Nick Land's drugs got him there well before everyone else, but I'm talking about the right wing cranks such as Big Yud that have kept up a mask of "grey tribe" pretenses, said stupid stale memes like "politics is the mind killer," and worshipped billionaires as the more radiant energy beings they are, being of the sky while we are of the dirt.
Sure, it seemed inevitable all along, especially when billionaires started outright buying ownership stakes in "futurology" conventions. It got especially creepy when the United States Department of Defense openly peddled contractor wares in such places.
It isn't fun being the Cassandra, seeing it happening in real time, warning people, then getting laughed off about it. I've lost real life friends to this stuff, people that were superficially just open minded and quirky in college but now wear the metaphorical armband and goosestep to wherever Sam Harris or other crypto-bigoted cranks tell them to go.
They were always there of course. Remember the fucking Extropians?
But yeah, feels bad. At least a bunch of us got out.
Wait those are real? I thought they were just a faction in Ecpipse Phase.
Yeah, sigh. They were a nonceitarian faction of the Transhumanists lead by a guy who literally changed his name to Max Moore. There was also an outright fash group called the Prometheans but they got booted pretty quickly.
I do remember the Extropians, unfortunately.
Before Silicon Valley was really a thing, they were the harbingers of the techbro hellworld to come, subsidized by Clinton era neoliberalism.