In Response to Marc Andreessen’s Techno Optimist Manifesto
The following captures a series of tweets I posted today about a recent post on the Andreessen Horowitz blog, outlining a manifesto for techno optimism.
It was jaw dropping to read, a parody of all the things problematic about how Silicon Valley thinks about human progress. It honestly reads more like an SNL skit than an earnest attempt to articulate a worldview worth considering.
There’s so much more I’m tempted to say and may say in a later post, but for now this gets out some of my thoughts around a handful of things he states that are just stunningly off base.
As you read this, keep in mind two things:
- I used to work for Google. I know well the vision of technology to drive human progress; I joined just after the IPO and drank the kool-aid along with the rest of us. My husband is also a technology entrepreneur. I’ve had a front row seat to the dynamics of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem for two decades.
- I also have a degree in economics and international development from the Harvard Kennedy School, a program designed by Jeff Sachs to be the best in the world for development practitioners (he is a major architect of the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development goals). There I studied deeply the story of human progress via economic growth.
I thus know the world-views behind Marc’s post deeply; I have lived both of them. Over the past decade plus since leaving Harvard disillusioned, I have engaged in deep intellectual inquiry regarding systemic change. I have questioned the world-views that Marc holds and searched for alternative answers to realizing human progress. I have come to the conclusion that in order to realize the long term goals of humanity, we need not technology but deep economic, political, cultural, and spiritual reform.
My responses are informed by all I have lived and learned over the past twenty years.
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I used to respect Marc Andreessen, and even had hopes that Andreessen Horowitz would become a VC firm that could bend Silicon Valley towards a less extractive, more impactful version of itself. They did some progressive things once; the partnership committed to give away half of their earnings to charitable causes.
Then I read this most recent post and lost not just respect but hope.
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
It is so over the top it reads like a parody of itself. The list of things to quote that are just comically off-base are truly astounding. Things like:
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“We are told to denounce our birthright — our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.”
Did he really just say it is our birthright to control nature? Can we just sit with this for a half second and marvel at its anthropocentricity?
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“We believe growth is progress — leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.”
How anyone as smart has him cannot plainly see indefinite growth that utilizes materials on a finite planet is fatal is beyond me.
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“Our civilization was built on technology.”
Yes. And. This misses the vital point that the incentive structure underlying that technology dictates whether it is net beneficial or detrimental to life on this planet. Tech as he preaches it alongside market fundamentalism / neoliberalism = suicide.
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“We believe that there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.”
The fundamentalism and lack of nuance here is unreal. Seriously who is going to play him on SNL — no need for a script it’s already written in the post.
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“Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand.”
Can we envision a world where purpose is the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand? The lack of purpose, btw, is one of the things driving the global rise of anxiety and depression. Again, narrow thinking on display here. We are spiritually bereft in the culture of profits that capitalism has broght forth.
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“We believe Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system”
#1) don’t confuse extractive capitalism with a market economy. #2) I by no means am indicating a centralized economy is the answer (it’s not) — but also, haven’t we invented AI to potentially meaningfully address constraints to (some degree of) centralization?
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“Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.”
Uhhh.. doesn’t your investment thesis focus on imperfect competition to realize your returns? Can we talk about Meta, Google, or Amazon? Markets fail. This is econ 101. Governments are supposed to regulate. They don’t. Why? Bc markets capture policy. Why? Because money = power = favorable policies = more accumulation = more power = more favorable policies. It’s a reinforcing feedback loop driving inequality, less competition, less regulation.
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“We believe markets lift people out of poverty–in fact, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of people out of poverty, and always have been.”
True. Also myopic and irrelevant for the topic at hand. Markets do not = capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Markets with proper incentive structures can address poverty without massive externalities such as climate change and species extinction, and widening inequality.
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“David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons — love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.”
Why can’t love scale? Also, can we pls think in a more sophisticated way about money? Money as we know it circulates largely based on financial return, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Money does not have to motivate extraction and accumulation. I wish Marc Andreessen had the capacity to think bigger. Very ironic for a top SV VC.
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“We believe there is no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable.”
I’m not sure how anyone can say this with a straight face given the stats on inequality, wages, and policy in this country over the last few decades.
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“We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us.”
Again, let’s not conflate markets with capitalism, esp the particularly pernicious, short term, extractive variant that is so wide-spread.
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“Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio. Who gets more value from a new technology, the single company that makes it, or the millions or billions of people who use it to improve their lives? QED.”
This one makes me wonder if this post might actually be a prank. Just one of an ocean of responses I could make to this but — do we really need a new iPhone every year? No. Manufactured wants in service of growth does not improve lives, other than shareholder’s. It corrupts our values and makes us lose touch with what truly drives happiness.
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“We believe in Milton Friedman’s observation that human wants and needs are infinite.”
They can be made to look infinite when capitalism captures culture and manipulates us to believe such things… It’s ironic that so many of us are all so indoctrinated we conflate human nature with the cultural output of the last hundred years of capitalism.
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“We believe markets also increase societal well being by generating work in which people can productively engage. We believe a UBI would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful / productive / proud.”
Uff this one is so unreal. First, “Man”? x2 in this day and age? I mean… really? Is unpaid labor in the home not productive for society? I know it’s not productive for economic growth bc it’s not valued in dollars, but raising our kids sure is productive for society. UBI btw, effectively compensates for this and addresses a VERY long list of social issues in one fell swoop. Marc’s indoctrination of the protestant work ethic on display here is impressive.
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“We believe markets are generative, not exploitative; positive sum, not zero sum.”
Spoiler alert: our entire global economy was built on exploitation. Land was stolen in the first place. The US economy was built on slave labor.
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“Infinite games never end, as players collaborate to discover what’s possible in the game. Markets are the ultimate infinite game.”
Game theory 101: the prisoner’s dilemma. Players don’t collaborate for optimal outcomes, they realize worse overall outcomes for everyone when they optimize for themselves. Market (and nation states for that matter) are multipolar traps: prisoner’s dilemmas with n players vs. 2. That means it’s a race to the bottom.
Case in point with competition in capitalism as Marc preaches: nature + labor are inputs to be minimized in service of profit, lower prices yield a competitive advantage. Nation states have nuclear arms races. This is the mulitpolar trap. The game theory dynamics of competitive markets optimizing for profit are effed, fundamentally.
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“We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength. We believe in merit and achievement. “
Ufff… there is no true meritocracy in a society with systemic oppression. Also what impact can we attribute to an individual when our accomplishments are built on hundreds of years of cultural and intellectual tradition. Again this is a sign of how indoctrinated Marc has become on market fundamentalism. I am also stunned how blind he is to his own privilege.
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“We have enemies. Our enemies are not bad people — but rather bad ideas.”
Sorry to burst Marc’s bubble, but the bad idea here is that technology fueled by capitalism is what drives human progress.
Also .. the whole section about enemies… oof. Just the whole perspective on enemies / war / fighting / othering reflects a worldview of superiority, us vs. them, a massive part of what is deeply wrong with the world right now (see the current conflict in the Middle East for e.g. where the concept of enemies is being used to justify horrific violence).
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It’s entirely misleading to include Buckminster Fuller on a list of techno optimists as Marc describes it, so fully embedded in the worst form of extractive capitalism. We need to divorce our views of what tech can do (so much) from its enmeshment with capitalism (which is ripping apart society at its seams).
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There is so much more I could say, but this feels like the 90/10 given all of my other responsibilities at the moment. God help us if this is the thesis driving the one of the world’s largest venture capital firms.
I’ll keep beating my drum nevertheless. While I’ve lost hope in a16z, I remain deeply hopeful. I believe it’s possible for enough of us to wake up and see this absurdity for what it is. I believe it’s possible for us to take on the collective responsibility to realizing a system that truly works for life on this planet into perpetuity.
