“Perhaps the darkest direction the new fusionist thinking could take was suggested by Yarvin back in 2008. In contemplating the transformation of San Francisco into a private entity called “Friscorp,” he wondered what might be done with the city’s unproductive residents who would remain. After considering and then rejecting the idea of converting surplus “hominids” into biodiesel for city buses, he suggested that “the best humane alternative to genocide” was “not to liquidate the residents… but to virtualize them.” He envisioned confining the knowledge economy’s underclass in “permanent solitary confinement, smeared like a bee larva in a cell that is sealed except in emergencies.” Against fears that this might spark a rebellion, similar to the one Michael Young had envisioned half a century earlier, he reached for the map of technology. The prisoner’s cell would not be barren. It would involve “an immersive virtual reality interface that allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.” – a passage from Quinn Slobodian’s 2025 book Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right that resembles a cross between Soylent Green and The Matrix – even here poor sick Curtis Yarvin was not original. This vision of Yarvin is horror, and he thinks it is compassion.
TESCREAL – an acronym that describes the secret philosophy of the technological moguls, so-called progres
Imagine a world in which the most powerful technological visionaries — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Curtis Yarvin, and others like him — dream not just of new gadgets, but of the complete transformation, or even replacement, of humanity. This is precisely the imagination described by the term TESCREAL, an acronym coined in 2023 by philosopher and ethicist Émile Torres and his colleague Timnit Gebru to articulate a specific but influential worldview network of ideas that today shapes the technological elite of Silicon Valley.
Reading the interview with Émile Torres in Jacobine , it seems to me that his explanations of this acronym and the actions of tech-moguls shed light on what is actually happening right now and what people like apartheid Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and in general people behind companies like Palantir, Raytheon and the like want. Namely, they are arrogant enough to think that with their power and wealth they can change the human race and the destiny of humanity, direct the direction of development and ideologies, be the tech whip of God.
TESCREAL is not just a fancy word — it is a combination of seven ideologies: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism . Each of these components carries its own fantasy of what the future should look like, but together they create a very powerful, almost mythological vision of a future in which human beings become only a stepping stone towards superior forms of intelligence and a post-human existence.
Meanings of terms
Now to my great regret, when I introduced this Torres acronym, I also have to explain the individual components and end this essay. Transhumanism is the idea that man should and can improve himself with technology (implants, genetic interventions, AI, virtualization of people, like the horror from Curtis Yarvin's proposal at the beginning of this text) in order to overcome biological limitations such as disease, aging, suffering and death.
Extropianism is a radical technological optimism that advocates constant progress, self-improvement and rejection of all “natural” limits as obstacles to development. Singularitarianism represents the belief that the arrival of the technological singularity—the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence (AGI)—is inevitable and should be actively accelerated.
Cosmism is a worldview in which the spread of intelligence and life throughout the universe is a moral imperative, even more important than concern for current humanity. So, let me translate for you – current humanity, you your child, are not important in this worldview, You are less than an orangutan, you are some flatworm in this understanding. Your dreams, hopes, loves are not important. All for some higher purpose.
Rationalism, but this is not Descartes’ rationalism, this is more Ayn Rand’s objectivism, i.e. the belief that all social and moral problems can be solved by cold reason, models and optimization, often underestimating emotions, empathy, culture and politics. People don't work like that, but like I said, people don't matter in this concept.
Effective altruism is an ethical framework that seeks to do “maximally” good through calculating benefits, but it often privileges abstract, future scenarios over concrete human suffering today. Longtermism is the idea that the lives of people in the distant future are more important than the lives of people today, so present sacrifices can be justified in the name of hypothetical future benefits. Yes, if there are people in the future, but this is more about some struggle to create cyborgs and clones that will not have your consciousness.
In this narrative, the goal is not the preservation of current humans but the maximization of “value” in the universe — an abstract concept measured by the amount of consciousness, experiences, or intelligence we can create. This means that the ideals of traditional humanism—concern for human needs, feelings, and communities—can become secondary to the construct that TESCREALists see as a cosmic imperative.
This means that they are not interested in the welfare state, social mobility (moving from one social class to another, most often due to education), targeted programs, inclusivity and the fight for the right to equal opportunities. If you are born poor, you will die poor. The poor are considered stupid by this type of arrogant people, limited because they did not succeed. They did not have apartheid daddies with slaves in emerald mines to push their first business.
TESCREALists overlap here with neoliberals, libertarians like those of the Mont Pelerin Society or the Mises Institute, economists of the Chicago and Austrian schools (whom Quinn Slobodian so aptly called “Hayek’s bastards”). The big capitalists, whose main product is actually war, surveillance, and false promises of human progress through AI, actually believe that we are all worthless.
Hayek's bastards also consider the welfare state and regulation by the state as an enemy that smacks of socialism. And that's how a marriage was created, into which the zealot Christians of the MAGA province entered, because they also do not smell socialism and libertarians, worshipers of laissez-faire capitalism. This is something that Quinn Slobodian calls fusionism – the merging of extreme market liberalism with authoritarian, hierarchical and technocratic ideas , often with an open rejection of democracy . Surveillance capitalism companies like Palantir and Raytheon need just that.
To explain – libertarians believe that capitalism is the most ethical of all systems because in the transaction of trade (“both buyer and seller” – both sides say “thank you”) and because they believe that capitalism makes people happy by giving them what they need. This should be said to the families of drug addicts, oxycodone owners, owners of fur coats, people trapped in debt slavery (because, for example, they have a student loan), children, especially girls who are victims of ephebophilia and pedophilia, who “made happy” the sick rich and a number of other unfortunates. Dino Merlin, the great evlija ( sarcasm ) , sang the old well-known saying “the fortune of a couple is not full of sacks, those who have it know that”.
In the world planned by tech-capitalist moguls, the poor can at best be cannon fodder and breeding grounds for cannon fodder. And in their minds, anyone under a billion dollars is poor.
The key to the establishment of this regime of liberal technological tyranny is the deregulation of any role of the state, just what the crazy Ayn Rand imagined, under the guise of rationalism and objectivism, coldness in assessments and decision-making, and hatred of statism (French étatisme , Eng. stateism) – the intrusion of the state into market affairs and social welfare, the existence of a strong state that regulates many things.
They dream of eternity and the spread of their genes. You are collateral damage.
Have you ever wondered why these billionaires have such a fixation on procreation, the creation of engineered offspring, offspring that did not arise from an act of love, but rather a lab experiment in which Musk selects embryos so that they are only male (so one child applies the gender to him), the psychopath and criminal Jeffrey Epstein dreams of inseminating women with his sperm at the Zorro Ranch, and Sam Altman and his boyfriend invest in the company Preventive for editing the genomes of babies – no would treat diseases rather than create babies with the desired characteristics, unable to learn anything from the case of Musk's daughter Vivian Wilson. By the way, genetic editing of babies is prohibited, but I guess tech-despots are above that.
In addition to procreation in controlled lab conditions, probably for the sake of producing Übermensch offspring, tech-moguls are obsessed with biohacking , longevity , anti-aging , but also personalized medicine, especially genome analysis, in order to find some traits that make them better, to tweak some genes to make them better, live longer and look youthful until they die .
By the way, all this is already offered to you as a product of the wellness industry, so don't be surprised to be bombarded with commercials and reels about supplements that promise longevity and gene tweaking and push you to sequence your gene, under the pretext that it will give you better results in sports, or cognitive abilities. All these are partly manosphere fairy tales, in which you are the product and the consumer at the same time.
It should be noted that Telegram founder Pavel Durov offered to cover the costs of IVF for women who wanted to become mothers if they conceived with his sperm. This narcissism – believing that you are smart enough, that your IQ is so high, that you are so attractive that you should procreate indefinitely – is a difficult F diagnosis.
By the way – if someone is so smart, how does he not understand the concept of the gene pool , and the importance of diversity for the survival of the species? In a world where the gene pool is reduced so that the offspring are half-brothers and half-sisters, the risk of genetic malformations and diseases is very high. Let's remember the Habsburgs, and the recent case of a sperm donor, the biological father of 197 children who passed on a very ugly cancer mutation to his offspring .
You just have to follow the miraculous case of Bryan Johnson , a billionaire who annually invests 10 million in biohacking and achieving a youthful appearance, even using his own son for it. Along with all this, there are also wet dreams about clone dynasties, like the one from Asimov's Foundation, and uploading consciousness, like the theme in Altered Carbon.
They don't want to save humanity—they want to replace it.
For the sake of the dream of conquering other planets and colonization, they invest resources in it, they don't care about the survival of the Earth and climate change. These poor people will definitely stay there, us, so let them die. The rich will buy a one-way ticket to the colonies.
In short, they are madmen, mentally ill people who are leading the planet and humanity to ruin and their goal is to make it fail. Their goal, like in Fallout, is to eliminate all dissenters from the face of the Earth. No matter how high their IQ is (and by the way, they all have a fetish for IQ, something that has remained as a legacy of eugenics and the book The Bell Curve by another libertarian, Charles Murray), these people do not possess other types of intelligence and in fact, apart from obvious psychological problems, they are disabled in terms of other types of intelligence, such as emotional and social.
For some of the protagonists of this vision, this means colonizing galaxies, creating superintelligent beings, or even “uploading” consciousness into digital worlds. For others, this means that even the human species itself is not necessarily the final stage of evolution. Critics point out that such a way of thinking can be elitist, removed from everyday reality, and prone to ignoring the ethical implications for ordinary people who may never have asked for such a future — but will nevertheless be deeply affected by its realization.
Militarization, manosphere, conservatism, control of women – it's all part of the package
In this rapidly militarizing world, military terms are returning under the false pretext that young men need to learn discipline, eat beans, steel themselves and know how to make a tight bed, Germany is sending out polls about readiness to mobilize young people, one thing is clear: in the era of AI, there will be increasing unemployment, created precisely by tech moguls. People will only be able to do physical work and their purpose will be narrowed down to being cannon fodder or cannon fodder. That's why there is so much manosphere and bringing women back into the house.
These are all psychological preparations for a single function that real people, not rich enough, will have in the world that tech moguls desire. Being reduced to the role of marwa for breeding and slaughter. The manosphere doctrine is not accidental – it is there to infiltrate young men and change their minds so that they want to go to war and treat women only as reproductive material.
From Jordan Peterson, for whom it is creepy that some women are delighted by him and his infantile books without style and point, through Andrew Tate, trad-wives , videos on YT and IG about stoicism, discipline, male and female energy, to wet dreams about high-tech inseminations – all these are cognitive preparations for a world in which only the super-rich of technological despotism have the right to live. And so that we are happy to accept that fate, even proud of it. And that's why now, like Pavlov's dog, we are being trained to be used to AI slop , the virtual world and to even enjoy it.
Such texts serve to make us disagree with such a development of events and to consciously rebel against it.
Essentially, TESCREAL is a symbol of a technological mythology of our time: a vision in which the boundaries of human identity, body and meaning become the object of an engineering project — but not necessarily one with the human heart at its center.
The first step to rebellion is to be aware of what is happening.
Author:
Jelena Kalinić, MA in comparative literature and graduate biologist, science journalist and science communicator, has a WHO infodemic manager certificate and Health metrics Study design & Evidence based medicine training. Winner of the 2020 EurekaAlert (AAAS) Fellowship for Science Journalists. Short-runner, second place in the selection for European Science journalist of the year for 2022.
