TL;DR

Lydia Laurenson’s article is a long, semi-sympathetic insider reconstruction of Leverage Research 1.0, an early Effective Altruism/rationalist-adjacent organisation founded by Geoff Anders in 2011. It argues that Leverage began as an ambitious “world-improvement” research project trying to understand psychology, talent, institutions, and social change, but gradually slid into high-intensity psychological experimentation, bodywork, occult-adjacent frameworks, internal paranoia, and interpersonal dysfunction. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The core mechanism: Leverage people believed they had discovered unusually powerful “introspection tools” for debugging beliefs, trauma, motivation, and competence. Early results reportedly felt dramatic: reduced anxiety, altered bodily states, possible headache improvement, better performance, etc. This fed the idea that they might “crack” human excellence and even create “masters” — a pitch Geoff reportedly made to Peter Thiel-linked funders. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The failure mode: the group mixed workplace + communal living + romantic entanglements + amateur therapy + founder authority + funding pressure + metaphysical speculation. Bodywork and “intention” practices produced reports of shaking, panic, nausea, paralysis-like states, tinnitus, nightmares, “metaphysical unease,” and people being “taken out” for hours or days after sessions. Some wanted to slow down; others thought they were near something important and kept going. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The infamous “demons” angle is presented less as literal Hollywood demons and more as Leverage people trying to describe strange, contagious-feeling psychological/imaginal patterns: “introjections,” intrusive internal models, shared nightmares, “intention objects,” or psychic/occult-seeming interpersonal phenomena. Laurenson does not fully debunk this; she treats it as potentially meaningful psychological/spiritual territory while remaining ambiguous about ontology. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

The article pushes back somewhat against the simple “Leverage was just a cult / everyone went insane” narrative. Laurenson says she found little evidence of professionally diagnosed psychotic breaks, and several former members dispute parts of Zoe Curzi’s viral account. But it still depicts Leverage as a psychologically unsafe, boundary-dissolving environment where some people were seriously harmed and later felt the official inquiry “whitewashed” what happened. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

Leverage 1.0 effectively dissolved in mid-2019 when Geoff Anders concluded the ecosystem had “ceased to fulfill its function” and restructured it. The current Leverage Research is smaller, no longer communal, and is informally treated by many as “Leverage 2.0.” Many alumni scattered into startups, coaching, Palladium/Bismarck/New Right circles, EA-adjacent projects, and other ventures. (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

One-sentence version

Leverage Research 1.0 was an EA/rationalist-adjacent attempt to invent a science of human transformation that generated some apparently powerful effects, then overloaded its own social/psychological containment vessel and collapsed into trauma, occult framing, internal conflict, and unresolved ambiguity about whether it had found something real, dangerous, delusional, or all three.

TL;DR: This rant argues that some AI opposition is less about specific risks and more about scapegoating. It distinguishes good-faith concerns from sacred narratives around the Jobpocalypse, data centres, and decelerationism, then argues that techno-optimism should reject collapse fantasy and focus on building better systems with AI.

One thing I keep noticing in arguments about AI is that many objections seem less like arguments about AI itself, and more like displaced anger at something much deeper.

To be clear, I am not talking about ordinary people who agree that reasonable arguments around some AI risks and downsides, and are cautiously concerned. AI risks are legitimate things to discuss. Job displacement, data centres, centralisation, misuse, safety, governance, and power concentration are all important topics.

The distinction I care about is not whether someone has concerns. The distinction is whether those concerns are held like normal ideas, or like sacred cows.

A normal concern is open to argument. You can ask questions, weigh evidence, compare costs and benefits, update your view, and change your mind. But some people do not treat AI risk arguments that way. They treat the "Jobpocalypse", anti-data-centre panic, or decelerationism as emotionally protected beliefs. They react to counter-arguments not with better arguments, but with hostility, contempt, smug dismissal, and a total refusal to engage or respond substantively.

People will say they are worried about data centres, jobs, billionaires, capitalism, “the machine,” or “the system,” but the emotional intensity often seems wildly disproportionate to the actual claim being made. And when pressed, they often cannot articulate a logical argument for why they hold their position. They did not reason themselves into it, so they cannot reason about it properly. They are defending something deeper.

I’ve been thinking about why this happens, and my current view is that a lot of it comes down to scapegoating. I could be completely wrong, so I’m interested in feedback, but this is the pattern I keep seeing.

People are in pain. Their lives suck. And if they are psychologically vulnerable or weak, they often cannot accept that this might be due to bad luck, chaos, or their own choices. It's just too painful. So if they cannot find a clear external cause, they invent one. They create a scapegoat.

Humans have done this for millennia. It is the oldest trick in the book. The Nazis perfected it because they understood how appealing it was to fearful, psychologically weak people.

Disclaimer: I am not saying decels are Nazis. But I do think there are similarities in the underlying psychological mechanism: the need to locate suffering outside oneself, concentrate it into a single enemy, and imagine that removing that enemy would make everything “be alright.”

Some people blame another ethnicity. Some blame AI. Some blame data centres. Some blame capitalism. Some blame other countries or other cultures. But the structure is often the same: something else is made overly responsible for why their life sucks, and if only that goat could be “scaped,” the world would finally be good and just again.

You can see this clearly with data centres.

Yes, data centres have some small, nominal negative impacts. But those impacts are completely dwarfed by their positive ones. Instead of weighing the trade-offs honestly, people start overfitting every problem onto them.

Climate anxiety, inequality, corporate power, local infrastructure pressure, housing anxiety, water usage, energy costs — it all gets lumped on to one whipping boy. The data centre stops being a simple building with computers and becomes a symbolic container for grievances people already had.

The same pattern shows up with the Jobpocalypse fans.

Again, I do not mean people who simply think AI could disrupt labour markets. That is a normal prediction, and it may be partly or substantially true.

I am talking about the people who seem emotionally invested in the Jobpocalypse as a sacred narrative and purification ritual: AI causes mass unemployment, mass unemployment causes chaos, guillotines, and collapse, collapse destroys capitalism, the people rise up, the evil system is purified through the crucible of crisis, and the scapegoat is finally destroyed.

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They do not merely predict the Jobpocalypse. They want it to happen. They think it is a necessary step.

In their case, the scapegoat is capitalism. Obviously capitalism has downsides. No serious person should deny that. But they have taken those real downsides and overfitted everything onto them, piling all the world’s woes onto the shoulders of capitalism until their image of it becomes distorted and hyperbolic.

That is why questioning the Jobpocalypse provokes such hostility. You are not merely disputing a forecast about labour markets. You are interfering with the collapse fantasy, and fundamentally questioning if their personal suffering might not be capitalism's fault... but maybe it's partly their own. And that is just too painful to consider.

Instead of focusing on the constructive power of AI to reduce suffering, they focus on a destructive fantasy of AI as a purifying flame.

But simply breaking the system will not cure their suffering. Humans would just build another broken system, as we always have. The better path is not collapse and chaos first, then hoping for something better afterwards. The better path is using AI to create systems infinitely better than the ones we have now, while upgrading and replacing this system as we go.

Decels are engaged in the same flawed reasoning, just from a different angle.

Both left-wing and right-wing Decels often see AI as an extension of their existing scapegoat: the technocrats, the billionaires, the oligarchy, capitalism, the Elites, big government, the Establishment, centralised power, the machine, Academia, the system. They do not evaluate AI as a technology with costs, benefits, risks, upside, and trade-offs. They treat it as a symbolic container for everything they already hate and fear.

So decels and Jobpocalypse fans are not really opposites. They just have different preferred routes to the same fantasy of collapse and purification.

One side wants AI to cause mass unemployment so capitalism collapses. The other wants to fight AI now because they see it as capitalism’s final weapon.

AI is still the apocalyptic force, capitalism is still the scapegoat responsible for all of the world’s woes, and collapse is still treated as the central event around which everything else must orbit.

And once a scapegoat becomes psychologically necessary, any argument that complicates the story feels like an attack. That is why these debates become so hostile and fallacious so quickly. You are not just challenging their claim. You are challenging the coping mechanism holding their worldview together.

That is also why techno-optimism and techno-accelerationism matter.

Techno-accelerationism (not the Nick Land nonsense) refuses the comfort of the scapegoat. It does not say the world is simple, painless, or risk-free. It prioritises Expected Value calculations over the Precautionary Principle.

The answer to complexity is not retreat, resentment, or collapse fantasy.

AI is not the goat to be scaped. Instead, we should be riding it into the sunrise of our glorious future.

https://preview.redd.it/1t6mnc4wbuah1.png?width=1672&format=png&auto=webp&s=ad4d9449d71078475a4c51c260399fa2d5c14e25