you're wrong here, tho
longtermism is the computer engineer's optimize everything approach applied to 19th-20th C type utopian impulses. it's a tiny clique of self-appointed philospher-kings deciding what the ideal future is for everyone and acting to impose that future on everyone.
one of the problem with those nominally utopian impulses is that some of them wound up killing tens of millions of people in the name of an ideal future. tbf so far longtermism has only managed to steal a bunch of people's life savings, so improvement I guess.
(1) Longtermism isn't one thing, it's an umbrella that a ton of different people and projects are rallying under
(2) James C Scott is basically gospel in these communities, and the dangers of top-down engineering/imposition are precisely why many of them lean libertarian and anarchist.
(3) Can you actually point me to top-down engineering projects being done by long-termists? Because the long-termists I've encountered are interested in things like information logistics, seed banks, gene banks, time capsules, infrastructure investments, and growth. They're trying to figure out how nuclear waste can be safely stored over 10,000 year periods, or how we can communicate to civilizations as culturally distant from us as we are to, say, cavemen.
If your rebuttal to this stuff is "Zuckerberg's trying to start a virtual feudal society," sure, I don't disagree. But pointing to the philosophy an expansionist billionaire pays lip service to, as emblematic of the philosophy itself, isn't charitable. I've never criticized e.g. woke ideology on the grounds that corporations appropriate it to move product.
Long-termism as a genuine intellectual movement looks like Stewart Brand, the Oxford radical altruists, and some of the GMU economists.
