Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Among the Edgelords,” a feature on the Hereticon Apocalypse Ball, written by author Daniel Pinchbeck. To read the rest, get your copy here.
“This is just like the hunger games!” a young woman venture capitalist in a purple wig and silver sci-fi bodysuit exclaimed, standing on the balcony overlooking the Apocalypse Ball. Held over Halloween weekend at the Faena Forum, an exhibition and event space in Miami Beach designed in minimal modernist fashion by Rem Koolhaus, the doomsday shindig resembled a very rich, strangely somber Burning Man party, with the familiar assortment of costumed revelers, half-naked dancers, and carnivalesque stilt walkers. It featured dim sum, filet mignon, chocolate bonbons, and an unlimited open bar.
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One story I heard from that night, perhaps apocryphal or exaggerated or misinterpreted: A young engineer in the biotech space approached Thiel with a proposition. He could attempt to clone the legendary physicist John von Neumann from dried saliva he left on the back of a postage stamp.
Impressed, Thiel allegedly invested on the spot.
Those in attendance had been commanded to dress for the imminent end of the world. One contingent came as their favorite Roman emperors, marking the approaching fall of the republic and the thrilling return to monarchy. Others wore white tie and tails, or ceremonial robes. Luridly canceled Hollywood stars, libertarian YouTube influencers, and infamous white-collar criminals boozed and canoodled.
Photocopies of the Unabomber Manifesto were scattered around, presumably ironically. The event was the culmination of Hereticon, an annual three-day conference for “thoughtcrime,” put on by Thiel’s venture capital firm, the Founders Fund. The brash spirit of the legendary $80 billion investor who believes in free markets, “sovereign individuals,” and tech monopolies hovered over the event. Hereticon brings together tech entrepreneurs, investors, maverick scientists, UFO enthusiasts, effective altruists, and AI doomers and AI accelerationists for a deluxe gabfest, with talks, panels, performances, and the lavish Apocalypse Ball.
Hereticon occurred just a week before Election Day. I was not in a happy frame of mind. Current events were making it difficult for me to maintain my usual state of non-attached bonhomie and underlying
optimism. It was difficult to ignore the brutal omens of approaching neofascism, or to suppress my growing anxiety for the future of America in the epoch of surveillance capitalism and hypermanipulative artificial intelligence. Even if Donald Trump lost, it was hard to muster enthusiasm for the dreary status quo–preserving alternative. Onstage a month earlier, I interviewed Guy McPherson, a doomer climate scientist.
McPherson believes the great human die-off will start in the next five years, as rivers dry up, food runs out, Category 5 superstorms become annual rites of passage, and mass climate migration triggers nuclear wars. When I got the surprise invite to attend Hereticon—probably because of my past books on psychedelics and prophecy—I felt there was nothing left to lose. The neolibertarian transhumanists gathering might be my ideological nemeses, but at least they felt enthusiasm for this future we were caroming toward.
Hereticon bills itself as a convention for radical, dangerous thought. “Most new ideas are wrong, or useless. Some are even dangerous. But from science and technology to business and faith, progress is a history of persecuted weirdos,” the organizers note on their website. The event covers topics such as “genetic modification, natalism, parapsychology, artificial consciousness, defense, pharmacology, virology, sex, God.” There were a lot of big ideas tossed around—these people think in moonshots (interstellar travel and nanobots), not incremental changes (Inflation Reduction Acts and antitrust legislation). There was no problem that couldn’t be solved through some combination of crypto, exponential tech, and owning the libs.
Read the rest of the story in PLAYBOY Magazine, on shelves now. Get your copy here.