The Techno-Optimist Manifesto1 by Marc Andreessen2is a 2023 statement of a libertarian-technology-centric view of the world.
This manifesto is primarily based on a faith-based understanding of the world. In this case, we do not need to look to some alleged words of a god; this faith-based ideology is entirely man-made in Silicon Valley.
From the section titled “Truth”
Our civilization was built on technology.
Our civilization is built on technology.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
Despite the inaccurate re-statement of our evolutionary history in one of the preambles by Marain L. Tupy, to characterize human civilization in this way is profoundly wrong. This is emphatically reflected in the Meaning of Life section (encapsulated here):
We are materially focused, for a reason – to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid material abundance.
A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true, yet more than offset by the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.
Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually.
We believe technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.
We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human.
The focus on material abundance is interesting. However, the question left unanswered in the manifesto is who is making the “choices of how to live, socially and individually.” In the present moment, when billionaires are nakedly and obviously in charge of the federal government, we know that they are making these choices. There is no society and the individual, excepting the several thousand billionaires in the world, we don’t exercise any effective choice-making power.
From the Enemy section:
“Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “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”.
This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.”
Essentially, the enemy is anyone or any institution that might attempt to exercise control over an economy that pollutes everything around it; that might try to avert the now active phenomenon of global warming; that might try to constrain capityalism’s exhaustion of our home planet; that might try to stop the industrial food corporations from continuing their production and promotion of foods that we are not evolutionarily capable of dealing with.
BTW – the Precautionary Principle” is the notion that “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context, the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.”3 If the chemicals industry had followed this principle we might not now be faced with micro-plastics ubiquitous in the environment and even every nook and cranny of our bodies.
The Markets section is a fairly full-throated re-statement of Libertarian and Neoliberal views of capitalism. This is so filled with faith-based assertions that I won’t but point out a few incongruities. These are not unique to this manifesto; rather, they are common to much of my critique of capitalism.
“We believe in market discipline. The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.” Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.”
So, I guess this means that Techno-Optimists support trust busting, such as breaking up Alphabet (Google), Meta(Facebook), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and NVIDIA. As a general statement, conservatives blather on and on about the miracles of free markets, but ignore the tendency, noted by Adam Smith in 1776, that markets tend toward monopoly. This has been demonstrated beyond any doubt throughout the history of capitalism in its several phases. Only the trust busting of the Progressive era and the New Deal maintained any semblance of competition in the economy. Today, the US economy is highly concentrated in almost every sector. Evidence can be seen in data on new business formation, which has been falling for decades.
“We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know.
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.
We believe there is no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable. In fact, they are aligned – the production of markets creates the economic wealth that pays for everything else we want as a society.”
What the hell is “societal wealth” in a country where the rich and corporations long ago captured the federal government and set laws and regulations of the economy for their benefit? In 2024, the lobbying industry in Washington received over $4.2 billion from the rich and corporations. They dominate the election process by funding both parties and extending their control through a system of lobbyists in Washington. Lobbyists ensure that the interests of the rich and corporations are meticulously attended to through legislation and regulations. There are 435 members of Congress and 100 Senators. In 2021, there were 12,136 registered lobbyists in Washington, supported by over $3.73 billion to influence legislation and regulations. That amounts to $6,972,000 and 23 lobbyists per legislator.
The Techno-Capital Machine section asserts:
“The techno-capital machine makes natural selection work for us in the realm of ideas. The best and most productive ideas win, and are combined and generate even better ideas. Those ideas materialize in the real world as technologically enabled goods and services that never would have emerged de novo.”
In the highly monopolized capitalism of today’s America, once again this is just faith-based nonsense. For instance, Apple has spent $218 billion acquiring more than 112 companies from 2016 to the present. Alphabet (Google) has acquired 258 companies, spending over $42 billion. Boeing has purchased a major competitor, McDonnell Douglas, along with Rocketdyne, DeHavilland, and 13 others. This is merely a sample of acquisitions by dominant companies.
This notion of the techno-capital machine as the source of all innovation completely ignores the actual history of innovation. Take your cellphone in hand. Every single basic technology that enlivens it was developed by the US government. The brute facts of capitalism include a fairly short investment horizon. No capitalist will invest in basic research that typically requires many years, if not decades, to bear fruit. And, in this time of financialization, the move of business strategy from production to extraction, capitalists are more focused on shaving milliseconds from the stock trading algorithms in the financial markets than any concern for innovation in the production of new products and services.
OK, I have rambled on long enough.
Footnotes
- This is a fairly brief document at 5,225 words.
- for a sketch of Andreessen see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
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