cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/49480496

That worldview is expressed through science fiction: not as decoration, but as the medium that makes its accumulation strategies feel natural, necessary and inevitable. This is not to say that science fiction precedes or causes these projects – it is part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions become thinkable and certain power grabs feel like common sense.

Today, Silicon Valley’s centre of gravity is moving from the ‘Californian ideology’ – the 1990s fusion of counterculture libertarianism and digital utopianism – toward what the communication professor Fred Turner recently called the ‘Texan ideology’: a century-old fusion of resource exploitation and millenarian Christianity, the conviction that providential destiny justifies the conquest of nature and the extraction of its wealth. Where the earlier era focused on building networks and platforms, the new model treats data like oil-boom bounty, a natural resource to be mined from vast server farms demanding enormous land and electricity.

Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas is not a ‘campus’ like Google’s, but ‘a walled fortress as big as a cattle ranch’, as Turner puts it, representing what he describes as a future built by men with the ‘willpower to tame the forces of technology’ and ‘wrestle profit from the land’. In December 2024, Musk announced he was moving SpaceX’s headquarters from California to Texas. Starbase, SpaceX’s South Texas facility, exemplifies this vision: a private company town where SpaceX sets the rules, workers live in company housing, and local governance bends to corporate priorities. This is the path of selective science fiction operationalised as political reality – technological progress as cover for social regression.

This path finds its philosophical expression in ‘longtermism’, an offshoot of the effective altruism (EA) movement heavily funded by tech wealth from figures like Sam Bankman-Fried, now serving time for crypto fraud. By applying a rigid utilitarian calculus, EA proponents like William MacAskill argue that the welfare of trillions of potential future humans – who might exist if we colonise space – mathematically outweighs the needs of the 8 billion alive today.