TESCREAL
02 Mar 2026 - 02 Mar 2026
- It's a new name for an old egregore.
- A term coined (by its ideological opponents) to describe a cluster of intellectual/political tendencies common in technical people and milieus. TESCREAL - Wikipedia.
- It's a wildly good move in the ongoing conflict between technocapital and its critics.
- I myself feel torn in two by this conflict. I have served technology for 50 years, I spent time at the innermost sanctums of its highest temples. These institutions were not, I thought, particularly right-wing. They may have been funded by the heart of the military-industrial complex, but they were supporting the development of knowledge that was a boon to mankind, and in the best academic traditions open to critique.
- But while MIT was firmly in the pocket of the technopolitical power, it wasn't ideological about it. Only a few of the more extreme geeks were Ayn Rand fans, not the ones who were being humanized.
- Let's break it down!
- transhumanism
- Extropianism
- Singulitarianism
- Cosmism
- Rationalists
- Effective Altruism
- Longtermism
- Oh that's funny that "libertarian" doesn't even appear! OK that's weird. Or maybe the two tendencies are not the same, despite both having right-wing geek appeal,.
- Note that a lot of these are near-synonyms, so not really much of a bundle.