack for this very reason).