The Valley of paradoxes and dystopias
The paradox, i.e. a correct reasoning which, however, has a striking contradiction in itself, seems to be the new rationality that shapes the minds of the protagonists of cyberspace. The principle of contradiction seems to have become the driving force behind the way of thinking of technologists, entrepreneurs and people who are changing the world.
Take the case of Israeli intellectual Yuval Noah Harari. We are dealing with this a lot, even too much, brilliant intellectual, whose theses seem the most suitable to give us an overview of the point at which human evolution has arrived and the challenges that await it. In his investigation, which begins with the affirmation of homo sapiens and reaches robots, Harari has come to develop a extremely critical position towards what is happening in Silicon Valley. He never misses an opportunity to affirm how pernicious that way of thinking is, above all for his agnosticism towards the consequences of the technological and economic models practiced in the Valley. The consequences of technology, to use a famous phrase by Martin Heidegger - who wrote something definitive on this subject - are anything but technological, since technology, according to the German thinker, can be subsumed in metaphysics.
In some ways, Harari's prophecies about the future of humanity, shaped on the technological model of the Valley, seem affected by the Cassandra syndrome. In fact, it is no mystery that Harari considers Silicon Valley the incubator of a mountain of dystopian ruins which humanity is facing. Harari is convinced that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and building a world in which democracy is a plus. It is something that is already happening now because, with the mammoth mechanisms of influencing the minds of billions of people, the big technology companies are destroying the idea at the foundation of modernity and the Enlightenment, that of a sovereign individual guided in his actions of free will. He wrote about it:
“If humans are hackable animals and if our choices and opinions do not reflect our free will, what should be the role of democracy? How do you live when you realize that your thinking might be shaped by the government, that your amygdala might work for Putin, and that the next idea that pops into your mind might be the product of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself?".
He's worried about other things too. Above all for the maintenance of the social structure built around democracy, first of all work. The technological revolution led by Silicon Valley requires few workers. Thus a new narrow ruling class is being created, the one that owns the data, and a large swarming and furious "useless class" that supplies the data. The latter is the equivalent of that people of the abyss, of the homonymous and little-known work by Jack London.
Despite these opinions, which the Israeli futurist certainly makes no secret of, it happens that Harari is today the most popular thinker in Silicon Valley. He is revered as a star. The young entrepreneurial class of the Valley listened to him, invited him and courted him on every occasion. His first book "Sapiens, a brief history of humanity" occupies the ninth place in the ranking of Mark Zuckerberg's favorite books. Google called him to talk about its technology and the two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often refer to his ideas. Bill Gates wrote a 1000 word celebratory article about Homo Deus and made a point of recommending it, already at breakfast, to Melinda Gates, inserting 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari's latest book, among the five best books of 2018.
How did CEOs, technologists and entrepreneurs fall in love with their Cassandra? This is the question asked by journalist Nellie Bowles, who covers Silicon Valley for many publications including the "New York Times", accompanying the Israeli historian on a tour of conferences and meetings held in Silicon Valley last fall. We propose below the report on this tour in the Valley of dystopias.
Traveling with Yuval
If that of a small dominated elite and a people from the abyss is Harari's heartbreaking vision and the consequence of what he calls dataism, why do Silicon Valley technologists love him so much that they elevate him to the greatest philosopher of their time?
“One possibility is that my message isn't threatening them, and so they do,” says Harari a bit puzzled. “For me, this is even more worrying because, maybe, I'm still missing something.”
When Harari visited the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was overwhelmingly joyful. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, threw him a dinner. The bosses of X, Alphabet's secluded research division, opened doors for him that are usually tightly closed. Bill Gates reviewed the book in the New York Times as "fascinating... such an inspiring writer."
I'm interested in understanding how the Valley may be so infatuated with Yuval. It's crazy that he's so popular, they're inviting him to speak everywhere, when what Yuval he's saying undermines the foundations of their economic models. said Tristan Harris, former chief ethics officer at Google and co-founder of the Center for Human Technology.
An explanation could lie in the fact that Silicon Valley, at least on one level, is not at all optimistic about America's future. The more chaos dominates in Washington, the more the tech world is interested in creating an alternative that may not be one of representative democracy. Technologists are very wary of regulatory programs and intrigued by alternative forms of government to the current one. There is even a separatist current: venture capitalists are demanding the secession of California or its fragmentation into corporate states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who recommended Harari to his book club, expressed his admiration for the autocrat Caesar Augustus. "Basically - Zuckerberg told the "New Yorker" - with a firm and hard hand, Caesar Augustus ensured 200 years of world peace".
Harari, who has a PhD from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His current fame begins in 2011, when he published an ambitious book: A Global History of the Human Species. He was born of it Sapiens: A Brief History of humankind, first published in Hebrew. The book hasn't broken new ground for historical research, nor does its thesis — that humans are animals and their domination is an accident — seem like a recipe for success. But the casual tone and the sweet way in which Harari has been able to connect the various disciplines make it a very pleasant read, even if the volume closes with the prediction that the process of human evolution could be at its end. Translated into English in 2014, the book has sold more than eight million copies and made Harari an intellectual celebrity.
A Sapiens it followed Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which outlined his view of what comes after the end of human evolution. In it, he talks about Dataism, a new organizational paradigm based on the power of algorithms. The future for Harari is one where big data dominates, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop god-like abilities.
Harari during the recent TedTalk dedicated to fascism. 18 minutes of absolute brilliance. Look here Harari's Ted Talk video with Italian subtitles. After the past and the future today he wrote a book about the present: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. He titled his recent TED Talk Why fascism is so seductive — and how our data might be fueling it.
His analyzes could have turned him into a persona non grata in Silicon Valley. Instead, he was delighted to discover that he was very popular and loved by the locals. In the end, he sees the matter as an opportunity: "If you get people to start thinking very deeply and seriously about the problems you raise - he says - some of the conclusions they draw may not be the ones you want them to draw".
Is the “new world” the world of the Valley?
Harari agreed for me to join him and his partner on his tour of the Valley. One afternoon, I watched him speak at the X headquarters in Mountain View. A shy, thin, bespectacled man with a sprinkling of white hair appeared to me. He has something of an owl: a meditative aspect, he doesn't move his body much and often looks askance at the interlocutor. His face is not particularly expressive, except for a mischievous eyebrow. When you meet his eyes, there is something guarded in his expression, as if he wants to investigate if you too are fully aware of the evil that is about to strike the world.
After his meeting with the techs at Google, Harari brought the conversation to Aldous Huxley, one of his favorite authors. Huxley's contemporaries were horrified by the novel Brave New World, which describes a social regime of controlling emotions and seeming to eliminate pain. At first glance, readers who read the book, Harari notes, may think all is well in that brave world. “Everything looks so beautiful and perfect and instead we're faced with an intellectually disturbing scenario because it's really difficult to explain what's wrong. It's the same feeling you get when faced with the vision of Silicon Valley techs".
For example it is interesting, says Harari, that unlike politicians, tech companies don't need a free press, since they already control the media. However, he has resigned himself to the global domination of technologists, after realizing how much worse politicians are. He says:
I've met a number of these high-tech giants, and they're generally good people. I am not the Hun Attila. In the lottery of human leaders, much worse could happen.
Some of his tech fans approach him about the anxiety their job causes them. “Some are very scared of the impact of what they're doing,” Harari says.
However, his enthusiasm for his thinking doesn't put him entirely at ease:
It's a rule of thumb of history that if you get so pampered by the elite, you won't be able to scare them anymore,” Harari says. “They can absorb you. You can become one of their many intellectual trinkets.
Evidence of the tech elite's enthusiasm for Harari's acumen is not hard to find. “I am attracted to Yuval for his clarity of thought,” Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email, praising one particular aspect of Harari's thinking.
And Reed Hastings, head of Netflix, wrote: “Yuval is the anti-Silicon Valley intellectual — he doesn't carry a phone and spends a lot of time meditating. We see in him what we really want to be." He then added: “In his new book, reflections on AI and biotechnology broaden our understanding of the challenges and problems we will face”.
At the dinner hosted in Harari's honor, Hastings co-hosted academics and industry leaders who discussed the perils of Dataism and how biotechnology will extend human lifespans. (Harari wrote that the ruling class will outlive the “useless class.”) “His books have the ability to gather people around a table and make them think and that is the greatest contribution,” Fei said. Fei Li, an AI expert who works at Google.
The irrelevance of most
A few days earlier, Harari had spoken to 3.500 people in San Francisco. The event consisted of a dialogue with Sam Harris who presented himself in a well-starched gray suit with flashy white buttons. Harari looked far less comfortable than he did in a baggy suit that curled around his body, his hands clasped over his stomach and sunk in his chair. But while he talked about meditation—Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence—he captivated the audience. In a place where self-improvement is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Harari's practice gives him hero status.
During the conference he stated that free will is an illusion and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he added, may no longer make sense. You went on to argue that the liberal world order was based on fictions like "the customer is always right" and "follow your heart" and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated by technology.
Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Harari continued, while most of the world's people aren't even useful enough to be exploited. Harari explains his thoughts on the matter thus:
A person outside that narrow circle increasingly perceives his own irrelevance in the global scenario. And it's far worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited. The useless class is extraordinarily vulnerable. If a century ago a revolution against factory exploitation was unleashed, it took place in the awareness of the importance of one's role as workers in society and the economy. The rationale was: they can't eliminate us all because they need all of us.
It is less clear today why the ruling elite should not purge the useless class. “You are totally expendable” is the new rationale of Dataism. This is why, according to Harari, Silicon Valley is so committed to promoting the concept of a universal basic income, or the idea of transferring resources to people whether they work or not. The hidden message is: “We don't need you. But we're kind, so we'll take care of you."
Lifestyle and influence
For his stay in the Valley, Harari, together with his spouse, Itzik Yahav - who is also his manager -, rented a small house in Mountain View. One morning I found them making oatmeal. Harari noted that as her notoriety increased in Silicon Valley, technologists also began to take an interest in her lifestyle.
Silicon Valley has been something of an incubator for new lifestyles related to the counterculture, meditation and yoga. He says. “The fact that I practice these disciplines is one of the things that has made me more popular and interesting to the people who live there”. As he talks, she pulls on an old sweatshirt over denim pants. Her voice is silent and, making a sweeping gesture with her hand, she knocks over a container of cutlery.
Harari grew up in Kiryat Ata, near Haifa. His father worked in the arms industry. His mother, formerly a postal employee, now works for her son managing her correspondence; he gets about 1.000 messages a week.
Harari does not use the ringer in the morning and spontaneously gets up between 6:30 and 8:30. She meditates for an hour and then has a cup of tea. She works till 4 or 5pm, then does another hour of meditation, followed by a 60 minute walk, which is sometimes a swim, and then gets on TV with Yahav
The two met 16 years ago through dating site Check Me Out. "We're not big fans of falling in love," says Harari. “It was more a rational choice that prompted us to get together”.
Yahav became Harari's manager. At a time when English-language publishers weren't too convinced of the commercial success of Sapiens (his first book)—deeming it too serious for the average reader and not serious enough for scholars—Yahav insisted on going ahead and engaged Deborah Harris, a literary agent in Jerusalem. One day, while Harari was meditating, Yahav and Harris brought the book to Random House in London.
Today there is a team of eight, based in Tel Aviv, working on Harari's projects. Director Ridley Scott and documentary filmmaker Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” for a television series, and Harari is working on some children's books to reach a wider audience.
Yahav used to meditate but recently he stopped. “I was too busy,” he says as he folds the laundry. “I have not been able to reap the benefits of meditation through regular practice.” Harari instead remains engaged in meditation.
“If it were only up to him, he would be like a hermit, busy writing all day, not even cutting his hair,” says Yahav, looking at his spouse
The couple are vegans and Harari is particularly sensitive towards animals. "In the middle of the night," says Yahav, "when there's a mosquito, he catches it and takes it out."
Being gay, Harari admits, has helped his work, given him a different perspective. Indeed, he questioned the ruling principles of the very Jewish society in which he grew up, a society that is very conservative towards homosexuality. “If society has got its approach to homosexuality wrong, who guarantees that everything else hasn't got it wrong?”, she says.
“If I were a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” adds Harari. The couple watch a lot of TV. It is their main hobby and main topic of conversation. Yahav says it's the one thing Harari can't get away from.
They just finished watching Dear White People after being delighted by the Australian series Please Like me. That evening, they planned to meet with Facebook executives at the company's headquarters and then watch the YouTube show Cobra Kai. When Harari leaves Silicon Valley, he will enter an ashram just outside Mumbai, India, for 60 days of absolute silence.
