On a cool June evening in Berkeley, I watched a man named Victor try to shoot a beam of light out of his penis. Minutes earlier, he had raised his hand because he found the volunteer onstage before him attractive. And now here he was, facing her in front of a crowd of perhaps 60 people, having been instructed to do precisely this by a woman named Aella … Now she told her first subject to imagine himself gathering all of the energy in his body into his pelvis and then sending that energy outward as a beam of light, straight through his trousers and into the room.

For some reason, this brings to mind ancient Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire websites written by children, that promised training programs for being able to shoot Dragonball Z energy beams in real life. And I can’t be sure that isn’t exactly what inspired Aella here.

We lined up by body count.

People using this term to mean their number of sexual partners will never not be funny to me. Not always in the same way, but it’s always funny in some fashion.

“And what would you say is your body count, Will?”

“I thought new couples were supposed to rise above that kind of contest, Dr. Lecter.”

I want to adapt a now deleted comment I originally framed as a “shortcoming”

I think more can be done with this adoptive parallelism between Manifest and Davos man, which risks being artificial. There is a risk of taking both parties too much at their own word, with the former in its pre-eminence and the latter as worthy successor. Capitalism, or the neoliberal system, or whathaveyou, is ambivalent about this kind of particular (there will always be some kind of conference, does it especially matter?), so what we really want to do is find out what independent work each of these is doing, and I think it is in their similarity to one another that the two differ.

——

Regarding the essay’s closing remarks:

“Manifest Man” doesn’t differ from Davos Man in regarding knowledge as a “positional asset”. In the example given to contrast, Manifest Man’s prediction markets externalise knowledge onto markets. But this is precisely the driving vision of the World Economic Forum, where it is regularly taken into equally science fictional scenarios. I don’t have to check to know how much Ray Kurzweil malarkey was on sale at the WEF 20-30 years ago. Nor does this translate into “they’re both versions of the same old capitalism”, in fact they’re both very closely related arms of the same highly specific model for doing capitalism.

Nor is there any particular difference in preferences for and against institutional affiliation, besides the accidental. Manifest theoretically aims at more direct affiliation away from explicitly state entities, but this is only indicative of the perception that states are over - a view also promulgated most famously at Davos. Both pursue a bracingly market-first approach to statecraft, with the difference emerging that Manifest has a classically more eccentric view of the role of the state (which with deepening context disappears into the imbrication of the modern techno-state with Silicon Valley, and Peter Thiel’s shitty data-aggregation software for gullible neoliberals).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n13/peter-geoghegan-and-lucas-amin/this-looks-absolutely-rubbish

What should emerge here is a more equivocal conclusion about any comparison: is Davos like that because it’s BETTER at courting institutional favour? Had a better start in that area? Will Manifest REALLY take over the world, or will its attendees end up at Davos or Davos 2 when they eventually grow up to be as ancient Klaus Schwab?

Davos emerged at the tail-end of the post-war consensus and the collapse of the keynesian balance of payments model of international trade. Here amongst other places around the same time the idea began to take hold that governments should voluntarily abridge their own mandate to govern in matters of the economy. As we have learned thereafter, political history is often not cyclical - it does not tend towards the mean - so much as libidinal and plural: the right kind of trend will continue until it is halted or exhausts itself into something entirely different.

Davos man seeds more aggressive children like Manifest man all over in the hope of encouraging some grim process of natural selection which will produce the most virulent next strain. What happens next is up to what people do about that

That is not a place of honor, and it feels like abuse to send an unshielded 20 year old into it.

Also, Aella rhymes with paella.

Whereas Josh had encouraged us to make a single confession, Aella proposed to extract confessions from all of us at once, continuously, for the better part of an hour.

Ah, more ‘we are not a cult’ shit.

but if there’s anything to fear about them, it’s their belief that there should be no secrecy.

Except for SlateScots emails.

or maybe they don’t believe in withholding damaging information at all.

You just talked about SlateScots real name, and didn’t mention his name. Be a little bit self aware please.

One member of the audience asked whether MetaDAO was trafficking in unregulated securities. Proph3t cheerfully allowed that it might be. But Trump is in office, he pointed out, and MetaDAO’s policy advisors considered the odds of “an enforcement action on this administration” to be low.

love 2 build the future of society with a horizon of two years at most

You know, somehow I had managed to avoid connecting the abhorrent views in that footnote with Robin Hanson specifically. The abyss never ends. Also I think it connects back to the biggest missing piece of this assessment. Their anti-authority authoritarianism, their anti-journalism but pro-transparency thing, etc. all come from the same place: they believe that there should be no limits on their own power and very little else.

Read the comments against my better judgement. Couple of ‘erm ackshuallys’ and then one comment from a self-described ‘former rationalist’ that starts out reasonable enough…then nosedives into something vile (for the record I’m not talking about their complains about how mean Scoot was)

Frustratingly even-handed on Razib Khan and Steve Hsu

Neither of these guys was fired because of public outcry at their views, or because of perceptions of their views

They got fired, especially Khan, for being insanely dumb, and the outcry generated by that fundamental lack of being even a little bit smart about their racist opinions

People noticed that Razib Khan was unbelievably far out over his professional skis on fucking VDARE (Hsu was blogging his shit I think?) and mouthing off about racial intelligence using the standard kindergarten collage of smarmy doggerel and, like, somebody else’s GWAS scatterplot or whatever

Hsu is just a bigot, like he doesn’t even have anything to say, he’s not even passionate about it in the frightening way people like Khan project, like his opinions are cartoonish and cartoonishly under-derived

Good for him mentioning Caroline Ellison, the proscription amphetamines, and the ketamine. The icebreaker exercise is from one of Aella’s blog posts “This practice made men arouse me.”