Infinite games

I’m surrounded by techno-optimists. People who, like a lot of Silicon Valley veterans, embrace a pragmatic optimism about technology because the future is most often shaped by optimists (as famously stated by Kevin Kelly). The belief goes: what doesn’t work fades away, and better stuff emerge to replace it. This is the altar of entrepreneurial vision, everyone seems to worship on LinkedIn. I’ve watched too many ideas that should have failed be kept alive (and even forcefully driven to profitability) through sheer capital injection. Meanwhile, urgent, grounded ideas die quietly because they aren’t easily monetized at scale.

WeWork pitched office subletting as a tech revolution and ballooned into a $47 billion valuation before imploding. Uber was heavily capital infused to profitability. Today, OpenAI’s mission to “benefit all of humanity” now sits uneasily beside multi-billion dollar partnerships and closed models. Meanwhile, ideas with genuine public value: clean water, affordable housing, or universal healthcare infrastructure, all struggle to find funding because they don't scale profitably. Capital rewards what sells, not what serves. Utility and profitability are not necessarily linked in our ever more financialized world. Capital behaves nothing like evolution; money has no biological equivalent.

To be fair, it’s easy to criticize techno-optimism, to stand on sit in a cushy ergonomic chair to talk smack. It takes real effort and vision to create anything. Everything we rely on (tools, comforts, structures) came from someone’s ambition. I’m surrounded by someone’s best work at all time. As a parent of two young kids, I’m confronted daily with the miracle of invention. Diapers. Running water. Healthcare system. Things I take for granted but couldn’t imagine parenting without. And yet… there must have been a tipping point. Optimism that once fueled genuine progress nowadays often covers for reckless speculation.

Capitalism and nature are both infinite games, but they play by different rules. Evolution is indifferent but principled. Its business model is survival through adaptation. Capital’s is survival through speculation. One refines what works; the other amplifies what excites. And so we drift. Not toward what we need, but toward what tickle or sense (and can be funded). “The market” will keep fueling innovation. It’s now tied to our biological craving for ergonomic improvement: first necessity, then comfort. Logically with scale we’ve outsourced optimism to industry. We don’t really steer our boat anymore, at least not the collective one. Which is why it’s necessary to stop, as individuals, and scrutinize what’s going on, harshly.

Elon Musk once said: “If we are not trying to become an interplanetary species, then we are just waiting around for an extinction event, man-made or natural.” Of all his soundbites, that’s the one that stuck in my techno-cringe mental database. He finds solace in pushing the fate of our species outward into the stars. I’m more comfortable with the idea that all of this might have no meaning. The transhumanism of his vision, to him, is pure humanism. To me, it’s like veganism: a refusal of what I see as a law of nature: that everything eats, and everything gets eaten and beyond that there’s isn’t much to it. There’s no real need to go anywhere aside of closing the loop.

My kids are already telling me they need space try things that make no sense to me. Fueled by abundant energy they will feed new dreams. Today it’s Legos. Tomorrow it could be rockets, biotech, or whatever future gadgetry. Reconciling fresh enthusiasm with my metaphysical leanings will be emotionally costly. Unless I take a dramatic turn, I won’t be a monk or a remote farmer. I’ll never be fully at ease with the churn of new technology, abundance, or dogma.

Yet, Zen and techno-futurism are both infinite games. Zen turns inward. Transhumanism pushes hardware far beyond its default settings. They’re both open-ended pursuits without a real finish line, just very different directions for the play. Although I can't personally of elevating the human mind without consideration for the meat-sack it came in. The thought experiment of humanity without bodies mostly leaves me cold. But after all, some people already take vacations just to play video games—that feels like the embryo of that future.

My neighbor J said it best: “I don’t think we should colonize Mars—that looks like a terrible place to live. But humans have been doing silly things just because they can since forever, so why not? After all, there are people living in Yukon, and happily so. I’d never do that”. It’s okay to love science and want to mess around beyond earth, space cowboy. Just don’t be dramatic and dogmatic about your fantasies. We’re all buggy software running in gloriously decaying hardware. Sometimes the bugs are features. Sometimes the features are bugs. Either way, the ride ends the same.

← Index / Published on 2025-08-13