Cancel me, daddy. Last week, Founders Fund launched Hereticon, a conference for thoughtcrime. Roughly the idea was to invite a bunch of people working on interesting things, or erased from the internet for saying interesting things, to a beautiful spot for a fun party in celebration of the cultural outlier. It was a whirlwind of aliens and biohackers, of drugs and sex and immortality, an incredible set by an incredible artist like fireworks when all was said and done, and a vanilla ice cream safe space — which was frankly very cute. The hotel setting was theatrical. The darkened weather was foreboding. The dress code was anything and everything from academic tweed to leather, whatever, come as you are, we literally just want to talk about weird shit. Topics on stage included but were not limited to: evolution, global warming, geoengineering, polyamory, brain-computer interfaces, ESP, genetic engineering, homemade vaccination, the ideological weaponization of virtual beings, and the apocalypse (there’s a silver lining here, turns out).

We all know the social cost of speaking our mind is too high. But in a world where progress is impossible without new ideas, and almost every new idea must necessarily be in some way non-consensus, a culture of silence is also capable of ending history. Then, frankly, the free speech dialogue is getting tedious. The idea here was not to lament the high cost of speaking. The idea here was to actually speak. And okay sure, the idea here was also to heavily drink (thank you, Peter).

We achieved what we set out to achieve.

While I do think the conference newsworthy, I was in charge of the thing, which unquestionably guarantees anything I have to say about it will be critically biased. So I’ll keep this one brief. I thought up the idea for Hereticon back in 2018 on a scouting trip with my great friend and colleague Alex Silverman (the chief operator of the conference, without whom it never would have succeeded), and we officially dropped the idea in October 2019. I was promptly insanely accused by professionally-outraged tech influencers of throwing a Nazi conference, which I refused on principle to take seriously. In general, however, most people were not crazy. Most people just wanted to come and share a crazy idea in defense of the lone heretic, who is probably wrong but maybe also knows something important we should all at least be able to talk about. Then Covid happened, immediately proved the position — that our lives depend on our ability to communicate unpopular ideas — and ultimately shut down the first attempt.

The challenges we faced these last two years were significant, and among the antimaterialists I invited there was some talk of perhaps the forces of darkness literally waging psychic war on us to stop the thing. This is probably not true, but it does make me sound a lot cooler than I am, so I’ll just leave it here and let you think it over. Two postponements and a location change later, after navigating a virus, a mass hysteria, and a series of bizarre mimetic rivalries, we finally wound up in Miami, together, in person, thoroughly not distanced, and this was important and good. This, in fact, is maybe my heretical opinion:

The extremely online tech idea that the future of human civilization is disembodied heads on a screen forever is an honestly low-key psychotic idea, which I haven’t done a good enough job challenging. I have too many friends entranced by the vision, is the problem, and I’ve let that keep me from speaking my mind. But, in the spirit of Hereticon, allow me to say this: no one wants to live in their computer. The future is people together. The future will always be people together — excepting of course the introduction of machine or alien superintelligence into our lives, at which point your guess is as good as mine — and on the ground floor, I promise you, this all truly just reduces to sex. Young people want to bang. They will move to the best possible places to make their fortunes and find their lifelong partners, after which they will move to the best possible places to raise their families. Any vision of the future or technology that doesn’t help us achieve these essential human goals is doomed to failure, thank God, and it's really not something I’m interested in.

Every day I’m asked if I’ll release audio from last week, and this, in some form, is my intention. But the recordings of a few staged talks are also not Hereticon, because Hereticon didn’t happen on stage. Hereticon happened at the bar. Hereticon was a bunch of crazy people making friends and talking to each other, in person, which I cannot recommend more highly.

Beyond the technology industry, our political and cultural leadership has spent the better part of two years attempting to terrify us all into ignoring actual data, and holing up inside our homes like neutered house pets afraid of thunder. But I will not stay inside. I will not eat the bugs. The panicked yelling of the 1% most neurotic people in the country is no longer something I’ll be treating with respect. I intend to live while I’m alive.

Godspeed, and thanks to everyone who helped make this conference unforgettable.

-SOLANA