Marc Andreessen, a billionaire investor in Silicon Valley, wrote a manifesto of techno-utopianism a few days ago. One could safely ignore this document, which is full of pathos, historical inaccuracies and outdated market fundamentalism, if Andreessen were not one of the most influential men in technology circles and his word carries weight. This manifesto is a useful guide to the moods and attitudes of the tech elite, even if it sounds like a teenager’s fervent Wannabe epic.
Lucas Ropek writes on Gizmodo why Andreessen is wrong about practically everything and I wrote in my newsletter why the pathos-laden aestheticization of ultimately political-regulatory questions is reminiscent of the roots of fascism, which Andreessen also explicitly cites in his document along with neo-reactionary thinkers .
David Karpf offers a different, somewhat calmer but possibly better approach to criticism in his Takedown Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new? He describes why Andreessen mainly warms up old and worn-out tech visions from the 1990s, which sound absurd mainly because the so-called techno-utopians of the 1990s have practically received political and social blank checks in the form of tax cuts and subsidies since the triumph of the Internet and deregulation. In doing so, they created market monopolization and inequality.
At the same time, Andreessen points his finger at enemies – not people, as he emphasizes, but “dangerous ideas” that threaten the freedom of the unregulated market and unfettered innovative power. These ideas are industry standards such as “risk management”, but also sustainability, social responsibility, trust and safety, stakeholder capitalism and so on and so forth.
Karpf counters that these are not features of a pessimistic, regressive view of technological innovation that supposedly prevents progress, but rather approaches to what he calls techno-pragmatism, referring to one of his older essays.
Techno-pragmatism sees the opportunities of technological progress and is no less enthusiastic than techno-optimists, but does not close its eyes to risks and the therefore necessary regulations that embed technological progress in civilizational-legislative mechanisms for the benefit of the general population.
History proves him right. In his new book Power and Progress, based on years of historical research, MIT economist Daron Acemoğlu describes why it was never unbridled technological innovation alone that triggered social progress, but always the associated struggle to achieve the improvements in the general population that accompany technological progress to make it accessible and to offer people a share in more progressive living conditions.
Marc Andreessens wants to eliminate exactly this struggle for regulation in favor of libertarian, unbridled progress, which is why I don’t consider his manifesto to be techno-optimistic, but rather techno-extremist, and I see the true techno-optimism in Karpf and Acemoğlu: the confidence in socially and politically integrated technological progress that benefits everyone – not just a handful of tech billionaires and their accelerationist followers.