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( em português: sol2070.in/2025/06/livro-more-everything-forever/ )

More Everything Forever (2025, 384 pages), by Adam Becker, was one of the best nonfiction books on technology I have ever read. The subtitle: “AI overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley's quest to control humanity's destiny.”

Given the lack of discussion and interest in the ideologies that drive the world, this work is essential. It deals with the ideas defended by tech billionaires about what really matters today, to the detriment of everything else. In their view, these are:

• Achieving AGI, artificial general intelligence. The addition of “general” implies an AI capable of doing anything a person does, including self-improvement.

• Preventing such AGI from turning against humanity.

• Achieving technological singularity, the point at which inconceivable advances would be possible with the help of AGI.

• Uploading copies of the mind into a virtual world beyond death.

• Colonizing all of space and converting it into a cosmic computer, where transhumans would live forever (including resurrected copies of the dead).

It is no coincidence that in this science fiction scenario — utopian or dystopian, depending on your bank account — those who have all the power and money are the owners of corporations.

Sam Altman, from OpenAI (ChatGPT), even proposed that all money be replaced by shares in his company (obviously, only a minority portion would be divided among ordinary people). His justification is the democratization of advances in AI and alignment with the interests of society. He just didn't mention that this would perpetuate the corporation as the most powerful and, in practice, transform it into a techno-emperor.

Much of the book focuses on the ideas of the Effective Altruism, Longtermism, and rationalist movements.

Longtermism

Longtermism is about aiming for hypothetical immense benefits in the very distant future and disregarding current problems. A central argument is that a hypothetical future, where quadrillions of posthumans would live in paradise, with a 0.01% chance of becoming reality, would be morally preferable to trying to ensure the well-being of all people today. It sounds completely absurd, but the logic is that by multiplying the good of quadrillions of future beings by a 0.01% chance, that number is much higher than that of people today multiplied by a chance of success of, say, 50% or even 100%.

The flaw in the argument is that human well-being, especially in an unlikely future, cannot be converted into a number. But since treating people like numbers is a specialty of the current system, billionaires love this kind of idea, which, crucially, also underpins their attitudes. If it weren't for them, movements like Longoprazismo would remain restricted to eccentric fantasies. With millions of dollars directed to their organizations, this ideal is already influencing even governments, in addition to the general public.

Although tech billionaires like Musk and Altman profess these beliefs, there is doubt as to whether they really believe in them or just use such ideas to apply a philosophical veneer to their insatiable greed and thirst for power.

As the author of the book is a doctor of astrophysics and science journalist, the book presents rich and profound refutations of the pseudoscience and cult fanaticism behind these ideas, without compromising its fluidity. It is also a book-report, containing the positions of various experts that Becker interviewed, as well as representatives of the movements.

Singularity

However, the pace may be compromised somewhat by the long and detailed analyses of space colonization and the ideas of Ray Kurzweil, the prophet of singularity. But this is justified: as the arguments are loaded, the refutation could not be otherwise.

For example, Kurzweil imagines space nanobots capable of assembling Dyson spheres (structures around a star to capture a gigantic amount of energy), before going out into the universe, multiplying and converting all matter into an immeasurable digital network, to house and process virtual reality “better than reality” where quadrillions of beings would live forever. Although he does not mention it, this conversion implies the destruction of everything that exists!

Not only is it something worthy of a Marvel movie villain, but also, in Becker's words, it is “just the latest entry in the annals of the oldest human fantasy,” to live forever.

More Everything Forever is a treasure not only for those who follow technology and its directions, but also for those who love science fiction.

The section on how tech billionaires seem to misunderstand science fiction stories — seeing dystopian warnings as roadmaps to follow — would be amusing if it weren't so tragic.

Mental bug

The author raises the possibility that the predominance of science and math degrees — with a lot of narrow-mindedness, of course — among big tech leaders may have something to do with this misunderstanding. It is as if there were an invisible bug in how their minds operate. Here are some excerpts on this topic:

This homogeneous intellectual background focused on STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] in the culture of tech startups and, more generally, in Silicon Valley, generates a denial of the humanities, a systematic and sometimes deliberate ignorance of the arts and humanities.

Nowhere is the denial of the humanities more evident in the tech industry than in its attitude toward history. “I don't even know why we study history,” says Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of Google's self-driving car division, now known as Waymo. "It's fun, I guess — dinosaurs, Neanderthals, the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what has already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they did. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."

The denial of the humanities is enabled—and enables—another endemic affliction in the tech industry: “engineer disease,” the belief that specializing in one area (usually STEM) makes you an expert in all others as well. (…) Or, put another way, there is only one thing that is really difficult, and you [the engineer] already know what it is, so everything else must be easy.

People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any type of system, from the ground up, without prior training, thanks to their superior analytical powers. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes dangerous confidence.

For example, Elon Musk, in his sidereal hubris, completely ignored the consecrated image that astronomer Carl Sagan commissioned and evoked, about the “pale blue dot,” Earth, “... there being no other place, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.” An interviewer asked the entrepreneur to read the longer excerpt, and when Musk reached that sentence, he complained: “That's not true, that's false. Mars!”

Solution?

In the final chapter, Becker advocates a solution: billionaire fortunes should not be allowed. There is an urgent need for taxation that prevents the accumulation of more than, say, $500 million — which would still allow for immense wealth. Economist Paul Krugman is quoted as saying that something like this has actually already been done. In 1953 in the US, annual incomes above $300,000 were taxed at 92%.

Personally, I imagine that such regulation — in the very unlikely event that laws were passed — would be short-lived. Very wealthy people always end up hijacking politics simply because their fortunes allow them to, just as they did to overturn this 1950s law and many other regulations on corporate power.

Something much more radical would be necessary.

( em português → sol2070.in/2025/06/livro-careless-people/ )

In Careless People (2025, 400 pages), Sarah Wynn-Williams recounts the years between 2011 and 2018 when she worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook leaders. The book is captivating and fascinating because it gets up close and personal with the kind of people who influence the world so much, showing glimpses of how extremely different they are from most people, in terms of their lack of humanity, as well as some of the company's most shady operations, which we only hear about when their spokespeople appear to deny everything.

The book's success could be one of the comedies of errors recounted in the book itself. The corporation tried to legally ban the circulation of the work. The result: it went straight to the bestseller list on the day of its release.

The narrative begins slowly, with Sarah joining the company. But the revelations become more serious as she gets closer to the leaders. For example, Zuckerberg's obsession with cornering the Chinese market, and all kinds of privacy invasions and espionage he offered the Chinese Communist Party to close a deal.

Coming from New Zealand, with experience in diplomacy, she worked with FB policies in countries outside the US. It is only towards the end that she decides to leave, disgusted by what she repeatedly witnessed and by personal abuse. For most of the book, she tries to convince herself that the corporation could still have a positive effect on the world, admitting her own careerism. In other words, she is no Edward Snowden-type whistleblower; she just wanted the company to make humane decisions, sacrificing profits minimally, but still generating billions for shareholders and a good salary for herself.

Perhaps that is why the title of the book is so neutral: “Careless People”. The author saw no evil conspiracy, only executives who were extremely irresponsible and negligent with anything that did not quickly translate into profits for shareholders. But the consequences of this, as in other companies of this size, are disastrous for people and the world.

Genocide in Myanmar

One example, in the most shocking chapter, is what happened in Myanmar between 2015 and 2017. It was one of the few countries that joined the company's project to help provide internet to the population, as long as the internet was limited to Facebook (brazilian president Dilma Rousseff appears in the book giving Zuckerberg the cold shoulder when he tries to sell the scheme to Brazil). A large part of the population started using FB, which came pre-installed on cell phones, with unlimited minutes, without ever having used the internet on a desktop computer.

The country has a Buddhist majority and an Islamic minority, and has been ruled by a dictatorship since a coup in 1962 (with failed attempts at democratization in recent years). Stimulated by fake news and hatred on Facebook, radical groups began to lynch and rape Muslims, aided or allowed by police and military personnel. The massacre escalated into genocide (recognized by the UN), with more than 6,000 dead and the forced displacement of 700,000 Muslims to Bangladesh.

From the first signs of the catastrophe, the company's leadership had been warned and pressured, but did nothing because the country was not on the priority list — what mattered there were only the millions of new users to fatten the global sum that gives value to the corporation. There was only one person employed to moderate fake news (based in Ireland), and she was sympathetic to the military and opposed to human rights. The official FB app did not work, and people ended up using third-party programs, which did not have the ability to report crimes online. There was even an implementation error in the encoding of Burmese characters, which prevented people outside the country from viewing the content correctly — for example, for someone who understood the language to evaluate it in the US (at the time, automatic translators did not translate Burmese).

The team trying to monitor the situation had to do so unofficially, contacting NGOs, since the company did nothing. Facebook only took action too late, after the ethnic-religious massacre had reached massive proportions, adding to the official list of crimes against humanity.

Hacking human vulnerabilities

Another striking example of this negligence on the part of administrators was when a report in Australia revealed that ad sellers were widely exploiting one of Facebook's capabilities: commercially exploiting moments when teenagers felt “emotionally vulnerable.”

Research has already proven that, at times like these, people spend money more compulsively. The platform detected, for example, when a teenager deleted a selfie (a sign of dissatisfaction with her appearance) and then displayed an advertisement for a cosmetic or weight loss product.

The company was quick to deny and condemn any such practice. Then, people in the sales department began to protest internally, saying that publicly condemning this practice, as if it were something nefarious, was hurting sales. Everyone, in every office of the company around the world, used it. In fact, it was what made the difference in commissions. Salespeople wanted the company to own up to what it was doing so that sales would not be affected.

Abuse

Sarah also reports several instances of abuse she suffered, such as having to participate in online meetings during maternity leave, or constant sexual insinuations from bosses. She details how silence about abuse is part of the toxic culture of the workplace. When she reported her boss's harassment, she ended up being fired.

Reacting publicly to the accusations in the book, executives referred to the author as a troubled and resentful former employee. Denying, as always, any possible illegality or wrongdoing.

( sol2070.in/2025/06/livro-nem-mesmo-os-mortos/ )

Um magistral e surreal romance latino-americano histórico: Nem Mesmo os Mortos (Ni Siquiera Los Muertos, 2020, 480 pgs), de Juan Gómez Bárcena.

Bárcena na verdade é um aclamado autor espanhol, mas a estória se passa no México, abrangendo uma busca delirante desde o século 16 até os EUA de Trump. O protagonista Juan, ex-soldado da coroa, assume a responsabilidade real de encontrar e neutralizar o indígena subversivo Juan.

É como se Cormac McCarthy tivesse expandido um conto de doppelganger borgesiano em um grande romance de apocalipse colonial, com uma boa homenagem também ao 2666 de Roberto Bolaño. Então não teria como deixar de me arrebatar.

O livro também vai bem além dessas influências, com a qualidade de um pesadelo hipnótico, e alguns respiros essenciais. Ao longo da busca, os cenários vão se transformando historicamente, assim como o linguajar das pessoas, acompanhando os séculos, em transições integradas, sem brusquidão, como as dos sonhos. O perseguidor parece continuar a mesma pessoa, apesar das sugestões de que simboliza um anseio maior. O perseguido vai se transformando. Indígena convertido, pregador herege que aponta a hipocrisia institucional, messias, revolucionário etc.

Versa em prosa formidável (o autor também é poeta) sobre massacre colonial, religião — nas faces horrendas, fanáticas e também mais espontâneas do cristianismo — e política, sendo ao mesmo tempo uma excursão interior pela devastação, pelo “coração das trevas” (o clássico de Joseph Conrad é outra homenagem clara, assim como, aparentemente, a adaptação cinematográfica de Coppola, Apocalypse Now).

Fiquei contente por ter a cópia impressa, na bela edição da editora DBA, já que é o tipo de livro para reler, com muitas camadas. Juan está perambulando num pós-morte alucinatório? É a corporificação dos anseios essenciais de um povo eternamente pisoteado, buscando uma imagem idealizada de si? Algum anjo caído vagando pelas ruínas do tempo?

Nem importa tanto esse tipo de explicação. Há uma grandeza épica que encanta com aquela estética de um sublime maior e bestial, que reflete bastante nosso mundo.

O título vem de uma citação do filósofo cultural Walter Benjamin:

O Messias não vem apenas como Redentor, mas também como o vencedor do Anticristo. Somente o historiador perpassado pela convicção de que nem mesmo os mortos estarão a salvo do inimigo, caso este vença, tem o direito de acender no passado a centelha da esperança. E esse inimigo não cessou de vencer.

É um resumo temático do romance, levando em conta que Benjamim está falando de opressão e libertação históricas.

( em português → sol2070.in/2025/06/livro-the-saint-of-bright-doors/ )

A strange, mythical, and captivating novel: The Saint of Bright Doors (2023), by Sri Lankan author Vajra Chandrasekera, winner of the 2024 Nebula Award—one of the most important awards in speculative fiction.

Strange, perhaps, because it comes from another culture. In Buddhist Sri Lanka, it may not have sounded so exotic, despite its heresy against the dominant religion. Classified as fantasy and full of magical realism, it is a queer Oedipal saga where legends are reality.

We follow Fetter from childhood, when his pagan mother eliminates his shadow and trains him to commit all five of the most serious religious crimes, including murdering saints and even his mother and father.

It is necessary to situate the book to understand it better. The Buddhist religion is often seen in the West with an aura of greater coherence, critical practical spirit, and pacifism. But in countries such as Sri Lanka, which is predominantly Buddhist, religious institutions seem no better than those we know well, with their corruption, political promiscuity, and neglect of multiple forms of violence. In some respects, they seem even worse, as they brutally contradict what they preach, given the culturally and religiously motivated massacres that have been devastating the country.

Vajra transports this apocalyptic spiritual context to a magical world with levitating saints, magic doors, revolutionary movements, demons, and “enlightened” beings—without discarding smartphones and online surveillance—as if all religious and folkloric mythology were part of consensual reality.

Just as Western stories rebel against involuntary Christian indoctrination in education, the author does so with Buddhism, although he does not name it.

The gay protagonist Fetter is the unrecognized heir of the “enlightened” one, a quasi-chosen one. He leaves his mother and ends up joining a support group for quasi-chosen ones, being drawn into a conspiracy to unravel the mystery of the bright doors and, with his special abilities, even helping to fight the religious-political tyranny.

Loaded with psychological archetypes, it reconciles the mythical with the mundane, as one critic said, the surreal with wisdom.

I just felt that, at times, it drags on in an exposition of scenarios that don't resonate, at least with me (who already has an above-average familiarity with the East and Buddhism).

However, there is a twist at the end that fully compensates for the less captivating passages, practically on the same level as the great immemorial myths.

( sol2070.in/2025/06/livro-snowden-eterna-vigilancia/ )

Apesar do interesse no tema, fui ler só agora Eterna Vigilância (2019, 288 pgs), em que o próprio Edward Snowden conta sobre a vigilância online massiva ilegal que descobriu nos serviços de inteligência dos EUA.

Um dos motivos porque não tinha lido é que imaginava que seu objeto poderiam ser tecnologias defasadas, já que se passa no início da década de 2010. Engano.

Na verdade, é mais assustador até: se há 15 anos, uma vigilância tão granular e invasiva já estava em plena operação, imagine agora, com a onipenetração big tech e sua agenda de extrema-direita.

Um dos programas, o PRISM, escaneava palavras-chave em tudo o que as pessoas faziam online. Como “bomba”, “protesto” etc. Ao detectá-las, infectava automaticamente os computadores e celulares dos alvos com malware, ganhando total controle sobre os dispositivos e transformando-os em aparelhos de escuta em tempo real.

A NSA dos EUA diz ter desativado essa vigilância massiva ativa, após o escândalo. Só que eram negações exatamente como essa que eram dadas, antes das revelações. “Não existe nenhum programa de vigilância”, “Governos e corporações não têm como fazer isso”, “É ficção científica distópica” etc.

A capa da edição brasileira (li a versão em inglês) tem um subtítulo exagerado: “Como montei e desvendei o maior sistema de espionagem do mundo”. Snowden não montou o sistema. Era administrador de sistemas em diversas unidades da CIA e NSA, na maioria das vezes, terceirizado. Ao ver sinais da completa invasão de privacidade, dentro e fora dos EUA, começou a fuçar por conta própria. Reuniu provas, fugiu (abandonando a noiva, família e amizades) e entregou tudo para jornalistas. Hoje, vive como asilado político na Rússia, sendo procurado internacionalmente por revelar segredos de segurança nacional.

É um thriller da vida real envolvente como poucos. Li em três dias, sendo que costumo consumir não ficção em ritmo muito mais lento.

Vi o filme de Oliver Stone Snowden (2016) há uns anos e, apesar de irregular, não é ruim. Ele é baseado em outros livros sobre o caso. Mas Eterna Vigilância é muito mais interessante. Entra fundo, por exemplo, nos dilemas morais e convicções de Snowden, sua formação com zines hackers na infância, além do clímax no heist final quando rouba os dados e foge.

Do ponto de vista tecnológico, pode ser um pouco decepcionante para pessoas mais técnicas. Como é um livro para o público leigo, evita aprofundar demais esses detalhes. Mas também não faltam considerações técnicas mais amplas.