Silicon Valley Philosophies: How Ideas and Machines Shape Each Other

Abstract

Silicon Valley has always run on ideas as well as on capital and silicon. Cybernetics, the hacker ethic, libertarianism, transhumanism, effective altruism and accelerationism each shaped what got built, who funded it and how it was regulated. The traffic also runs the other way: the computer created new philosophical problems, from Turing’s imitation game to the question of what an AI model should value. This article maps the main schools of thought, the splits inside each school, and which people in this encyclopedia belong to which. It ends with a table that works as a second index to the person articles. Because the AI-era schools are still fighting it out, its figures and rankings reflect the state of play when it was last reviewed, in October 2026.

Two Directions

Philosophy into Technology

The most direct line from a philosophy seminar to a product runs through a Chilean engineer. Fernando Flores commissioned Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn in 1971 and was imprisoned after the 1973 coup. In exile at Berkeley he studied under Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle and absorbed Martin Heidegger’s idea that people act out of an unspoken background of practice, not from explicit mental models. With Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd he wrote Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), which argued that the “rationalist” picture of mind behind classical AI was wrong and that software should be designed around human action and conversation instead. Winograd, who had built the language program SHRDLU, turned from AI to human-computer interaction. From 1995 he advised a Stanford PhD student named Larry Page, who was looking at the link structure of the web.

Other routes are shorter and better documented by the people themselves:

René Girard → Peter Thiel → Facebook. Peter Thiel studied with the French literary theorist René Girard at Stanford. Girard’s mimetic theory holds that people want what others want. Thiel attended a seminar with Girard in July 2004 and put $500,000 into Facebook the following month. He later said he saw Girard’s theory confirmed in social media: “Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic.”
Ayn Rand → Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales moderated an online discussion list on Ayn Rand’s philosophy in the late 1980s and early 1990s (accounts give 1989 or 1992 as its start) and has called himself an Objectivist. The project he co-founded runs on unpaid volunteers and gives its product away.
Marshall McLuhan → Wired. Wired’s early colophons named the Canadian media theorist, author of “the medium is the message,” as the magazine’s “patron saint.”
Virtue ethics → Claude. In January 2026 Anthropic published a new constitution for its Claude models, written chiefly by the philosopher Amanda Askell with Joe Carlsmith. It leans on virtue ethics, cultivating judgment rather than listing rules, and it is used directly in training. Here a branch of moral philosophy became a training input.

Technology into Philosophy

The computer also handed philosophers new problems, and some of the old ones became engineering questions.

Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Mind, 1950) replaced “Can machines think?” with a testable game. Three decades of replies followed. Hubert Dreyfus attacked AI from a Heideggerian position in What Computers Can’t Do (1972). Joseph Weizenbaum, shaken by how readily people confided in his ELIZA program, argued in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) that some decisions should never be handed to machines whether or not they could make them. John Searle’s Chinese Room (1980) argued that symbol manipulation is not understanding. James Moor’s “What Is Computer Ethics?” (1985) founded a subfield on the observation that computers create “policy vacuums” no existing rule covers.

Later, technologists’ thought experiments became philosophers’ topics, and vice versa:

Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s “The Extended Mind” (1998) asked whether a notebook, or a phone, can be part of a person’s mind, a question Douglas Engelbart had treated as a design goal since 1962.
Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument (2003) asked whether we live inside a computer simulation. In 2016 Elon Musk told a conference audience that the odds we live in “base reality” were “one in billions.” Chalmers devoted a whole book to the question, Reality+ (2022).
The trolley problem, a 1960s philosophy-class puzzle, became a self-driving-car specification question. MIT’s Moral Machine experiment collected about 40 million decisions from 233 countries and territories and published the results in Nature in 2018.
AI alignment, the problem of giving a system goals that match human values, turned moral philosophy into a research budget line at every frontier lab.

Reading the Map

The rest of the article goes school by school. Two rules apply.

First, a person is listed under a school only on the strength of their own words: an essay, a book, a manifesto, a stated self-description or a documented act of funding for the school’s institutions. Being called a “TESCREAList” or a “techno-libertarian” by a critic does not count.

Second, the schools overlap. Many people hold two or three positions at once, and several schools grew out of each other. The table at the end shows these overlaps.

School	Took shape	Core claim	Key texts
Cybernetic counterculture	1948–1990s	Tools and feedback can liberate individuals and communities	Wiener, Cybernetics (1948); Whole Earth Catalog (1968)
Hacker ethic and free software	1960s–1990s	Information and code should be open; access to computers should be unlimited	Levy, Hackers (1984); Stallman, GNU Manifesto (1985)
Cyberlibertarianism	1988–2000s	The network makes governments obsolete or escapable	May (1988); Barlow (1996); Thiel (2009)
The founder creed	2000s–2010s	Software fixes problems; founders, not institutions, should lead	Andreessen (2011); Zero to One (2014)
Transhumanism and the Singularity	1988–today	Technology will transcend human biology	Vinge (1993); Kurzweil (2005)
Rationalism, effective altruism, AI safety	2000–today	Reason about consequences at scale; superintelligent AI is the main risk	Yudkowsky (2000s); Ord (2020); MacAskill (2022)
Accelerationism	1990s, revived 2022	Speed up technology and capitalism; slowing down is the real danger	Land (1990s); e/acc (2022); Andreessen (2023)
Humanist critics	1950–today	Technology needs limits set by people outside the industry	Weizenbaum (1976); Morozov (2013); Zuboff (2019)

The Cybernetic Counterculture

Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) described humans, animals and machines alike as systems steered by feedback. Wiener drew political conclusions from it in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), warning that automation could free or enslave depending on who owned it. J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960) and Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962) turned the feedback idea into a research program: the computer as a partner that raises human capability.

The idea reached California’s counterculture through Stewart Brand. His Whole Earth Catalog (1968) opened with the line “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” and sold tools, books and systems thinking to back-to-the-land communes. Brand worked a camera at Engelbart’s 1968 demo and in 1972 reported for Rolling Stone on the researchers at Xerox PARC and the Stanford AI Lab. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) traces how Brand’s network, from the Catalog through the WELL online community (1985) to Wired (1993), recast the computer from a tool of bureaucracy into an instrument of personal liberation.

Splits. The school divided early over who should steer. Wiener and, in Chile, Stafford Beer and Fernando Flores saw cybernetics as a tool for democratic planning; OGAS imagined it as a tool for Soviet central planning. The Californian branch rejected planning for individual tools and voluntary communities. By the 1990s the Californian branch had moved toward the market: Kevin Kelly, Wired’s executive editor, described technology in Out of Control (1994) and What Technology Wants (2010) as a quasi-biological force with its own direction. Brand himself stayed a pragmatist. His 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline revised his slogan to “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it” and endorsed nuclear power and genetic engineering, positions many of his old readers rejected.

The Hacker Ethic and Free Software

Steven Levy’s Hackers (1984) wrote down the unwritten code of the MIT and Stanford labs (see The Hacker Culture): access to computers should be unlimited, all information should be free, mistrust authority and promote decentralization, judge hackers by their hacking. At the first Hackers Conference the same year, Brand added the line most often quoted from the period: “Information wants to be free.”

Richard Stallman turned the ethic into a moral philosophy with a legal mechanism. The GNU Manifesto (1985) argued that withholding source code from users is a moral wrong, and the GPL (1989) used copyright to keep shared code shared.

Splits. In 1998 a group around Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens and Christine Peterson, who coined the term, rebranded the practice as “open source.” Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (1997) argued for openness on engineering grounds: more eyes find more bugs. Stallman rejected the new label because it dropped the ethical argument (see The Open Source Movement). Linus Torvalds took neither side’s philosophy and stayed with what worked. The commercial branch won the market; companies adopted open source by the thousand and free software as an ethical cause remained a minority position.

The same split returned with AI. Meta released the weights of its Llama models, and its then chief AI scientist Yann LeCun argued that open models are safer because more people can inspect them. The Open Source Initiative answered in October 2024 with an Open Source AI Definition that most “open-weight” models, Llama included, did not meet, because their training data and licenses were not open.

Cyberlibertarianism

The cypherpunks and Wired turned the hacker ethic into a political theory: the network would make the state irrelevant.

Timothy May’s “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” (1988) predicted that public-key cryptography would “alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions.” Eric Hughes’s “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (1993) put it in one line: “Cypherpunks write code.” (See The Cypherpunks.) In 1994 Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth and Alvin Toffler published “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” which described the information economy as the “overthrow of matter” and asked for deregulation to match. On 8 February 1996 John Perry Barlow posted “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from Davos: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel… You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

The school got its name from its critics. In 1995 the British media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called it “The Californian Ideology”: a fusion of hippie anti-authoritarianism and free-market economics, held together by faith in technology. Wired’s publisher Louis Rossetto replied that the essay showed “profound ignorance of economics.”

Splits. No school on this map has split into more branches:

Civil libertarians. Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 to defend free speech and privacy through courts and legislatures. They accepted the state as an arena.
Crypto-anarchists. May and the cypherpunks wanted to route around the state with code. Their line runs through anonymous remailers to Bitcoin (2008) and from there to the cryptocurrency industry. Jack Dorsey renamed Square to Block in 2021 and made Bitcoin one of the company’s priorities.
Objectivists. The followers of Ayn Rand: Jimmy Wales by his own account. Travis Kalanick of Uber once used the cover of The Fountainhead as his avatar and called it his favorite book, then later said he “didn’t even know what a libertarian was.”
Exit. In 2009 Peter Thiel wrote in “The Education of a Libertarian”: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He proposed escaping politics through cyberspace, outer space and the sea. Thiel funded the Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 by Patri Friedman. In 2022 the former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan published The Network State, a manual for founding countries as online communities that later buy land.
Neoreaction. The programmer Curtis Yarvin, writing as “Mencius Moldbug” from 2007, argued that democracy had failed and should give way to something like a corporate monarchy. The British philosopher Nick Land gave the current its name, the “Dark Enlightenment” (2012). Thiel invested in Yarvin’s startup Tlon in 2013, and Yarvin’s ideas reached Republican politics through figures including JD Vance.

The branches disagree on fundamentals. The EFF defends democratic institutions in court; neoreaction wants to replace them.

The Founder Creed

By the 2000s the libertarian politics had settled into a working philosophy for running companies. Its central claims: software can fix most problems, speed beats caution, and founders should be trusted more than institutions.

Google’s 2004 IPO letter promised “Don’t be evil.” Mark Zuckerberg’s 2012 IPO letter was titled “The Hacker Way” and gave Facebook’s motto as “Move fast and break things.” Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator (2005) turned his essays into a training program for founders, collected the essays in Hackers & Painters (2004). Marc Andreessen summed up the period in a 2011 Wall Street Journal essay: “Software is eating the world.”

Peter Thiel supplied the creed’s two sharpest twists. His Founders Fund manifesto “What Happened to the Future?” (2011) complained, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” and his essay “The End of the Future” the same year argued that outside computing, technology had stagnated since the 1970s. Zero to One (2014) told founders that “competition is for losers” and that the goal was monopoly.

In 2013 the Belarusian writer Evgeny Morozov gave the critics a word for the whole creed: solutionism, the habit of recasting social and political problems as engineering problems with an app-shaped answer.

Splits. The creed has a pessimistic and an optimistic wing. Thiel’s starts from stagnation: progress stopped and only bold founders can restart it. Andreessen’s 2011 version said software was already winning. By April 2020, in the essay “It’s Time to Build,” written during the COVID-19 pandemic, Andreessen too blamed the shortage of masks and ventilators on a failure to build. A third strand, the space-colonization ambitions of Musk and Jeff Bezos, took the creed off the planet and is covered under transhumanism below.

Transhumanism and the Singularity

The transhumanist school holds that human biology is a stage to be improved upon or left behind.

Its Silicon Valley form begins with the Extropians. The philosopher Max More launched Extropy magazine in 1988 (the word came from Tom Bell), and its mailing list of the 1990s brought together cryonics advocates, libertarians, nanotech enthusiasts and early cypherpunks. The mathematician and science-fiction author Vernor Vinge gave the movement its central event in a 1993 lecture: a technological singularity, after which “the human era will be ended” (see The Singularity and Superintelligence). Ray Kurzweil dated it. The Singularity Is Near (2005) put human-level AI at 2029 and the singularity at 2045, and Kurzweil co-founded Singularity University with Peter Diamandis at the NASA Research Park in 2008. Google hired him in 2012.

The money followed the philosophy. Google founded the aging research company Calico in 2013; Altos Labs launched in 2022 with about $3 billion, reportedly including money from Bezos; the software entrepreneur Bryan Johnson turned his own body into a public anti-aging experiment under the slogan “Don’t Die.”

Splits.

Singularitarian optimists (Kurzweil) expect the merger of human and machine to go well.
Longevity pragmatists (Calico, Altos) want longer healthy lives without the cosmology.
Space expansionists (Musk’s SpaceX, founded to make humanity “multiplanetary,” and Bezos’s Blue Origin) see humanity’s future in leaving Earth.
The worriers. Some Extropians concluded that superintelligent AI would not merge with humanity but replace it. That branch became the next school.

Rationalism, Effective Altruism and AI Safety

Eliezer Yudkowsky co-founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2000 to build a superintelligence. Within a few years he had concluded that an AI built before anyone knew how to give it the right values would destroy humanity, and he spent the following decades arguing the point. He co-wrote the blog Overcoming Bias with the economist Robin Hanson from 2006 and founded the community site LessWrong in 2009, where the “rationalist” community formed around Bayesian reasoning and AI risk. The Singularity Institute renamed itself the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2013.

A parallel movement started in Oxford. The philosopher Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972) had argued that distance does not reduce the duty to help. Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld founded the charity evaluator GiveWell in 2007; Toby Ord and William MacAskill founded Giving What We Can in 2009; on 5 December 2011 a vote among about seventeen people settled on the name “effective altruism” (see Effective Altruism). The money came from tech: Open Philanthropy was funded chiefly by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna.

The two communities merged around one idea: if the future could contain trillions of people, then reducing the risk of human extinction outweighs almost anything else. Bostrom had made the argument in “Astronomical Waste” (2003); Ord’s The Precipice (2020) and MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future (2022) brought it to a general audience under the name longtermism.

Technology followed directly. Musk read Bostrom’s Superintelligence and tweeted on 3 August 2014: “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” He co-founded OpenAI the following year. In 2017 Open Philanthropy gave OpenAI $30 million and Karnofsky took a seat on its board. In 2021 a group of OpenAI researchers left to found Anthropic, explicitly as a safety-focused lab. When MacAskill’s book came out, Musk tweeted: “This is a close match for my philosophy.”

Splits. This school has fought harder internally than any other:

Global health EA versus longtermist EA: bed nets now or extinction risk later.
Earning to give. The idea that a talented person should take a high-paying job and donate the money. Its most famous practitioner was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX exchange collapsed in November 2022 amid fraud for which he was sentenced to 25 years. EA lost its best-known donor and its most visible public face in the same week.
Doomers versus builders. Yudkowsky wrote in Time in March 2023 that a six-month pause on AI training was not enough; governments should “shut it all down” and be willing to “destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” The labs founded partly on safety arguments took the opposite view: the safest course was for careful people to build frontier models first. Dario Amodei’s essays “Machines of Loving Grace” (October 2024) and “The Adolescence of Technology” (January 2026) set out that position, first the upside and then the risks. Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. in June 2024.
Scientists who changed sides. Geoffrey Hinton left Google in May 2023 so that he could speak freely about AI risk. Yoshua Bengio took up AI safety policy. Neither came from the rationalist community.

The split decided a corporate fight. On 17 November 2023 OpenAI’s board, two of whose members, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, had ties to effective-altruist organizations, fired Sam Altman for not being “consistently candid.” Within five days most of the staff threatened to quit, Altman returned, and Toner and McCauley left the board. Whether EA motives drove the firing is disputed. What is not disputed is that the safety faction lost control of the most valuable AI company.

Accelerationism

Accelerationism (see Accelerationism) is the claim that the way out is through: speed up technology and capitalism instead of restraining them.

Its academic root is Nick Land’s work with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, which treated capitalism as an inhuman process that would dissolve the human. A left-wing version followed in 2013, when Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” arguing that the left should take over technological modernity instead of resisting it.

Silicon Valley’s version, effective accelerationism or e/acc, appeared on Substack and Twitter in mid-2022. Its name was a pun on effective altruism. The pseudonymous “Beff Jezos” and “Bayeslord” published “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets” in July 2022, grounding the movement in thermodynamics: life and intelligence spread because they dissipate energy, so technological growth is a natural law and slowing it down is futile and harmful. In December 2023 Forbes identified Beff Jezos as Guillaume Verdon, a former Google quantum-computing researcher and founder of the startup Extropic.

Marc Andreessen gave the movement a manifesto. “Why AI Will Save the World” (June 2023) called AI-risk advocates a “cult.” “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (16 October 2023), about 5,200 words long, declared that “there is no material problem… that cannot be solved with more technology.” Its section on the enemy attacked a “mass demoralization campaign” waged under labels including “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “trust and safety” and “tech ethics.” It ended with a list of “patron saints” that included the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Nick Land and “@BasedBeffJezos.”

Splits.

Land’s accelerationism is anti-humanist: it does not much care whether humans survive the process.
Left accelerationism (Srnicek and Williams) wants technology to deliver post-capitalism.
e/acc states in its founding notes that it has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate of intelligence. That separates it from transhumanism, which wants to improve humans rather than outgrow them.
Techno-optimism (Andreessen) is the venture-capital version: the same arguments without the thermodynamics.
d/acc. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin answered Andreessen on 27 November 2023 with “My techno-optimism,” arguing that “not just magnitude but also direction matters.” His “d/acc” (defensive, decentralized, democratic acceleration) favors technologies that make defense easier than attack and power harder to concentrate.

The Humanist Critics

Every school above has had critics inside computing who argued that people outside the industry should set the limits.

Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) was the first book-length attack by an insider. Winograd and Flores’s 1986 book turned the critique into design advice. Jaron Lanier, who popularized the term “virtual reality” in the 1980s, argued in You Are Not a Gadget (2010) that social media design reduces people to data. Morozov named solutionism in 2013. Shoshana Zuboff described surveillance capitalism in 2019 as an economic logic that turns human experience into raw material for prediction. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, founded what became the Center for Humane Technology in 2018 to fight the attention economy.

The newest critics target the AI schools directly. Timnit Gebru, who was forced out of Google in December 2020 after a dispute over a paper on the risks of large language models, and the philosopher Émile P. Torres coined “TESCREAL” in 2023 for a bundle of seven ideologies: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism. Their 2024 paper in First Monday argued that the bundle descends from 20th-century eugenics and that its fixation on far-future AI apocalypse distracts from present harms such as algorithmic bias. Supporters of the movements reject the label as a guilt-by-association device that lumps together people who disagree with each other.

Splits. The critics divide between reformers, who want better-designed and regulated technology (Harris, Lanier), and structural critics, who see the problem in the business model or the ideology itself (Zuboff, Morozov, Gebru). Outside the United States, the humanist position became law rather than commentary. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court derived a right to “informational self-determination” from human dignity in its 1983 census ruling, a line that runs to the EU’s GDPR (2018) and AI Act (2024). See The Privacy War.

The CEO as Essayist

Tech leaders have always written. What changed after about 2010 is that the long essay became a standard strategic instrument, used to recruit, to raise money and to lobby.

Year	Author	Essay	What it argued
2004	Larry Page, Sergey Brin	Google IPO letter	“Don’t be evil”; founders keep control
2011	Marc Andreessen	“Why Software Is Eating the World”	Every industry becomes a software industry
2012	Mark Zuckerberg	“The Hacker Way” (IPO letter)	Move fast and break things
2020	Marc Andreessen	“It’s Time to Build”	Stagnation is a choice
2021	Sam Altman	“Moore’s Law for Everything”	AI will make goods cheap; tax capital to share the gains
2023	Marc Andreessen	“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”	Technology solves material problems; safety is the enemy
2024	Sam Altman	“The Intelligence Age”	Superintelligence within “a few thousand days”
2024	Dario Amodei	“Machines of Loving Grace”	What safe powerful AI could achieve
2025	Sam Altman	“The Gentle Singularity”	“We are past the event horizon”
2025	Mark Zuckerberg	“Personal Superintelligence”	A superintelligence for each individual
2026	Dario Amodei	“The Adolescence of Technology”	The risks, and what to do about them

The essays have more than one audience. A warning that AI could end civilization argues for regulation, which large incumbents can afford more easily than newcomers. A promise that AI will cure most diseases argues for the next funding round. Amodei’s two essays do one each; Altman’s do both.

Thiel took the genre furthest from business. In September and October 2025 he gave four sold-out, off-the-record lectures on the Antichrist at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, drawing on Girard, Francis Bacon and Carl Schmitt. According to press reports he argued that the Antichrist might arrive as a global regulator of science and AI promising peace and safety.

Dead End: Philosophies That Did Not Survive Contact

Ungovernable cyberspace. Barlow wrote in 1996 that governments had “no sovereignty where we gather.” Within two decades China had built the Great Firewall, the EU had passed the GDPR, and platform companies were enforcing more speech rules than any government. The network turned out to be easy to govern for anyone who controlled its chokepoints. Barlow lived to concede much of this; see his article.

The floating city. The Seasteading Institute signed a memorandum with French Polynesia in January 2017 for a semi-autonomous floating settlement. Local opposition made it an election issue, and the government let the agreement lapse and formally cut ties in March 2018. A single-family seastead off Phuket in 2019 was declared a threat to Thai sovereignty by the Thai navy. No seastead of any size has been established.

Company mottos as ethics. Facebook replaced “Move fast and break things” in April 2014 with “Move fast with stable infra,” because outside developers depended on its APIs. Google moved “Don’t be evil” from the opening of its code of conduct to a single closing line in 2018. Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council on AI ethics was announced on 26 March 2019 and dissolved on 4 April after employee protests over its membership. Each time, a stated philosophy gave way when it conflicted with scale or revenue.

Effective altruism as a brand. Until 2022 EA was the philosophy Silicon Valley’s young founders were most likely to name. After FTX it became a liability: Bankman-Fried’s trial showed that customer money had funded the giving, and after November 2023 OpenAI’s board fight attached the label to a failed coup. The organizations still exist; founders stopped naming the philosophy in public.

Who Shares Which School

The table lists people with articles in this encyclopedia. Each entry rests on the person’s own words or documented actions; see the sections above for the sources.

Person	Schools	Evidence
Norbert Wiener	Cybernetic counterculture (founder)	Cybernetics (1948); The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
J. C. R. Licklider	Cybernetic counterculture	“Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960)
Douglas Engelbart	Cybernetic counterculture	“Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962)
Stewart Brand	Cybernetic counterculture; hacker ethic	Whole Earth Catalog (1968); “Information wants to be free” (1984)
Richard Stallman	Hacker ethic (free software branch)	GNU Manifesto (1985)
Linus Torvalds	Hacker ethic (pragmatist)	Declined both free-software and open-source ideologies
John Perry Barlow	Cyberlibertarianism (civil-libertarian branch)	EFF (1990); Declaration (1996)
Jimmy Wales	Cyberlibertarianism (Objectivist branch)	Self-described Objectivist
Jack Dorsey	Cyberlibertarianism (crypto branch)	Square renamed Block for Bitcoin (2021)
Peter Thiel	Cyberlibertarianism (exit branch); founder creed	“The Education of a Libertarian” (2009); Zero to One (2014); Girard student
Marc Andreessen	Founder creed; accelerationism (techno-optimist branch)	“Software Is Eating the World” (2011); “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023)
Mark Zuckerberg	Founder creed	“The Hacker Way” (2012); “Personal Superintelligence” (2025)
Larry Page and Sergey Brin	Founder creed	“Don’t be evil” IPO letter (2004)
Kevin Kelly	Cybernetic counterculture; founder creed (optimist wing)	Out of Control (1994); What Technology Wants (2010)
Paul Graham	Hacker ethic; founder creed	Hackers & Painters (2004); “Founder Mode” (2024)
Eliezer Yudkowsky	Transhumanism, then rationalism and AI safety (pause wing)	MIRI (2000); LessWrong (2009); Time op-ed (2023)
Nick Bostrom	Transhumanism; longtermism; AI safety	World Transhumanist Association (1998); Superintelligence (2014)
Ray Kurzweil	Transhumanism (singularitarian branch)	The Singularity Is Near (2005); Singularity University (2008)
Jeff Bezos	Transhumanism (space and longevity branches)	Blue Origin; reported Altos Labs investor
Elon Musk	Transhumanism (space branch); longtermism; AI safety, later builder	Bostrom tweet (2014); OpenAI co-founder (2015); “close match for my philosophy” (2022)
Sam Bankman-Fried	Effective altruism (earning-to-give branch)	Self-described; FTX Future Fund
Sam Altman	Founder creed; singularitarian	“Moore’s Law for Everything” (2021); “The Gentle Singularity” (2025)
Dario Amodei	AI safety (builder branch)	“Machines of Loving Grace” (2024); “The Adolescence of Technology” (2026)
Ilya Sutskever	AI safety (builder branch)	Safe Superintelligence Inc. (2024)
Geoffrey Hinton	AI safety (scientist convert)	Left Google to warn about AI risk (2023)
Yoshua Bengio	AI safety (scientist convert)	AI safety policy work
Yann LeCun	Hacker ethic (open-AI branch); critic of AI doom	Advocacy for open model weights
Joseph Weizenbaum	Humanist critics (founder)	Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)

Some pairs are worth reading side by side. Thiel and Andreessen arrived at techno-optimism from opposite moods. Yudkowsky and the e/acc founders agree that superintelligence is near and disagree about almost everything else. Stallman and LeCun both argue for openness, one for users’ freedom and the other for model safety.