Interesting read, but to me this essay projects an attitude "of course my particular brand of progressive politics* is correct, I don't need to justify it, it's

Interesting read, but to me this essay projects an attitude "of course my particular brand of progressive politics* is correct, I don't need to justify it, it's obvious to all right-minded people", and I find that to be grating. The author rails against all sorts of various viewpoints and movements that he thinks are dangerous, ranging from transhumanism to fascism to right-libertarianism to accelerationism to rationalism to tech industry hype. And, while I agree that these movements can be dangerous, some obviously so, some less obviously, I think that the essay goes overboard in trying to paint them as a connected monolith of undiluted bad, despite the only tenuous relations that many of them have with each other. There is a lot of good that can come out of some of these movements. Sure, a large part of rationalism is very cult-like and silly and I myself not infrequently make fun of it for that. But there are also many interesting non cult-like thinkers in that community. I try to take the good where I can find it. As for tech billionaires, well I think that for example Elon Musk is a scam artist and a fraud for his robotaxi hype, but that does not negate the fact that his spacecraft seem to work well and are an interesting move forward in humanity's exploration of space. I think that there has been a lot of unrealistic over-optimism about the pace of AI technology development and we are probably not anywhere close to general artificial intelligence, and I certainly don't think that a tech singularity is right around the corner, but that does not negate the fact that there have been some genuine huge steps forward in AI in the last decade and there are many constructive and beneficial things that this technology can do. If humanity consistently thought like Charlie Stross does, I am not sure that we would be out of the Stone Age yet. *I say particular brand because not even all progressives agree with him. There are progressive rationalists, progressive transhumanists, etc.