Ask Coral; Why do big tech and the government hate climate action?
Thoughts from a decade in tech
If you’re unfamiliar with the software engineer, techno-anarchist, and right-wing nutcase Curtis Yarvin, congratulations. Don’t look him up. We mention the name largely in response to a frequent question we’ve been getting from friends outside of tech, namely about the continued hard-right turn of Silicon Valley, and why so many prominent figures are not only giving up their climate advocacy (Mr. Bezos, hi), but seem to be feeding the government’s current hatred of climate action. On one level it’s simple, given that those AI data centers won’t power themselves, but we’ll admit that tech as an industry has spent the past month revealing a particularly cynical and destructive streak that probably seems shocking to those outside the business.
We did not find it so.
A word before we dive; Team Coral has been thinking hard about the future of our writing, and has decided that we’re ok with being more personal and less PC than we’ve previously done. There’s a lot of ugliness happening in the world, and we have a responsibility to use our small platform to talk about it openly and honestly. Our focus on climate and the tactical execution of funding and scaling companies will never change, but expect to see a bit more of …. Us here going forward.
Back to Yarvin who, again, we recommend not familiarizing yourself with if you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid doing that. This decidedly mediocre technologist and worse writer, whose work we are not going to link to, spews a “philosophy” sometimes termed the dark enlightenment. This boils down to the idea that the American project has failed, and therefore a group of enterprising patriots need to burn the system down and install a tech-forward king. We read it as the embodiment of the cult of the founder. It is, we think, a peculiarly American phenomenon, the idea that there exists a subset of people so remarkably gifted that their talents can only be expressed by raising lots of money to scale B2B SaaS companies. Kidding, sort of.
Look up “Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field,” and imagine that said field is a genetic phenomenon that can be identified and nurtured much like athletic ability. Those who believe deeply in this ideal are cultists of the founder, either seeing themselves as one of the gifted, or assisting the higher beings through the gift of their talents or money. Usually money.
Sidenote; We’ve worked with dozens of successful founders, including several who’ve achieved 9 figure net worths, and regret to inform you that they’re just people. Smart, diligent, passionate, and sometimes ruthless, but just people. The best all tend to be grounded, gracious, and cognizant of the role of luck in their success. An impressive group to be sure, but hardly the aliens seen by the cult.
Consider the demonstrated ethos of Silicon Valley over the past couple of decades. Move fast and break things. Funding rounds are not just a milestone but the whole game. If an idea doesn’t work, just keep pivoting. Human talent is fungible and must sometimes be turned over in the name of scale. We can’t emphasize this enough; Move fast. And break things.
As we’ve written many times before, we’re products and students of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, although mostly in the slightly more sane outposts of Boston and Seattle. We’ve blitzscaled, synergized, partnered, aligned, and exited. One of your writers once traveled 2-3 weeks per month for two years straight to help build a company, the sale of which primarily enriched someone else. The other has pulled numerous all-nighters in order to craft decks for pitches and board meetings that nobody ever read. It took us several tries to start the eponymous HBO show, mostly because it was simply too true to life. We’re not knocking the cult, we escaped from it.
And so we can say with some conviction that the current philosophy of American tech is deeply destructive, of both the self and the surroundings. Yarvin’s ideas are shallow, incoherent, and petulant, and yet followed by a shocking number of tech luminaries (Thiel, Musk, Andressen, Vice-President / couch enthusiast JD Vance, Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale) looking for excuses to justify their own shitty actions in pursuit of money and power. It’s easy to extrapolate that the dark-enlightenment desired state of the world is fundamentally one of chaos and change, out of which the few, the gifted, the founders, are uniquely capable of crafting a new and efficient world order.
It’s a remarkably dark idea, and it becomes simple to see the throughline towards things like making AI and crypto happen at all costs, no matter how many trees need to be chopped down, and fellow humans shoved into poverty. Do dark enlightenment thinkers see this as a responsibility? Given the heavy whiff of eugenics surrounding the enterprise, we think it likely. The destructiveness is the point. They see the rapid development of new tech as the answer to every question. It isn’t. The best technologists we’ve worked with treat the development of new products as the bridge to a bright new future, not the goal. Much of Thiel’s writing around the “network state” boils down to wishing that The Matrix was a documentary, with himself in the role of Architect.
Elon Musk’s Doge is an obvious piece of bullshit, designed to carve up those agencies tasked with regulating his many businesses, and thereby removing obstacles to Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. It also allows him to exercise regulatory and procurement capture in industry after industry, and to grab the vast federal budget at the level of spigot rather than the filled pool. Note the firing of professional after professional who’d flag the role of fossil fuels companies in climate change, or the ordering of the FAA to find millions of dollars in order to fund a contract with starlink.
What’s made the current moment difficult to diagnose is the collision between numerous related strains of toxic thought. Thiel wants to burn the world down until he can install himself as founder of the network state, Musk just wants money and power, oil companies want the world to want more oil, big tech wants their AI fetch to happen. The interests have aligned and the methodologies converged. It’s the world’s shittiest eclipse.
It’s also short term. Let’s leave aside the numerous horrific ethical violations, which of course one should not, and the current administration is still fighting the inevitability and necessity of climate adaptation and mitigation. The belief that technology and technocrats are the solution to all things means that, necessarily, nature is not. They’re going to let forests burn and oceans boil because they don’t care.
What to do? Climate founders, we continue to beg you. Learn to love making money. Listen to Ben Affleck; Anyone who says money if the root of all evil doesn’t fucking have any. Get yours, and become inevitable. This is a time to play rough.
And, perhaps, to consider relocating. In our series on building a climate ecosystem in Montreal almost 18 months ago, we wrote that the expense and intolerance of the US would push the next wave of great startups to start in Vancouver and Montreal instead of Seattle and New York, Mexico City instead of Austin, London and Tokyo instead of San Francisco. The past month will accelerate the trend. We don’t suggest this lightly. The work needs to get done, and we see founding climate companies as genuinely dangerous business in the US in the next several years. And perhaps simply futile. Let’s be realistic. The climate ecosystem in the US is in rough shape, and it’s been a mere 45 days.
And if you’re already building here, just keep going. The history of politics and economics is rife with reactionary grifter-clowns. They never last. The work continues.
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