In a climate emergency, our Silicon Valley Overlords’ Olympic-scale rule-breaking is no joke.

At the turn of the millennium, See Through Network founder Robert Stern wrote a humorous piece of journalistic whimsy. 25 years on, libertarian billionaires are about to make this absurd notion real.

In this article, ‘SternWriter’ reflects on what his inadvertent fantasy-turned-prediction tells us about how our Silicon Valley Overlords are obstructing our path to a sustainable future.

The Enhanced Games

For the past couple of years, friends have been forwarding me news articles about the Enhanced Games (EG).

If ‘enhanced’ sounds like a cheat’s euphemism for cheating, you’ve grasped the gist. 

A BBC report describes the EG as:

 ‘a controversial new event which promotes banned performance-enhancing drugs’.  

The EG’s website, a model of positive spin, describes the event’s ambition as:

‘pioneering a new era in athletic competition that embraces scientific advancements to push the boundaries of human performance.’

Basically, it’s the Olympics, but with athletes taking any drugs they want. 

The ‘Drug-O-Lympics’

These friends forward me EG-related reports because they remember this article I wrote for the International Herald Tribune, ahead of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. 

(The article can now be found on the New York Times online archive, but as it’s paywalled, the full article is reproduced below). 

To be clear, I was just kidding about my ‘modest proposal’.

Published in the ‘Meanwhile’ column, the IHT’s light relief from hard news, under the headline ‘Let’s Have a 2d Olympics For All Athletes on Drugs’, the premise was:

The Drug-O-Lympics will feature pumped-up supermen (and former superwomen whose testosterone treatments have pushed them over the gender edge) who can swallow, inject, or smoke whatever they want, no holds barred, if they think it will make them run faster, throw further, or jump higher’.

The references in the article may no longer be familiar, and the remark about superwomen shows how sporting gender preoccupations have moved from former Eastern Bloc athletes blowing the whistle on systematic doping regimes to today’s culture wars.

But how well this throwaway bit of satire has held up after a quarter of a century is not the point here.

The incredible thing is that my absurdist journalistic whimsy from 2000 is about to become reality. 

This article addresses why it matters.

In particular, why the EG should bother those who, like me, are part of a global network dedicated to nudging us towards the shortest available path to a sustainable future.

Olympian ambition

Even for non-sports fans, the Olympics represent something noble.

For all its organising body’s naked corruption, every four years (biennially, if you follow the Winter Olympics), the Olympic Games emerge from the gloom as a beacon of hope.

For 16 days, obscure fencers, canoeists, and weightlifters are suddenly catapulted to global stardom. The Olympics are a truce, during which inspiring tales of human endeavour displace our usual preoccupations of war, politics and ‘natural disasters’ – all increasingly driven by human-induced climate change.

The podium ceremonies, with their flags and anthems, carry more than a whiff of nationalism, which also imbues the medal tables, dominated by nations who consider sports programmes a good return on investment for feel-good patriotism.

Most of us, however, either don’t mind a bit of flag-waving or are more focused on the actual events.

Break-out stars could come from anywhere. ‘Olympic moments’ of outstanding human achievement feature amazing backstories, comebacks and overcoming of odds, irrespective of nationality.

• the Jamaican bobsled team, so unlikely it inspired a Hollywood movie
• impoverished villagers plucked from the Rift Valley to dominate long-distance running
• Eastern Bloc gymnasts enchanting us during the Cold War

Despite its creeping commercialism, each Olympics is a showcase for positive human stories, stimulating a species-level generosity of spirit. To celebrate anyone who’s overcome obstacles is to celebrate the best of us, whichever flag ends up being saluted.

Very few events have the Olympics’ capacity to invoke a sense of common humanity, and elevate us above the petty political differences that divide us during the three years and 349 days between Games.

It’s why, like the United Nations and FIFA, the International Olympic Committee operates at an elevated plane, legally trumping the laws of national governments. 

Occasional Olympic boycotts have been the exceptions that prove the rule. They’ve come and gone without diminishing the Olympian aspiration that some things can ‘rise above’ our intra-species squabbling and represent the best of Homo sapiens.

The devil, however, is always in the detail.

To understand how the EG went from comedy punchline to reality in 25 years requires a more nuanced understanding of exactly why the Olympics are such a big deal.

In particular, the keystone of ‘playing by the rules’.

What’s the purpose of athletic events?

Every four years, the International Olympic Committee reverently quotes Pierre de Courbertin’s motivation for reviving the ancient Greek Olympics in 1896.

The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.

Still inspiring. More than a century on, de Courbertin’s words sound a bit militaristic, carry a hint of colonialism, and are eugenic-adjacent. As sports become more professionalised, they may also ring more hollow with each successive opening ceremony.

But when articulated by individual humans – even dead-eyed, devastated athletes, interviewed minutes after they finished 4th, trotting out some version of ‘it’s all about the taking part, not the winning’ – the ‘Olympic Dream’ still resonates with all but the most cynical.

Winning may become more monetised and fetishised with every Olympic cycle, but every Games also augments the Olympic Plucky Loser Hall of Fame, just as heroic as its iconic winners. For every Usain Bolt there’s an Eric the Eel. For every Eric Heiden, an Eddie the Eagle.

What do they all have in common? They ran, swam, skated and jumped under the same regulations.

Why rules matter

De Coubertin’s ideals still resonate, but there’s an unspoken premise underpinning it all. It’s so obvious there used to be no need to articulate it, but the EG now requires us to state the obvious.

Winners and losers all play by the same rules.

• 100M sprinters can’t claim a medal for being in the lead at 50 metres or at 110 metres
• Weightlifters can’t expect their moment of glory if they use a fork-lift truck
• Rowers using outboard motors would be eliminated

Ridiculous? Twenty-five years ago, I thought I was being no less ridiculous when proposing the Drug-O-Lympics.

The question of rule-following goes way beyond sports. Now I’m a climate activist, the impending reality of the EG puts a different spin on the article I dashed off 25 years ago as a journalist, hustling for bylines as I moved careers from CNN Beijing Bureau Producer to independent documentary filmmaker.

I’ve long been used to viewing headlines through a fossil-fuel filter (try imagining how many of today’s headlines would occur in a world of evenly-distributed renewable energy), but since friends started updating me on EG developments, I’ve also started viewing headlines through a ‘rules filter’.

The Rules Filter

Rules, whether formal constitutions/laws, or informal conventions/culture, create boundaries.

Teeter this side of the line, and you’re one of us. Step that side of it, and you’re against us. Rules are created to eliminate shades of grey, only admitting black and white.

This has its benefits, but also diminishes the messy nuance of real life. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ is a logical rule-breaker response – if you’re given no credit for violating by a little bit, why not go the whole hog?

Viewing news headlines through Rules Filter goggles is like applying a high-contrast monochrome filter to a Technicolour world. Complexities are simplified, spectrums become binary choices, dials become switches. Everything is reduced to whether ‘we’ think ‘they’ are following or breaking established norms:

• ‘Terrorists’ vs. ‘Freedom fighters’
• ‘IP thieves’ vs. ‘Social media disruptors’
• ‘Protectionists’ vs Fair traders’

We have a tribal urge to know which side of the line people stand. This side, and you’re a friend standing shoulder-to-shoulder. That side, your’e an enemy, face-to-face. How far you stand from the line becomes irrelevant.

All human activity is governed by such rules, whether they’re in a book, using a lot of Latin, or in the zeitgeist, using a lot of cuss-words.

Here’s another truism; virtually all human activity generates greenhouse gas emissions.

This makes it particularly important that we all share a common understanding of what the rules required to lower emissions to a sustainable level should be.

And that we then all follow all of those rules.

But which rules?

From the Laws of Cricket to the American Constitution, innovation is as intrinsic to sport as to any other ‘governing body’ with a big book of regulations.

But things also change.

In politics, business and civil rights, history judges you a hero if you challenge rules successfully, a villain if you fail. William Webb Ellis picked up the ball during a schoolboy football game, inventing – legend has it – an entirely new sport, named after his college, Rugby School. Ben Johnson doped himself to Olympic ignominy, from world-record breaker to pariah within half an hour.

Little wonder then, that so much of our fascination with sport lies in the tension between the legal and the possible.

Improved physical conditioning keeps breaking world records, but so do pioneers pushing the limits of the rule book.

Innovation sometimes involves privileged access to specialist kit providing the marginal advantage that separates winners from losers: a new hi-tech swimsuit, running shoe or bobsled.

Sometimes, however, all it takes is a maverick reading the rules book carefully, and imagining a different way of competing.

In 1968, Dick Fosbury’s high-jump innovation not only won him Olympic gold, but revolutionised his event, rendering scissor-kick merchants obsolete overnight.

The line separating ‘innovation’ and ‘going too far’ is fine and fuzzy. Backstroker Daiichi Suzuki was no less innovative when he dolphin-kicked his way to 100-meter Olympic gold in 1988, completing two lengths almost entirely underwater and surfacing only to claim victory.

This was perfectly legal at the time, but subsequently banned, as it was adjudged to have exceeded the bounds of ‘proper’ swimming, in a way that the Fosbury Flop, somehow, hadn’t.

As more money enters sport, stakes have risen. So too competitors’ incentive to shave the hundredth of a second, centimetre, or microgram of blood oxygen, that separate millionaire champions from impoverished also-rans.

And the most obvious means of gaining such fine margins isn’t better kit or technical innovation, but chemical ‘enhancement’.

Drug Rules

Olympic drug busts have closely tracked creeping professionalisation.

• 1960: After Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen’s amphetamine use was found to have killed him while competing in the road race, pressure to ban prohibit performance-enhancing drugs began.
• 1968: Swedish pentathlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall became the first Olympic athlete to be disqualified under drug rules. The fact that his sin was ‘a couple of beers to steady his nerves’ before the pistol shooting did nothing to prevent all his teammates also having to return their gold medals in disgrace.
• 1988: In that 100m final, drugs testers stripped Ben Johnson of his gold and handed it to Carl Lewis, with Linford Christie’s bronze upgraded to a silver. Successive drug-busts not only proved Lewis and Christie tested positive or were involved in the use or supply of performance-enhancing drugs, but so were all but two of the eight 100M finalists lining up for the ‘Dirtiest Race In History‘.
• 2008: Camiro, ridden by Norwegian Tony André Hansen, became the first non-human to break Olympic drug rules, losing horse and rider show-jumping bronze.

None of us likes having our sporting heroes exposed as cheats and prefer our binary hero/villain narratives not to be mediated by drugs testers, but – until now – we’ve accepted that such rules are necessary.

No Olympic sport can claim to be immune to drug cheats. Even a sport as corrupt as boxing enforces anti-doping rules.

Until the EG, every sporting authority has been engaged in the arms race between drug cheats and drug-detectors.

Repeated drug bans, for individuals or even countries, haven’t stopped drug-taking. Nor – for most of us – have they diminished our shared conviction that sport’s integrity depends on the never-ending battle of wits between immoral drug-cheats and righteous dope-testers.

This shared conviction was why I, the IHT editors, and its readers found the notion of the Drug-O-Lympics comically ludicrous.

With the EG, it’s not funny any more.

To be clear, this is not a matter of being sanctimonious. Drug cheats are acting rationally: the rewards of transgression increase in line with the rewards of victory.  For each athlete, sport, or national body, the marginal benefit of taking illegal drugs has been a straightforward – if cynical – risk/reward calculation. The Olympic Games as Game Theory.

But until the EG, this seemed a permanent feature an über-rule.

The EG’s made their billions from rule-trashing. Not only do they celebrate their rule-trashing, they expect to be lionised for it.

Their Drug-O-Lympics is a celebration, justification, and vindication of their exceptionalism.

Who’s behind the Enhanced Games?

At a ‘glitzy’ ceremony (what other kind would it be?) organizers have just announced the first Enhanced Games would take place in (where else?) Las Vegas, in May 2026. 

The three key investors featured on the event’s website are:

• Peter Thiel: PayPal/Facebook investor, JD Vance sponsor, author of ‘The Diversity Myth’, who’s ‘come to no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible’.
• Christian Angermeyer: investor in ‘life sciences, fintech, AI, psychedelics and cryptocurrencies’, co-founder of ‘anti-aging biotech’ Rejuveron Life Sciences. 
• Balaji Srivanasam: cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s first CTO, author of The Network State: How To Start A New Country.

Other investors include a venture capital fund headed up by Donald Trump Jr., the US president’s son.

What do these CVs tell us about their possible motivations for investing in the EG?

Thiel, Angermeyer and Srivanasam are all part of the new breed of ‘tech-right’ Silicon Valley Overlord. Specifically they’re all:

• Super-rich: not just multimillionaire-rich, but their wealth is so far beyond any real-world concerns about providing for their families for the rest of their lives, they can afford to raise their eyes to the horizon while the rest of us have to watch our next steps.

• Activist: not content with counting their fortunes, they all seek to actively change the world. They are prepared to spend some of their cash-mountains to nudge large numbers of ordinary people towards their preferred destination (exactly like the See Through Network, apart from the cash).

• Transgressive: they share the Silicon Valley Overlord code of ‘moving fast and breaking things’. Rule-taking is for losers. Winners take the initiative and prevail while everyone else is still figuring out what they’ve done. They don’t even ‘seek forgiveness and not permission’, but rather seek glorification and gratitude for their transgressions.

Why I’m not swanking

I’d usually be more than happy to swank about a quarter-century-old prediction becoming reality. 

For old-school journalists, shackled to fact and banned from speculation, this is a rare humblebrag opportunity.

But as founder of the See Through Network, a global network working pro bono to speed up carbon drawdown by helping the Inactive become Active, I recognise the forces behind the EG as the same forces that retard, obstruct and obscure our path to a sustainable future.

Like the Olympic ideal, our carbon emergency is a species-level enterprise.

Homo sapiens‘ responsibility for creating the climate emergency is collective, so our shortest escape route must also be collective. Like a family pulling together, we all need to cooperate to wean ourselves from our fossil fuel addiction.

But a common purpose demands a shared understanding, a common agenda – and rules in common.

Selectively isolating and ignoring one set of rules while keeping others to suit your own purpose is the opposite of what we need to address the climate crisis.

We need government regulation

It’s why the See Through Network focuses on the big levers of change – government regulation – not individual behaviour. Rules matter.

Ideologues like Thiel, Angermeyer and Srivansasam are highly selective about which rules they break. Think of them as 110M hurdlers who insist their competitors jump regulation 42-inch high hurdles, while theirs are only ankle-high.

This strategy is familiar to mob bosses – blithely ignore the rules that obstruct you, piously enforce those that benefit you.

It’s why the Enhanced Games do not feature:

• the 117-metre hurdles
• the high-jump wearing scuba-gear
• the 400-metre medley wearing flip-flops

These – apparently – would be ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as I, and the editors and readership of the International Herald Tribune in 2000, found the notion of a Drug-O-Lympics.

For the EG organisers, the rules determining the length of the race, or equipment you can use, etc., are worth retaining.

It’s only the doping rules they consider to be strictly for dummies, losers, and the unenlightened.

‘Made to be broken’

Questioning rules is a human instinct.

Toddlers don’t see why they should eat their greens before they can have ice-cream. Our current crop of tech-right Silicon Valley Overlords are literally shameless in using their money and power to drive their ice-cream-for-us agenda, and encouraging others to follow their lead:

• Elon Musk is fine with receiving $38Bn of government funding, and cutting environmental protection employees in his DOGE slash-and-burn of ‘wasteful’ government spending.
• Small-government preppers refuse to pay taxes, but expect emergency aid when their houses are burnt in a wildfire.
• Libertarian social media billionaires celebrate free speech while issuing gagging orders against critics.

Hypocrisy is also a human instinct.

Social media bosses ban their kids from using social media. I image these tech-right bros teach their infant children the importance of obeying certain rules when it comes to, say, crossing the road, finishing their greens before they get ice-cream, or following their diet regime they hope will guarantee eternal life.

But death is one rule we can’t trash.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana

This quote from that famous Marxist (Groucho) both deflates Silicon Valley Overlord hubris, and reminds us that we’re all mere mortals.

The EG backers will eventually die, probably on this planet, like the rest of us with a few fewer zeroes to our net worth.

Wealth can insulate you from the impact of climate change longer than most, which is presumably why these apparently intelligent people, with so much power to preserve our species, instead choose to actively sabotage attempts to make our future sustainable.

Individual mortality, like species extinction, is just a matter of time. Members of the See Through Network are big fans of human civilisation. That’s why we spend our time addressing the avoidable self-harm of our fossil fuel addition.

One of the many frustrations of the EG backers’ selective transgression of rules is that it’s not just self-contradictory. In the long run, it’s self-defeating. For people posing as visionaries, it’s a strange choice.

In the meantime, however, they damage us all by delaying and frustrating any collective attempt to return our species to a sustainable path, preferring to distract us with silver-bullet promises of off-planet travel, scalable carbon capture or living in metaverses, which just happen to make them even wealthier.

I turn out to have been wrong about the Drug-O-Lympics being a nutty fantasy. But when urgent climate action is needed now, space travel, carbon-gobbling machines and virtual realities – those really are fantasies.

With all our futures at stake, anyone with a sense of responsibility for the world we bequeath our children should know that the last thing we need to do is to indulge these cynical sociopaths and their bizarrely old-fashioned dreams of eternal life, magical tokens, and superior beings.

This is no time for Games.

**

If you want to be part of something larger than yourself, but still think it’s important for us all to play by the same rules, here’s how you can take action via See Through Network’s programmes to nudge governments into changing the rules – and enforcing them – to measurably reduce carbon.

**

That article in full

The Olympics are coming. Despite the routine assurances that this time they’ll be drug-free, we all know we’re going to get a doping scandal or two. Each one deepens our disillusionment with professional sport, and taints our admiration for the apparently legitimate winners. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Here a modest proposal:

Hol two separate Olympic games, one for the druggies, and one for the purists. The Drug-O-Lympics will feature pumped-up supermen (and former superwomen whose testosterone treatments have pushed them over the gender edge) who can swallow, inject or smoke whatever they want, no holds barred, if they think it will make them run faster, throw further, or jump higher.  Steroids, beta-blockers, human growth hormone, modified genes, why not? – anything goes. The Clean-O-Lympics will feature the slender physiques of the drug-free, their bodies as free from artificial stimulants as their consciences are from guilt and paranoia.

Consider the advantages:

• We could celebrate victories without them being tainted by suspicion of unfair advantage. No more fallen role models desperately trying to convince a cynical public they really are clean. Linford Christie and Merlene Ottey could hold their heads high, whichever event they chose to participate in.
• We would find out once and for all how much difference drug-taking actually makes.  Maybe all those young East German lives were ruined for nothing.
• The TV ratings would answer why it is that we watch the Olympics. Do we want to gawp at the limits of human achievement, or to cheer on ordinary heroes and heroines?  Is it a freak show or a soap opera? Which advertisers go for which version, and how much they were prepared to pay, would be most instructive.

The one thing everyone in the sports business seems able to agree on is that drugs in sport, just like prostitution and cannabis smoking, is not going to go away.  As sport becomes more professional, and the financial gap between the hundredths of seconds that separate a gold medallist from The Guy Who Came Fourth grows bigger, the problem is more likely to grow than fade. Promises of more punitive fines and fool-proof testing only stimulate the ingenuity of the drug takers. 

Are we more interested in the cartoon-like physique of Ben Johnson, or the heart-warning achievements of the Cambodian long distance runner, crossing the line hours after the winner? Do we want to see Michele Smith, or “Eddie the Eagle? The answer is probably both, but this way each would have their own appropriate forum.

A colleague of mine who recently returned from seeing the drug-free Chinese Olympic female swim team, all-conquering when doped to the eyeballs and beyond, training reporting the new durf-free lot poke like, well, typical Chinese women in swimsuits, rather than bearded behemoths. Will we cheer their fifth place in the semi-final to the rafters, or dismiss them as no-hopers?

I can imagine many objections to this proposal. If the Clean Olympics prove more popular, the temptation to take drugs to improve performance might grow. Others will object that the Drug-O-Lympics would tacitly approve of drug-taking, and represent another step for Modern Society down the moral ladder.

Possibly, but nearly all banned drugs are illegal only because sporting bodies have descreed them illegal. Sotomay9[re cocaine bust was a rare exception. Most athletes are busted for using over-the counter cold remedies. Some thought Mark McGuire’s home-0run  record was diminished by the fact he took muscle-building supplements banned by some athletic bodies, but not Major League Baseball. Anyway, we may not like steroids, but let’s put this into perspective. Are the risks of informed drug use (as opposed to those poor Cold War Sacrificial lambs being force-fed ‘vitamin supplement’ pills) really any worse than those we deem acceptable, or at least legal, like boxing or even ballet dancing?

And let me tell you about another idea I’ve had. Interactive cricket, where the viewer can dial in his or her bribe to the player or umpire of their choice, with the ever-changing tallies virtually displayed on the backsides of the participants as the bids and counter-bids roll in…