On the Real-Life Sci-Fi Horror of Silicon Valley

A New Comic on the Worldview and and Future Visions of Our Tech Oligarchs

For my new comic, Technocrat Tales: The Real-Life Sci-Fi Horror of Silicon Valley, I tried my hardest to understand how tech billionaires think. I forced myself to listen to hours upon hours of rambling Joe Rogan interviews and to read the transcripts of House of Representatives committee hearings on AI, as well as the entirety of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and other tech billionaire vanity publications. Basically I worked to locate every recent-ish public statement by a U.S. tech billionaire where they said something even remotely coherent about their worldview and vision for the future. As with all my projects of the last several years, I created a large file of these statements and eventually chose eighteen of them which I view as representative of the prevailing Silicon Valley ethos. Also using visual elements of early 60s sci-fi comic books, I made these statements into comics.

Why did I choose Silicon Valley as the focus of this project? Well, I work in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the public university where I’m contingent faculty can often feel like the front lines in tech companies assault on education. But more than that, it appears clear that Big Tech serves as a fulcrum to all the current horrors of our daily lives—from the “AI-assisted genocide” in Gaza to the surveillance systems utilized by ICE in their kidnappings—and the tech oligarchs have embraced catastrophic climate change as a necessity to achieve their AI fantasies. As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue in a recent essay, Big Tech and the far right have essentially fused into a singular force of “end times fascism,” one driving us all towards apocalypse.

To understand these stakes, we need to listen to what the technocrats are telling us about how they view humanity and our future, and as my earlier work should indicate, I believe that weird comic books are a natural medium to encourage this type of listening.

So, on that note, I’ll introduce three key themes that I’ve found again and again in the public statements of tech billionaires: 1) the necessity of mass death and suffering for technological “progress,” 2) Silicon Valley’s adoption of a sci-fi and video games framework to justify this death and suffering, and 3) the fundamental anti-humanity of Big Tech’s race to “digital super-intelligence.”

1) The Necessity of Mass Death and Suffering for Technological “Progress”

Big Tech appears determined to make our lives worse. Even at their most benign, technocrats regularly show little regard for basic quality of life matters. Google’s Sergey Brin demonstrates this in a 2025 memo to employees laying out what he considers an appropriate work week for them:

Even more seriously, technocrats have proven willing to sacrifice the environment to their greed. The unchecked growth of massive data centers to power generative-AI, embraced by governments and tech companies alike, will unquestionably prevent us from fighting climate change, and Big Tech fully understands the apocalyptic future they are imposing upon the world. Here is Google’s Eric Schmidt, testifying to the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee in April:

And here is OpenAI’s Sam Altman speaking in a 2024 interview:

As Altman’s terrifying reference to “geoengineering” indicates, technocrats justify their hastening of a climate apocalypse by offering vague promises that Silicon Valley will one day save the world using the same technology that is currently destroying it.

Tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen develops this theme further in the fascist-inspired Techno-Optimist Manifesto:

In a 2024 interview, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos further adds to this vision by arguing that we should additionally turn our focus to destroying other planets:

As with Elon Musk’s Mars fantasies and Big Tech’s unlikely claims about nuclear power, it is hard to imagine that these technocrats believe their own bullshit. But even if they do, where does the arrogance to play with the fate of the entire world (or the entire universe, in Bezos’s vision) come from? How could they possibly think like this?

This is where Silicon Valley’s love for video games and (misreadings of) science fiction comes in.

2) Silicon Valley’s Use of a Sci-Fi and Video Games Derived Framework to Justify This Death and Suffering

For over a decade, Elon Musk has insisted that our whole existence is almost certainly a video game “simulation,” repeating this to Joe Rogan, as well as to “serious” tech journalists such as Kara Swisher:

Demonstrating a similar sci-fi/ video games centered worldview, Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palantir) describes the U.S. left as “the borg” (Star Trek), “NPC” (video games), and “the Empire” (Star Wars)—all in a single interview:

Again and again, technocrats use similar terminology, positioning themselves as the video game players or the heroes of sci-fi films or novels. This would sound harmless, except that they utilize this framework to justify an essentially sociopathic distancing from other human beings. The claim that they see things on a macro rather than micro level (think video game world-building or Neo’s revelation of “the Matrix”) allows them to justify their mass manipulation of what Sam Altman refers to in a 2024 interview as “the whole structure of society”:

3) The Fundamental Anti-Humanity of Big Tech’s Race to “Digital Super-Intelligence.”

I’ll finish with this theme. Despite the lack of evidence that AGI or artificial super-intelligence is imminent or even truly possible, Silicon Valley prioritizes a theoretical future digital intelligence over humans themselves.

In a 2017 blog post, Sam Altman refers to our digital “descendants”:

Musk is even more blunt in a recent post to X:

This future vision, to be clear, is one of death. And in my study of the public statements of tech billionaires, I found the consistent presence of death throughout. Here is Palantir CEO Alex Karp, speaking in his 2025 book The Technological Republic:

One of the few examples I found of a technocrat emphasizing the importance of human life is this twisted logic from the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, yet another argument against regulating AI:

I’ll finish with Elon Musk’s speaking on “civilizational suicidal empathy,” a deeply disturbing contention adopted by both technocrats and the Christian right. Musk explains this pseudo-intellectual justification for mass suffering and death to a worshipful Joe Rogan in a 2025 interview:

Technocrat Tales is available now.