Jaron Lanier

Because Harris and Walz pursue the same goals that techies always have: to make life better for everyone

Speaking as a creature of Silicon Valley, it is a special joy to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Some of us techies have lately been drifting into a dark place. We imagine a future where most of humanity will be left behind by artificial intelligence and robots, facing abject irrelevance. Or our technologies might simply obliterate the human world all at once, though perhaps still leaving a tiny tech elite in comfort. If you don’t follow tech culture, this bleak report might sound exaggerated, but unfortunately, it is accurate.

Worse, perhaps, is that some of us seem to want to gallop into oblivion. Some of us say it’s destiny, that biological humans were only ever a stepping stone anyway. Some say we don’t deserve to survive, so let’s burn the whole place down. And some say, if we don’t do it, someone else will, and we should be the ones to turn the doomsday switch whatever happens.

Techies who feel this way are in a small minority, but they are noisy. Their malaise has crept out into the world and darkened the days of some of our brightest young people, who naturally gravitate toward science and tech. I have recently heard teenagers ask questions I have never heard before. “Why did our parents have us? Why would anyone have a child in this doomed world?”

The darkest of us have turned to Trump. When nothing matters, all that is left is money and macho preening. We have a few rich techies who seem to get some modicum of fleeting satisfaction from imagining the apocalypse for the rest of us.

Instead of doing everything possible to support the future—instead of taking that leap of faith that had previously been at the heart of technology—they rage against any impediment to their precious, real-life postapocalyptic movie. They say that the very worst thing in the world would be doing anything via the government or any mechanism other than a big tech platform, even as they also say tech—the very tech they are working on—might be the end of us all.

This is the insane darkness of the small but elite node of support for Trump within the tech world. But there is a better way.

Harris and Walz represent a simple idea, which is that the beneficiaries of whatever we do should be other people. To support them is to support humanity. 

Techies have to stop and ask why we do what we do. What is the purpose? I am so thrilled that tech has been at the core of reduced child mortality and increased overall health and longevity. These improvements happened incredibly recently, roughly coinciding with the optimistic project of the USA and similar reflections around the world. 

The policies of Harris and Walz pursue the same goals that techies always have: to make life better for everyone. How can you call yourself a techie and turn your back on that?

Go Kamala!

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, author, and musician.