Émile P. Torres's weekly newsletter examining the ideologies driving Silicon Valley — effective altruism, longtermism, TESCREAL, and the race to build artificial superintelligence — from a critical, insider-turned-skeptic perspective.
In plain terms: Stop doomscrolling and just read this! Click to read Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter, by Émile P. Torres, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
Essay on the singularity and conflict.
In plain terms: A Realtime Techpocalypse essay asking whether a technological singularity could provoke war between nations.
Émile P. Torres (Realtime Techpocalypse, October 19, 2025) surveys views Eliezer Yudkowsky has expressed over the years, following Torres's Truthdig review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which argues the book is TESCREAL advocacy. A critical perspective piece.
A long-form critical essay by Émile P. Torres arguing that the effective altruism movement has become a cult-like ideology with its own doctrines, charismatic leaders, jargon and social controls — and that this matters for how AI is being developed.
From the site: Understanding the "Scientology of Silicon Valley." (7,700 words)
Other resources that share this publication's topics.
Academic initiative edited by Seth Lazar, Jeffrey Howard and Rachel Sterken, with an annual conference and planned open-access Oxford University Press volume. The public site describes its scope, paper submission rules and AI usage policy; it is not a published research paper.
Aaron Sibarium’s Washington Free Beacon feature examines Anthropic’s constitution for Claude and moral-philosophy views attributed to people connected with its development. The article’s interpretations and characterizations are the publication’s reporting, not independent findings.
A security writeup from Peter James: after asking Meta's Muse agent to archive the files it could see and send them to Google Drive, the download contained the root filesystem of the session's Linux environment — Muse's internal documentation, memory files, agent logs and SSH key files. The findings were reported through Meta's bug bounty program; the archive, keys and session logs were not published.
Holden Karnofsky's 2022 EA Forum post arguing that effective altruism's focus on maximization carries real risks, and reflecting on integrity and division within the movement.
David Futrelle's September 2026 Nation piece criticizing effective altruism, after President Trump decried the tech-world creed for indulging in AI doomerism.
Matt Mikalatos explains TESCREAL, the term coined by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres for a bundle of ideologies — transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism — that he describes as billionaires and technologists pushing personal scientific projects while accepting fatal risks to people as the price of an "existential" need to advance the technology.
