Unfortunately, Marc Andreessen has returned. Really, he never went away, but more specifically, Andreessen the manifesto writer is back, and I have no choice but to read it and try to untangle why this is one of the most influential people on Earth at the moment when he’s just so stupid.
For the uninitiated (what’s it like to be you?), Andreessen rose to tech prominence in the mid-90s as the founder of Netscape, before launching his hugely impactful venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. Since then, he has invested in and had his finger digging around inside any number of big tech companies, from Skype to Twitter to Airbnb to Groupon to Lyft to Roblox.
As you probably don’t remember if you’re normal, Andreessen previously published a quasi-manifesto called “It’s time to build” in April 2020, at the height of the initial days of pandemic panic. In it, he lamented how Congress had thus far chosen to respond to the crisis (fair enough), proceeding to suggest technological solutions as the only proper way forward. As you might imagine, this rhetoric was not named at, say, mRNA vaccine development or tech answers to supply chain difficulties. Instead, the reason why we don’t build things anymore, the reason why our infrastructure is failing across sectors, is because we simply don’t want it enough — oh, and there’s too much regulation on America’s kinglike innovators.
However, “It’s time to build” resembles a coherent argument when compared with the unwieldy, Howard-Hughes-peeing-in-bottles mania of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” 5,200 words of capitalist mumbo-jumbo. Separated into sections like “The Techno-Capital Machine,” “The Meaning of Life,” and (I’m serious) “Becoming Technological Supermen,” it is very hard to not come away from the document feeling as though you’ve just encountered an excerpt from some dystopian sci-fi novel about a madman billionaire drunk with emperor-like power sharing his convoluted musings on the future of the world, his world.
He begins:
We are being lied to.
We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
…
We are told to be miserable about the future.
We’re off to the races. What’s great about this, of course, is that you can already tell where we’re going and the fundamental misalignment of this framing, for it correctly pinpoints that we shouldn’t blame technology for these problems, and yet do you think he identifies the real culprit: capitalism? Let’s find out where his mind palace takes us.
In contrast to his dour diagnosis of the COVID moment, today “we have the will,” the will to “advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.” How to get there? First and most importantly, Andreessen reifies Silicon Valley’s longstanding belief that “everything good is downstream of growth” — despite a constricted tech sector facing higher interest rates and shareholders more interested in actual returns, he argues that we must not lose our focus on the growth mindset as the guiding light. Meaninglessly, he suggests that there are only three sources of growth: population, natural resources, and technology. The first two are lost causes, and so there is technology, “perhaps the only cause of growth.” So far, so 1998 or 2006 or 2011.
Soon enough, we are assured that “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.” If the last couple of decades amid digital capitalism has taught us anything, it is that the opposite of this statement is true. It even acknowledges the many problems that technology itself (or rather, those with the power to wield it) creates, but of course only technology can fix its own mistakes. Incredibly, he asserts:
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
What technology, exactly, is creating abundance and “solving” the problem of poverty? What are you talking about? Did someone hit you over the head?
We then go over more familiar talking points about free markets (this is how we lift people out of poverty, it turns out), pulling from Hayek and Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, citing sources but without even a clear understanding of them. This whole section sucks, but it does include this chestnut:
We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.
I can only laugh.
As for the techno-capital machine, apparently “all the machines work for us.” But who is “us”? Turning to artificial intelligence, we hear another typical refrain, that to reject AI or propose nuance on its rapid advancement is to risk putting lives at risk, for “any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” Interestingly, the deaths caused by AI go unmentioned.
Andreessen quotes Andy Warhol discussing American consumerism, completing missing any tongue-in-cheek meaning behind the words, and also sings the praises of one of the architects of Italian fascism. This is, in the grand scheme of things, par for the course for these people — out of touch wealth hoarders whose intellectual pursuits and ideologies remain stuck in the hyper-libertarian mode of the time after the “end of history.”
In the 1990s, as the tech industry congealed into a cabal of rich dudes espousing the same “ideas” and as Western democracies declared victory over authoritarianism and communism through the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism, this framing of history, technology, and human development became the standard and accepted story, a panacea for those with the means to design a future in their image. For instance, as movements like effective altruism and longtermism grew in these circles, endless growth was the only answer and it was always justified because it provided them with a moral imperative for their aggressive accumulation of wealth. They knew what to do with it, and it was well within their rights to make as much of it as possible by any (exploitative) means.
Here, in his latest manifesto, and perhaps aware of some of the backlash to these ideas in recent years, Andreessen provides a minor corrective, positioning instead the further worship of pure accelerationism, “the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development…to ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.” To whose benefit? Everyone’s, he says. His, I’d wager.
The enemies of his techno-optimist ideology are various:
“existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”
Pesky ethics! Darn social responsibility! I hate that stuff!
Let’s be clear, though, Almost all of this, other than some of the more brazen bits, is nothing new. This is age-old tech Randianism, but it is presented and shared at a precise moment of technological change, specifically an ongoing uncertainty within the market at large and the supposedly invigorating power of the AI boom. The latter, naturally, faces threats of regulation, legislation, and pushback from governments, organizations, and activist groups around the world, and if nothing else this manifesto is intended as a reaffirmation of how we got here, a reassurance to tech evangelists and policymakers alike that the solutions to all of our problems remain in the hands of technologies propagated by a handful of well-networked and well-funded companies interested in ensuring growth and nothing else.
What first appears like a rah-rah celebration, then, starts to look more like a desperate plea from a well-insulated God of capital who can see the waters rising (literally, figuratively). As Dave Karpf pointed out:
The most powerful people in the world (people like Andreessen!) are optimists. And therein lies the problem: Look around. Their optimism has not helped matters much. The sort of technological optimism that Andreessen is asking for is a shield. He is insisting that we judge the tech barons based on their lofty ambitions, instead of their track records.
I think he’s right to see this absurd stream of consciousness as a shield, as a way to obfuscate, for example, the many bad calls people like him have made, like investing heavily in web3 or the metaverse or crypto or other DOA ideas, and now that there finally appears to be something substantial on hand with AI, it is time to remind everyone of who we have to thank, regardless of if anyone actually still wants anything that they tell us we should want. To suggest that slowing down AI or inserting regulatory demands on its development is akin to murder is not only stupid as fuck but it’s also a willful blindness to the agency we have — er, I should say, people like him have — to determine the shape all of this takes, that technology as such is not a subject of its own engaged in inevitable progression. It is a thing that we (they) wield, that we (they) weaponize. Even this line of argument, though, is just another strawman for him, since he also recognizes the basic utility of technology as tools, perfectly in tune with his so-called rationalist approach, concluding his manifesto once again with “it’s time to build.” He wants to have it both ways, or every which way.
The good thing, I think, is that I think more people than even in 2020 now see right through this hackneyed rhetoric for the manipulative mythologizing it is, a last ditch attempt by one of the most comfortable men in the world to believe once again in the smell of his own flatulence, to recognize within himself the answers for humanity’s problems, and to make sure no one can forget that even when they do wrong, they’ve really done right. We are not as stupid as you think, Marc. We pay attention.
Of course, he also takes aim at myself:
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
Fair enough, but me thinks the call is coming from inside the house, Marc.
Ephemera
To state the obvious, it has been heartbreaking and angering beyond belief to watch what has been going on in Gaza, and the last thing the world needs is another watcher-from-afar sharing their despair. Below I’ll just share some of the most meaningful critiques and reflections I’ve come across.
David Klion’s piece has been shared widely, but if you missed it, it remains essential reading: “For those Israeli ministers already committed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the horror of the incursion brings with it catharsis and clarity: now is the time to execute on their vision, backed morally and financially by all the great powers of the West, and unencumbered by those who would normally hold them to account.”
Arielle Angel for Jewish Currents: “One of the most terrible things about this event is the sense of its inevitability. The violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence. Many people have struggled with the straightjacket of this inevitability, straining to articulate that its recognition does not mean its embrace. I am reminding myself that it was from Palestinians, many of them writing and speaking in these pages, that I learned to think of Palestine as a site of possibility—a place where the very idea of the nation-state, which has so harmed both peoples, could be remade or destroyed entirely.”
A Palestinian mother, Asmaa Alkaisi, tells her story: “I have six siblings, and my understanding is that they are now with relatives in the same house where more than 50 people are seeking refuge. Fifty people in a two- or three-bedroom apartment. They sleep standing. They sleep in shifts for a couple of hours.
And there’s children, about 20 children in that house, no electricity, no water to drink, no food, no medications, nothing. They are completely cut off from the rest of the world. This is the textbook definition of a genocide, of collective punishment, of war crimes, and nobody’s doing anything.”
Citations Needed has thus far put out two crucial episodes, here and here.
Paris Marx spoke with Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: “I’ve always wondered, what would be the trigger to potentially allow Israel to do something on a massive scale? I’m not just talking about low scale though horrific wars every two or three years or violence in the West Bank, as bad as that is. I’m talking about on a much larger scale, forced mass movement of people. I worry that this event is something that Israel will use to justify that and we need to raise our voices and make politicians aware that this is not simply between Israel and Hamas. It’s much bigger than that.”
American Prestige has been doing regular updates.
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