What is there to say about Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto that hasn’t already been said about your Joe-Rogan-listening younger brother’s enthusiastic but ill-conceived book report on Sapiens? It reads like something a 16-year-old consumed 50 mg of Adderall to produce in one furious night so that he’d be eligible to walk the stage on graduation day. I hope Andreessen was on some sort of drug when he wrote this, because if not the only rational outcome is that he retire from writing forever.
It’s one thing to produce something bad and put it on the internet, it’s another to plaster it across the homepage of your industry-leading VC firm’s website. The fact that this garnered not one but two responses from the paper of record, despite his firm’s questionable recent performance history, says something about the staying influence of this odd, increasingly antagonistic man.
And perhaps that is the point. Andreessen-Horowitz (which is often abbreviated as a16z, using a shorthand style popular in software engineering culture called a numerical contraction) has been seeking to not only ride the hype train but power it for years now. During the halcyon days of 2021 tech euphoria, when crypto was cool and returns were high, a16z got frustrated with negative public sentiment and launched its own “unapologetically pro-tech” publication called Future, only to see it flame out – along with many of the firm’s high profile investments – the following year.
So perhaps this is all a ploy to generate sentiment, coverage, and continued relevance. And perhaps responses like this (or to a much larger degree, the ones in The New York Times) are playing right into Marc’s hands. But if we are to take this firm seriously – and Silicon Valley certainly does – we should take him at his word. The problem is that his word is…hard to make sense of, to say the least. Andreessen does not make it easy, but I’ll attempt a good faith response to some of the grand platitudes that shoot from the page like crypto king laser eyes.
The screed is divided into sections, the first of which are: Lies, Truth, and Technology. The Lies and Truth sections are so vapid I couldn’t find anything to even respond to, so I’ll skip to the Technology part.
I want to start by highlighting this foundational assumption that I see all the time in techno-optimist circles. Andreessen writes:
“Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things1 than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.”
Larry Page used to say that the purpose of automation was to free humans up to pursue more creative work. This idea assumes a “low” form of human experience that includes things like manual labor and the performance of rote tasks. If we are unburdened of this tedium, we will flourish and be happy, so the thinking goes. For those who subscribe to this philosophy, A.I. is the logical next step in the scientific and political project of computing. To them, relieving humans of the burden of drudgery is an irrefutably positive outcome.
I simply disagree. I think we can point to a number of cultural trends, from the revival of vinyl records to a resurgence in hands-on hobbies like woodworking, that seem to indicate an understanding, particularly among younger people, of value that transcends ease. There seems to be some innate satisfaction born from the manual process, the concentrated toil, the hard-fought victory. Shopcraft as Soulcraft, a book which changed my life and career trajectory, explores these questions as length. I have written about this before in different ways, but the idea that we are going to automate our way to eudaimonia is far too widely-conceded when we consider the future and what it portends. Andreessen, for his part, seems to agree about the value of work, writing that “man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.” I guess in his view utility and pride can only derive from the highest-level functioning of the human brain. Bullshit.
Back to the manifesto. It then proceeds to list a litany of inventions that solved real-world problems (Remember, we have technologists to thank for indoor heating!). Some of them, it should be noted, are more convincing than others. For example: “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.” This is a statement so bold-faced in its obviation of reality that I can’t believe it’s anything other than trolling. The fact is that we have a loneliness “epidemic” in the United State so severe that the Surgeon General issued an advisory, which recommends, among other things, that we “critically evaluate our relationship with technology and ensure that how we interact digitally does not detract from meaningful and healing connection with others.” I can’t tell if Andreessen is lazy or simply arrogant or both.
The section titled Markets is a pretty standard endorsement of free market principles, citing Hayek and Friedman to promote the idea that, “the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.” It really annoyed me how much the framing of these ideas focuses on the common good, when that so clearly conflicts with Andreessen’s stated politics.
We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else we want to pay for, including basic research, social welfare programs, and national defense…the production of markets creates the economic wealth that pays for everything else we want as a society.
This is outdated, trickle-down garbage that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Free markets are successful at generating wealth, but the question of course is how that wealth then gets applied to the problems of the commons. Private corporations and wealthy people alike are exceedingly adept at avoiding taxes, and the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 90% of the stocks. The wealth created is hoarded and offshored. If Andreessen truly believes that generating wealth in private markets leads to a more prosperous society, why isn’t he focused on these crippling bugs in the redistributive system?
One of my main issues with the manifesto, and a lot of the Silicon Valley rhetoric, is the conflation of internet technology with technology in general. Noah Smith recently wrote a piece on techno-optimism in which he cites turbulence-reducing technology as an example of tech as a force for good. But WeWork and turbulence reduction technology are not the same. The insidious root of the Silicon Valley tech ethos is its profit-at-all-costs enthusiasm buoyed by ceaseless hype and speculation. This has nothing to do with concrete improvements to our lived experience. Postmates can’t be compared to a life-saving vaccine, and it’s not a question of value but a question of type.
There needs to be a distinction between snake oil and substantive innovation. The blockchain and “AI” innovations of recent years have gotten much more attention than the airplane technology mentioned above or the vaccine development that helped lift us from the depths of the pandemic. It’s important to remember that Web3 and AI and the like get more attention by design, since the value of these things is based primarily on our collective feelings about them. No “techlash” is coming for the companies that make airplanes safer. It’s the consumer products whose mission is our attention, our money, and our usage for its own sake that face public ire, and for good reason. If Marc is actually operating in good faith but can’t recognize that distinction, he is too far up his own ass to be taken seriously.
In the end, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto is shadowboxing with ghosts. It doesn’t address the issues of our day with any nuance, preferring to omit known problems in favor of preferred, pre-determined solutions. It fails to acknowledge the actual substance of critiques leveled against the tech industry, instead attacking straw men and spouting conservative platitudes like they’re scientific epiphanies. It refuses to recognize the power dynamics at play, and even though it warns that “Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life,” it whines incessantly about the world around it without producing a single particle of introspection. And these guys wonder why the world has turned against them.
Emphasis mine
Mega. Great read.