(2022-01-18) Solana Hereticon Notes From The Irl

Mike Solana: Hereticon, Notes from the IRL. Last week, Founders Fund launched Hereticon, a conference for thoughtcrime.

Topics on stage included but were not limited to: evolution, global warming, geoengineering, polyamory, brain-computer interfaces, ESP, genetic engineering, homemade vaccination, the ideological weaponization of virtual beings, and the apocalypse (there’s a silver lining here, turns out).

The idea here was not to lament the high cost of speaking. The idea here was to actually speak

I was in charge of the thing, which unquestionably guarantees anything I have to say about it will be critically biased

Two postponements and a location change later, after navigating a virus, a mass hysteria, and a series of bizarre mimetic rivalries, we finally wound up in Miami, together, in person, thoroughly not distanced, and this was important and good. This, in fact, is maybe my heretical opinion:

The extremely online tech idea that the future of human civilization is disembodied heads on a screen forever is an honestly low-key psychotic idea, which I haven’t done a good enough job challenging

on the ground floor, I promise you, this all truly just reduces to sex. Young people want to bang. They will move to the best possible places to make their fortunes and find their lifelong partners, after which they will move to the best possible places to raise their families. Any vision of the future or technology that doesn’t help us achieve these essential human goals is doomed to failure, thank God, and it's really not something I’m interested in.

the recordings of a few staged talks are also not Hereticon, because Hereticon didn’t happen on stage. Hereticon happened at the bar

For links this week I’m rounding up reactions and such from Hereticon.

Finally, not really a roundup so much as a statement of fact, Grimes is the culture: