TESCREALism — Silicon Valley’s new religion

It is both laughable and disastrously wrong

A while ago I wrote about longtermism (here and here) and the TESCREAL bundle of utopian fantasies (here) among which longtermism plays an overarching role. This bundle of quasi-religious faiths would not deserve any further mention were it not for the outsize role it plays in the US in shaping tech policy, politics, and the country’s future. You may want to listen to a recent episode of Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich podcast featuring a conversation with Reverend Dr. Otis Moss III and Dr. Émile Torres about how this bizarre set of beliefs is currently gaining popularity in Silicon Valley.

From Duran’s introduction:

Prominent billionaires in Silicon Valley are preaching a strange new theology. Beneath their growing power in Washington lies a set of dangerous quasi-religious beliefs, rooted in white supremacy, male supremacy, tech supremacy, and wealth supremacy, all rolled into one. They believe that only they can save us from apocalypse and extinction. Their dark gospel has a name: TESCREAL. That stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. Yes, it’s a mouthful, but each piece fits into a larger, dangerous picture. Like traditional faiths, TESCREAL offers a cosmic story and salvation. It has prophecies, sacred texts, and apocalyptic warnings, but it replaces the soul with algorithms, heavens with space expansion, and in place of Jesus, it offers billionaire messiahs like Elon Musk.

The first half of the conversation is devoted to rehearsing the ideologies that make up the TESCREAL bundle.

Transhumanism is the fantasy that Silicon Valley can hack death. Transhumanists want to upgrade the human body like an iPhone, live forever, upload their brains to the cloud and eventually to the stars. (Nagging question: Who gets access to this digital immortality?) According to Torres, who together with Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL, transhumanists are atheists who have lost the eschatological hope of a better future, the possibility of resurrection, of living forever. To compensate for this loss, they believe that technology will enable us to create a world in which we will live forever, in which there will be no suffering but instead radical abundance: everything will be awesome forever. It’s “a sort of transubstantiation from human to machine,” says Duran.

Extropianism is an old-school techno-utopian ideology from the nineties whose goal is to beat entropy (hence ex-tropy), to beat decay, and eventually to beat death.

Singularitianism, the cult of the singularity, is the belief that the pace of technological progress will continues to increase exponentially to the point where to our mere human minds the world would be just a dizzying phantasmagoria, as if the amount of change that has happened in the past hundred years were happening every minute. Soon you will have AIs that are “intelligent” enough to take over the design of subsequent generations of AIs. And once you have super-intelligence, you have super-engineers who can engineer paradise. It will be “the rapture minus the angels,” and “instead of heaven, it’s going to be a server farm in Utah or Greenland,” quips Duran.

Cosmism is the old idea that humanity’s ultimate destiny is to spread throughout the universe, colonizing Mars to begin with. Contemporary cosmists like to think even bigger. With advanced technologies that we cannot even begin to comprehend right now, we may be able to redesign the universe. We may be able to control the very fabric of spacetime to fit our utopian desires. (Leaving aside that Mars is less hospitable than the peak of Mount Everest, would our track record on Mars be better than it was on Earth?)

Rationalism here does not simply stand for the idea that reason is our primary source of knowledge, or that certain truths can be grasped directly by the intellect without recourse to sensory experience. It is the idea that to be able to engineer paradise, we need to optimize rationality. This leads to a version of rationality which replaces the humanism in “humanist rationality” with mathematics. People are numbers, happiness and suffering are quantities. Rationalists, as Torres points out, literally have units of utility called “utils” which one can add and subtract.

Effective Altruism is the idea that greed is good, that people should focus on making as much money as possible and then go forth and do good. If rationalism is about “optimizing” rationality, EA is about “optimizing” morality. The great “success” story of the Earning to Give program was Sam Bankman-Fried. You probably know how it ended: he is in federal prison now. (After you’ve given up your moral compass to earn a lot of money, will the good you do offset the damage you caused by whatever you did to earn it?)

Longtermism basically says that we should prioritize billions of potential future lives over actual present lives. Carl Sagan once calculated that if humanity survives for another 10 million years, there could be 500 trillion future humans on earth. But if we colonize space, there could be many orders of magnitude more future people. If you are an effective altruist and your goal is to “optimize” the lives of the greatest number of people that ever will have lived, then you should worry about the people that are alive right now only in so far as their actions benefit or at least do not adversely affect those future lives.

The future is digital. This to Torres is the key aspect of the TESCREAL eschatology. In this future, there is no place for organic humans; it belongs to posthumans and therefore is deeply dehumanizing. Much the same goes for organic animals. It’s not that in this future there won’t be animals; they will just be digital. And that is how we will lessen the suffering of animals. Rather than striving to relieve the suffering of real animals, we will live in a simulation with digital squirrels, elephants, and polar bears, which are designed to never suffer. And we will call this humane.

In a piece posted just today, Torres stresses that

at the heart of the TESCREAL worldview is a pro-extinctionist stance that positively hopes our species will go extinct in the near future. Many notable figures within the TESCREAL movement are explicit that Homo sapiens should be replaced, in the coming years or decades, by a new posthuman species. Others are less outright about this, but would still say that if our species were to vanish once posthumanity arrives, so much for the better.... We must, therefore, recognize that TESCREALism poses a direct threat to our collective survival and flourishing that is no less — and probably much more — significant than nuclear conflict, global pandemics, climate change, and asteroid impacts. In fact, TESCREALism may be making these threats worse, e.g., because TESCREALists ... are racing ahead with this even though they understand that LLMs are nontrivially exacerbating the rapidly deteriorating climate predicament.

As Christian eschatology features a period known as the (Great) Tribulation, a time of trial and suffering which surpasses anything previously experienced, so does the eschatology of TESCREALism. The term used by its advocates is the “Time of Perils.” To them it is a period of heightened existential risk, where existential risk is the risk of an event that would prevent us from realizing digital utopia. And they believe that we are in it right now. If we manage to make it through it, what awaits is the digital equivalent of the Millennial Kingdom, Paradise, Eternal Life.

During the conversation, Rev. Otis Moss III mentions Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. In her book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, she argues that if the material on which LLMs (like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT) are trained are caste-based, racist, sexist, and the like, these biases will always be part of AI. Nor will AI be able recognize them since its creators do not recognize them. Inherent in AI are the flaws of humanity, which will always taint its output.

A couple of days after the conversation, Duran posted the first part of Dr. Benjamin’s Tanner Lecture at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center. In “Who Owns the Future? The Artificial Intelligentsia & the New Eugenics,” Dr. Benjamin delivers a searing assessment of what is at stake as Silicon Valley billionaires move to seize control of every lever of power. Here are some quotes from her speech (chosen by Duran):

• The future imagined by AI evangelists is meant only for a small sliver. The rest of us will be left clamoring to survive on this boiling planet. Alternatively, we can call bullshit on their eugenic futures and listen instead to the collective intelligence of the people ... who have been the consistent and courageous voices calling out the archaic visions of faux futurists purporting to save humanity.

• Behind their duplicity lies a familiar calculus: If AI evangelists can convince us that artificial general intelligence is possible, imminent, dangerous — we might be compelled to entrust our fate to them. Hype and doom, in other words, are two sides of the same Bitcoin.

• We have a choice. Do we continue worshipping at the feet of the artificial intelligentsia, self-appointed stewards of our collective future, those manufacturing techno solutions for problems that they themselves help to create?

On the same day Torres posted a piece on the ongoing merger between TESCREALism and the MAGA Movement, calling attention to MAGA’s birthing of “a new monstrosity — a syncretistic amalgam of Christianity and TESCREALism.” The piece points to Torres’ recent article for Truthdig, which explores the fusion of the two eschatologies, noting striking similarities between the narrative structures of TESCREALism and Christianity. It also points to an article Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor recently wrote for The Guardian. Titled “The rise of end times fascism,” it is eminently worth reading. Some excerpts:

• Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.

• If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state.

• The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times.... This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.

• Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all these threats – fossil fuels, weapons, resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, telling Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.

• The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise.... Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns.

• With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.

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Let us now take a big step back from this madness.

Life, to begin with, is not a product of matter. It is an ontological principle different from Matter, which had been involved in Matter and has emerged from it. Mind, likewise, is a principle different from Life, which had been involved in Life and has emerged from it. In several previous posts I “jumped the gun” and immediately proceeded to Supermind, a principle different from Mind which, having so far remained involved in mentally conscious life, has yet to emerge from it. In this emergence human beings can, must, and will actively participate. This participation will go through many stages, the first consisting in what, for want of a better word, may be called the emergence of a soul.

[A]t first soul in man does not appear as something quite distinct from mind and from mentalised life; its movements are involved in the mind movements, its operations seem to be mental and emotional activities; the mental human being is not aware of a soul in him standing back from the mind and life and body, detaching itself, seeing and controlling and moulding their action and formation: but, as the inner evolution proceeds, this is precisely what can, must and does happen — it is the long-delayed but inevitable next step in our evolutionary destiny. [LD 886]

To situate this soul in the ontological framework of Aurobindonian discourse, let me reiterate that Reality itself is best described in the triple terms of Existence (sat), Consciousness-Force (chit-tapas) and Bliss (ananda). As sat it constitutes the world, as chit-tapas it creates and contains it, as ananda it fills it with quality and value — the joy of creating and the enjoyment of what has been created. If the first is the answer to What, the second is the answer to How, and the third is the answer to Why.

Sri Aurobindo further adopts the Vedantic/Upanishadic distinction between Knowledge (vidya) and Ignorance (avidya). The former stands for a state of unspeakable unity, mutuality, and inclusion, a state of conscious existence where each being is consciously identical not only with Reality itself but also with every other being, a state where each not only is contained in the world but also contains it. The latter is the state of conscious existence with which we are familiar, where each being experiences (i) itself as a separate being and (ii) each part of the world as a separate part. Following the most common Vedic arrangement, Sri Aurobindo assigns the four principles Existence, Consciousness (or Consciousness-Force), Bliss, and Supermind to an upper hemisphere of manifestation, and the three principles Mind, Life, and Matter to a lower hemisphere:

In the descent into involution there can be distinguished seven principles of manifested being, seven gradations of the manifesting Consciousness.... The first three are the original and fundamental principles and they form universal states of consciousness to which we can rise; when we do so, we can become aware of supreme planes or levels of fundamental manifestation or self-formulation of the spiritual reality in which is put in front the unity of the Divine Existence, the power of the Divine Consciousness, the bliss of the Divine Delight of existence.... A fourth principle of supramental truth-consciousness is associated with them; manifesting unity in infinite multiplicity, it is the characteristic power of self-determination of the Infinite. This quadruple power of the supreme existence, consciousness and delight constitutes an upper hemisphere of manifestation based on the Spirit’s eternal self-knowledge.... The other three powers and planes of being, of which we are even at present aware, form a lower hemisphere of the manifestation, a hemisphere of Mind, Life and Matter. [LD 689]

Sometimes we are given to understand that to the three higher principles Existence, Consciousness-Force, and Supermind there correspond the three lower principles Matter, Life, and Mind. This raises the question of what, in the lower hemisphere, might correspond to the divine principle of Bliss (ananda).

We may, therefore, if we will, pose eight principles instead of seven, and then we perceive that our existence is a sort of refraction of the divine existence, in inverted order of ascent and descent, thus ranged —

	Existence 				Matter
	Consciousness-Force	 	Life
	Bliss 					Psyche
	Supermind 				Mind

The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of Consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of supermind towards the divine being. [LD 278]

Since Life is an energy of [the conscious-force of sat-chit-ananda], the secret of all its movements must be a hidden delight inherent in all things which is at once cause, motive and object of its activities.... But where in us is this principle of Delight? through what term of our being does it manifest and fulfil itself in the action of the cosmos as the principle of Conscious-Force manifests and uses Life for its cosmic term and the principle of Supermind manifests and uses Mind?... That term is something in us which we sometimes call in a special sense the soul — that is to say, the psychic principle which is not the life or the mind, much less the body, but which holds in itself the opening and flowering of the essence of all these to their own peculiar delight of self, to light, to love, to joy and beauty and to a refined purity of being. [LD 232‒33]

In fact,

we have a double psychic entity in us, the surface desire-soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness, and a subliminal psychic entity, a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence of being which is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic existence we so often dignify by the name. It is when some reflection of this larger and purer psychic entity comes to the surface that we say of a man, he has a soul, and when it is absent in his outward psychic life that we say of him, he has no soul....

[I]n this surface or desire-soul there is no true soul-life, but a psychic deformation and wrong reception of the touch of things. The malady of the world is that the individual cannot find his real soul, and the root-cause of this malady is again that he cannot meet in his embrace of things outward the real soul of the world in which he lives. He seeks to find there the essence of being, the essence of power, the essence of conscious-existence, the essence of delight, but receives instead a crowd of contradictory touches and impressions. If he could find that essence, he would find also the one universal being, power, conscious existence and delight even in this throng of touches and impressions; the contradictions of what seems would be reconciled in the unity and harmony of the Truth that reaches out to us in these contacts. At the same time he would find his own true soul and through it his self, because the true soul is his self’s delegate and his self and the self of the world are one. [LD 234–35]

It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature. It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness. On the contrary, where the psychic personality is weak, crude or ill-developed, the finer parts and movements in us are lacking or poor in character and power, even though the mind may be forceful and brilliant, the heart of vital emotions hard and strong and masterful, the life-force dominant and successful, the bodily existence rich and fortunate and an apparent lord and victor. [LD 239‒40]

So, what should we make of Silicon Valley’s new religion and its influences on US politics and the rest of the world?

Put in Gebserian terms, they are manifestations of the deficient phase of a moribund consciousness structure. (Cultural historian and evolutionary philosopher Jean Gebser attributed his insight into the emergence of a new consciousness, which he obtained through a flash-like intuition, to being “brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo.” More on Gebser here and here.) This moribund structure virulently resists the emergence of a new consciousness, which Gebser called “integral,” considering is conterminous with the consciousness Sri Aurobindo called “supramental.”

While the resistance can be laid at the feet of forces beyond our control, this should be no excuse for inaction. Sri Aurobindo once wrote in a letter that “the eye of the Yogin sees not only the outward events and persons and causes, but the enormous forces which precipitate them into action. If the men who fought [in World War I] were instruments in the hands of rulers and financiers, these in turn were mere puppets in the clutch of those forces.” As he put it in his epic poem Savitri:

Wherever are soulless minds and guideless lives
And in a small body self is all that counts,
Wherever love and light and largeness lack,
These crooked fashioners take up their task. [p. 153]

It is, however, up to us to which kind of influence we open ourselves. Living for the most part in the surface or desire-soul, we are for the most part playthings in the clutch of “these crooked fashioners.” On the other hand, the more we open ourselves to the secret psychic entity, learn to listen to and follow its intimations, the more we can be joyful instruments of diviner forces.

The TESCREALists’ fantasies are but mental counterfeits of supramental verities. Consider the inherent limitations of the consciousness which is presently running amok to prevent the emergence of a greater consciousness. Mental consciousness is unable to deal with anything that is unique. It discovers laws; it understands in terms of laws; its concepts express regularities. Mental man is homo faber, the workman who creates by applying the laws he has discovered, on which he relies, and which he cannot change. Supermind, on the contrary, is the consciousness by which Reality has subjected itself to certain constraints — the so-called laws of physics — in order to set the stage for the adventure of evolution.

But a consciousness that has subjected itself to constraints can also, as it evolves, loosen and eventually remove the constraints. And since the evolution of the anatomical and physiological complexity of the human organism was necessitated by the Houdiniesque nature of evolution, this complexity can eventually be shed like the chrysalis of a butterfly — except that this butterfly will be immortal (if it so wills). In a transformed material body, rather than in the “cloud” or a server farm on Mars, it will enjoy a terrestrial rather than a digital immortality. Instead of transforming a select few into digital posthumans while abandoning the rest of humanity, this future will leave nobody behind. Instead of dehumanizing, it will be as it were superhumanizing.

To a mental consciousness there is a significant gap between what the world is and what it should be. None of its technological exploits can possibly close that gap. To a supramental consciousness, the world is at every moment what it should be. It therefore is only by the evolution of a race of supramentally conscious being that the word can become what it should be. Our supramental future selves will indeed beat entropy, decay, and eventually death, not by technological means (which is impossible) but by the transformative power of their consciousness. Everything will indeed be “awesome forever,” and this not only to those who are conscious in the supramental way but also to those who remain conscious in the mental way. For while to our minds, a change in the experienced world is caused by a change in the objective world, the evolution of supermind reverses this causal relation. The presence among mental beings of sufficiently many supramental beings, who see the world as it should be, causes their mental fellow beings to see it that way, too.

Two final remarks. The first is that the “utopia” to which humanity can look forward does not consist in the satisfaction of all desires (which, besides, is impossible since every satisfied desire gives rise to another clamoring to be satisfied). Born of the sense of being a separate existence in a world of separate existences, desire disappears with the realization — not in thought but in the very substance of one’s being — of one’s identity with Reality itself, with its cosmic manifestation, and with everything that it contains.

The second remark is that while axiological values like beauty, goodness, joy, and happiness are ontologically rooted in the Bliss that is the very nature of Reality, to beings who, like our present selves, are not consciously identical with Reality itself, these values appear to lack any proper foundation. They are therefore easily quantified, as Rationalists and Effective Altruists do with reckless abandon.