The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

I agree with the overall thrust of this, or should be easy to convince, but boy does this lack of self-awareness just shout “distance yourself and run, don’t walk!”

> 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.

Really?

Does an uber-wealthy capital allocator publishing a social manifesto seriously not see that this comment at least justifies a half-assed explanation as to why it doesn’t apply to the author?

Maybe something like, “my personal chef Instacarts my dog’s peanut butter from Whole Foods, just like everyone else, so I am not totally detached from reality!”

This was strange and disappointing thing to read. Why such a conspiratorial tone ("we are being lied to", "we have enemies", etc.)?

Since this is written by Marc Andreessen, I did a search for "crypto" and "web 3", but no results came up. Isn't that strange coming from someone who was so prominent in promoting and advocating for a crypto-based future? I guess that one didn't pan out…

"Our enemy is the ivory tower" is a bit rich coming from a billionaire who lives in one of the most exclusive California communities (and vociferously opposes any development in that community, despite loudly proselytizing to others that "it's time to build").

Looking at the "Patron Saints", after skipping the meme-posting pseudonymous Twitter accounts, I am pretty sure university professor is the most common profession. The ivory tower is the enemy indeed. And it does seem distasteful to use the names of dead scientists and intellectuals like John Von Neumann and Richard Feynman to burnish the image of this polemic.

I used to have a similar worldview. I read about the consequences of technological advance in the past always with the present firmly in mind. Who cares if there were initially some unintended consequences and collateral damage? Things got better. Advances in technology have usually increased the size of the pie. It's easy to ignore the bumps in a trendline that's steadly headed skyward. However, when you look more closely, it's not just technological advances that keep things headed in the right direction. Social advances, critically those that help divide the pie more equally, are also responsible for the bounty we enjoy today.

e.g. The industrial revolution is typically credited with a great leap forward in quality of life for the average citizen, but it actually did the opposite at first. Workers crowded into dirty, unhealthy cities and started to live shorter, nastier, more brutish lives. Initially, many English workers were legally barred from seeking employment elsewhere. If you didn't like the wages you were getting at one job and tried to take another, you could be sent to jail. It's hard to ask for a raise or even safety equipment when the alternative is jail! It was the concentration of workers in cities that allowed labor movements to form and demand changes that granted more people a fairer share of the pie, such as the right to change jobs.

Technological advance is generally a good thing, but it's social advances that harness it for all. Be wary of philosophies that ignore part of the equation. If we want to avoid bumpy periods where life gets worse for the majority of us before getting better again, we can make conscious choices about how to use new technologies.

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people throughout history have been adamantly against the rapid progress of technology. The Luddites are the most famous group but there have been lots more.

Even if you ignore those people for being frankly a bit weird, the driving force behind technology for the first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive. Those were definitely noble goals. Compare that to the past 200 or so years and much of the progress has been about the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few extraordinarily rich people. The technological gains have been spread widely, sure, but they've come at a high cost. That's different to the past where the gains have come with very little cost.

We could transform society to benefit everyone using technology if we wanted to. I suspect we won't though. We'll sell a few AI powered gadgets to the masses, and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people. That's not really much of a win.

In a world where abundance reigns, the old structures and the leaders who champion them fade into obsolescence. The energy that once went into seeking more begins to flow into sharing, nurturing, and sustaining. In this transformed landscape, resource hoarding and centralized control are not just out of place; they become barriers to the collective human journey toward wisdom and spiritual fulfillment.

When everyone's basic needs are met effortlessly, the focus of life shifts from surviving to thriving, from acquiring to becoming. In such a world, market mechanisms and venture capital don't just lose relevance; they begin to feel like vestiges of an era defined by limitations that no longer exist. The skills once lauded for amassing resources lose their sheen when the quest becomes one of meaning, connection, and collective wellbeing.

The hearts and minds of people turn toward unlocking human potential, fostering creativity, and deepening relationships. In this new reality, leaders who can guide us toward spiritual and emotional enrichment will supersede those who have mastered the art of material accumulation.

In this context, the prominence of individuals like Andreessen, along with constructs such as markets and money, would naturally diminish into insignificance. The irony lies in the fact that such a manifesto would even be conceived, indicating a profound disconnect from the emergent realities of a post-scarcity world.

There's a lot of this that I agree with wholeheartedly and aggressively. One of the worst modern impulses is techno-pessimism in my opinion, but some of it is somewhere between strange and frankly downright stupid.

Take the "patron saints of techno-optimism". It includes "BasedBeffJezos", a pseudonymous Twitter account that subscribes to NRx ideology, and Nick Land, the progenitor of elitist, bigoted NRx ideology. How exactly do these deserve to be on the same list as great Americans like John Von Neumann? Likewise Thomas Sowell, Mises, the fictional John Galt?

This isn't a serious manifesto, and I say this as someone that would love to see techno-optimism pushed further into the forefront of politics and culture. This is Twitter inside-baseball, not designed to convince anyone that isn't already following a smattering of e/acc accounts that spend 1/3 of their time posting racist memes.

What worries me most is that this guy is supposed to be the inspirational leader of many startup founders and technologists, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Reading this made me really sad.

It's actually hard for me to conjure the strength to write and share an appropriate response, and explain why.

Let me just mention one of many thoughts. Mark Andreessen cites a number of Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism, "In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist."

One of them is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

This is what FTM writes in his Manifesto of Futurism [0]. (original Italian first, then English translation).

""Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra - sola igiene del mondo - il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei liberatori, le belle idee per cui si muore e il disprezzo della donna."

"We will glorify war - the only true hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman"

In 2023, reading about the "glory of war", and the "scorn of woman", should be enough to know what's needed to judge this guy.

Mark, you are really smart and successful and most people would envy your fame and wealth and intelligence, but you need to grow up for once and realize how sick some of your ideas are.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism

> Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

A lot of the optimism seems to rely on this statement and...I'm not convinced? But I also admit I'm not well informed on the topic. Does anyone have suggested reading on 'market discipline', as they're calling it?

I mean, the first person on their "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism" is Jeff Bezos, who is actively dealing with an antitrust lawsuit from the FTC regarding Amazon's frequent and regular push toward monopoly power.

This was deeply depressing to read, and indicates that the trend of disengagement between VCs (and SV tech culture, more generally) and our larger society is continuing apace.

Rather than doing anything else, a man worth approximately $1.8B[1] is posting screeds wherein he churlishly tells the rest of us to read Internet-poisoned reactionaries. No sane culture would be optimistic about any system or scheme that produces such results; we do much better to run screaming in the exact opposite direction.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/profile/marc-andreessen/

> Markets

> 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

> We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral

There's many things off with this. The USSR from the 1920s to early 1950s had enormous economic growth - particularly in the 1930s when so-called free markets in the West had collapsed, by the 1950s and early 1960s it was sending satellites and men to space - before the West. Also, the PRC had enormous economic growth from the early 1950s to late 1970s (and afterward as well).

Also, the US economy is centrally planned. Billions are flowing to military contractors for Israel right now as they were to the Ukraine before - the US is pumping over $800 billion (really over a trillion) this year into this centrally planned economy, and it also de facto plans for the giant medical sector. The Internet we type on was built over decades with government money.

But most importantly, as these are more minor issues - it is a false comparison. The Soviet Union had markets selling radishes for rubles, just like the US does (for dollars). So both had markets.

The difference is the USSR from the 1920s to mid-1960s made production decisions based on the general welfare, the desire for a space program etc. Workers on collective farms made their own decisions, with perhaps some government quotas. In the US decisions are made to benefit the heirs who own companies as opposed to the workers who do the work.

But that is a minor point. The point is that both had markets, little different from one another. But the distribution portion of the economy for the US is compared to the centrally planned production if the other economy. It makes no sense. The US production controlled by and for the benefit of heirs is unmentioned. The USSR-like market identical to to the US market is unmentioned. We compare US production to USSR-like distribution. The comparison makes no sense. Purposefully.

Externalities of progress are very real, and the speed with which the modern age has arisen, and it's brevity, should give us pause every time we assert that it is all good or all evil. It is certainly both.

The great problem of our time is the unrestrained accumulation of wealth. Tech wealth is the product of both innovation and making that innovation artificially scarce. Without the former there is no demand, without the later there is no profit. The techno optimists always seem to forget that second component! Once you've earned Enough, either drop the artificial scarcity and share freely, or give someone else a turn to earn their own Enough. Don't keep hoarding it all for yourself and lying that your wealth is proportional to the value you created. No. Especially in tech. It's proportional to the value you captured with the 1-2 punch of innovation and artificial scarcity, and that itself required a functioning society to which you owe your success and your allegiance.

So the Economist reported today that Tuvalu is planning for its disappearance as sea levels rise [1].

What a great opportunity for Msrs Andreeson, Thiel, Musk and all the other neo-Rand true believers to step in and create their seasteading utopia. They could cast this manifesto in gold at the entrance. Years from now, when we visit their brave new world below the waves I'm sure it will have worked out great!

[1] https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/10/12/tuvalu-plans-for-i...

> We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.

Let's not do that on Earth please. If you want to build a planet-sized solar concentrator in space for reasons, knock yourself out.

In fact, until we figure out how to not rely on fossil fuels, I think we're better off reducing energy use. We can do that and get more useful work done at the same time by using energy more efficiently. In many respects that will be the natural consequence of electrification of formerly fossil-fuel technology. EVs are far more efficient than ICE vehicles.

> We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Per-capita US carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power.

[citation needed]

Even if true, about half the CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution happened in the last 30 years or so. The path we're on is one that leads to environmental and economic devastation and misery.

The big problem is the "Markets" section. The author assumes that free markets just happen. But what we see today are monopolies or oligopolies. The end state seems to be 1-3 big players who tend not to compete on price. Price competition doesn't seem to happen until there are 4 or more roughly comparable players. Margins get much better as competition disappears, which produces a huge pressure towards consolidation.

Why this is is another discussion, but it's very clearly the case in the US.

Like, I see myself as a techno-optimist. But this whole manifesto sure does remind me of a Dr. Bronner's label.

Following A16Z's RSS feed has gotten weirder and weirder, even mostly just reading headlines and leads. Anecdotally, I feel there was a turn when they went "all in" on blockchain and started having people drum out constant "ecosystem-level" booster pieces. Then there was a turn in how I took it all after the new-hotness AI post, earlier this year.

It's all intuitive, but I get the distinct feeling they took a big decision toward conscious reality distortion at the top. Not just to shore up credibility of their investment theses to LPs, but to will the very success of their investments into being. Maybe that's just natural for equity flippers on a particular time scale with enough management fees and brand rec: grease both sides of the two-sided market you turn in. Envelop as many minds as you can.

They route systematically important gobs of capital. I guess I just keep watching the space, to note the content and timing of their big investment-theme announcements. Stick to headlines and leads.

I do wonder who the other 5,000 words are for.

Keep in mind that they changed the header in this, so thankfully Erin Kissane shared the original header for the record: https://mas.to/@kissane/111245487051384089

Talk about a falling off the rails type of piece, this is it.

What if technology has worked out as well as it has because of techno-pessimism? I.e. what if it's because we're suspicious of change that most change has been positive? Maybe filter out the bad ideas through a slow but necessary process.

I agree with the premise, but why does this read like a tech bro and his finance/business major buddy in their early 20s got high and wrote it with the help of an LLM trained on /r/iam14andthisisdeep?

Can't recall too many pieces of writing that fail this hard at what they're intended to do? I mean, if you've never read any other technology-related writing ever, there's some stuff in here I suppose.

I think though, it best highlights what's missing from a lot of visible technological aspirations -- which is a sense of fun?

i can't take a16z seriously ever since they were a major driver of all the pump & dump crypto crap, publishing a grandiose manifesto doesn't really help with the perception of being bullshit merchants.

stop listening to people just because they have money, it's not a measure for greatness and definitely not as reason to give them any credibility outside of their expertise.

Honestly, I felt this post just shows how delusional the people are who made out with billions during the tech boom of the past 25 years.

I was a huge techno-optimist in the late 90s and early 00s. If anything, my opinion has totally switched over the past 10-15 years as I increasingly see technology ripping societies apart, and benefits only accruing to those at the very top. So excuse me if I gag a bit from a post from newly minted billionaires saying how those crowing about the downsides of tech are just a bunch of Debbie Downers.

Tristan Harris, who was featured a lot in The Social Dilemma documentary, was on Bill Maher recently, and I totally agreed with this point he made: we have to forget all the optimistic stories we tell ourselves about tech, and instead just look at the incentives. With social media, we told ourselves all these stories about how it would bring us closer together and keep us better in touch with friends. But the financial incentives that exist for social media companies is solely based on stealing more and more of your attention: what keeps you scrolling to the next block. And it turns out nothing grabs attention like outrage. Tristan's point was that with newer tech like AI, we're likely to repeat the same mistakes if we just tell ourselves the same stories about all the good that can come from AI and ignore the incentives of those top companies speeding ahead as fast as they can. And if you look at those incentives, I don't think it bodes well for the rest of the 99.9% who won't control major AI systems.

I guess some people have an inherent inability to adopt some kind of middle ground stance.

It's either exponential growth forever and colonizing Mars or "why do you want to drag us back to the caves".

Having a conversation for the 1000th time with such people who don't recognize nuance is very tiresome and not worth it.

This isn't a techno-optimist manifesto.

This is a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist manifesto with a sprinkling of 1960 tech boosterism so that they can point at people who disagree and call them luddites.

I'm a massive techno-optimist. I think science and technology has self-evidently bought vast improvements to the human experience. I think it's an absolutely essential part of solving many of the problems that plague the world right now, and will do so in the future. But I whole-heartedly reject sizeable chunks of this teenage-political-science-student level manifesto.

If that somehow makes me a luddite, then pass me an iron bar and point me towards the nearest cropping frame, because apprently I have some wrecking to do?

The whole thing reads like the Nicene Creed from Roman Catholicism [0]; a series of statements of belief. If you put 1-5 (Agree/Disagree) below each paragraph, it could also be a personality test.

[0]: https://www.usccb.org/prayers/nicene-creed

The redacted version by Ben Grosser is better. https://bengrosser.com/files/Techno-Optimist-Manifesto-Andre...

Wow. So that was a bunch of navel gazing from the man who brought us Netscape. Are we sure he didn't just get lucky? I don't think I've ever seen anything discredit Marc in such a big way since the last time I remember him saying or doing something that discredited him in such a big way, like investing in crypto or claiming India was better under Empire colonization.

Also, citing Nick Land (neo-nazi), Filippo Marinetti (co-author of the Fascist Manifesto), Milton Friedman and John Galt (A LITERALLY MADE UP CHARACTER) is a bad read. Yikes.

We are not pessimistic about technology, just the few who own and control it. Markets? Literally everything was developed in the public sector. The two leading drivers of technological development in the 20th century was the US government and soviet union, none of it relying on market forces. If anything markets are local optimizations with the wrong loss function.

I think anybody endorsing this should be forced to work in a rare-earths mine for a couple of weeks beforehand, especially Billionaires.

I think this needs a close reading by a historian or something. I'm certainly not qualified to do it but still there are so many lines that even to my layman's understanding seem like just obvious, fortune cookie horseshit (ironic, given how aggressively the author is touting "truth-seeking"). The Nietzsche stuff reads like something a stoner freshman engineer would post on /r/atheism.

> 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.

Coming from the mouth of Andreeson-Horowitz this is...beyond rich. Didn't they just hand Adam Neumann a massive stack of cash (and to do nothing but extract rent from urban economies, no less)? Their entire milieu does nothing but play god and dick around with abstract theories. How is The Precautionary Principal delusional but cryptocurrency not "a luxury belief"?

This whole post smacks of a god-complex masquerading as a commitment to rationality. Clearly Marc Andreeson knew what he was doing at some point, but if this is representative of the current thought leadership in Big Tech I think we're heading towards some dark years. Victory has defeated us.

This suggests to me that Marc Andressen struggles with bipolar disease. This blog post reeks like the tailings of a manic episode.

Was he not able to find anyone to bounce this off before pressing "publish"?

First of all, they aren't serious about the scientific method or they'd fund Hume's Guillotine (see github). Moreover, they aren't even serious about reforming sociology -- which is what is needed for them to make strong claims about their "beliefs" aka social theory. That "ivory tower" publication Nature is leading them to but a step or two from a new scientific revolution based on technology, but they refuse to drink. Over 200 ecologists were supplied with the same set of data and asked to make predictions. This was "the first study of its kind" according to Nature, but this is exactly the purpose of Hume's Guillotine with regard to social theories, such as theirs. Why blather endlessly about their "beliefs" about the scientific method as providing the keys to techne kingdom and ignore the opportunity to not only nuke the social pseudosciences, but perform what, in other initiatives with which they are familiar, would be called "due diligence" regarding their own social theory?

Second, if they aren't going to be serious about their own social theory, what business do they have thinking of themselves as "apex" anything?

Really more of an e/acc manifesto.

Interesting to see a twitter thing slowly leak into the mainstream one step at a time.

There's a fair bit to like about this, and it's roughly aligned with my worldview: that, on balance, technology and market forces are a force for good; and that there is a little bit too much techno-pessimism abound that has led to bad outcomes (such as the relative lack of nuclear power). I think it's generally under appreciated just how good things are. The world, overall, is getting continuously better (Factfulness by Hans Rosling demonstrates this better than any other source I've come across).

Then again, there are bits of it which are a little bit strange - the enemies section, for example. SV could "move fast and break things" previously, but with its size, power and influence, it probably needs to take a slightly more "win friends and influence people" approach.

But most of all, it is a little bit contrary to some of a16z most high profile recent investments: Clubhouse, NFTs, web3. It's hard to see how these investments and products align with building towards abundance. I wonder if he's spent a little too much time away from the hands-on detail, where the next tech innovation will probably happen.

I'm a tech optimist but this isn't my manifesto. I'm good with the tech but then he mixes in:

"The Enemy": “social responsibility”, “tech ethics”...

"Patron Saints": John Galt

which it quite a different thing. You can be tech optimistic without being Randian.

I think Ezra Klein and Jerusalem Demsas are far better writers about the 'abundance agenda', without some of the bizarre baggage from this guy.

This is a good critique:

https://www.threads.net/@alex.stamos/post/CyeBy06PZGw

Also, wasn't Andressen's VC fund the one that sank all that money into crypto?

From the original "[...] Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" from 2013[1]:

> 7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.

[1] https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-mani...

Oh my, he actually quoted Italian futurism. We live in sacry times.

"Love doesn't scale" is crazy.

It's way too long and at the same time skipping over crucial human traits like kindness or compassion. Might be better to stick with Adam Smith.

> We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.

Is this real life

Only someone in league with or benefiting from the centralization of power, mass surveillance, wealth, and the use of technology to further the rapid concentration and centralization of such could write such a one-sided piece.

Unless they're somehow unaware that, in its current manifestation, technology is a tool that converts knowledge into power.

An improved and expanded strategy for -- with articulated tactics to achieve -- the decentralization of power and wealth, a dismantling of hierarchy, and increasing personal agency, privacy and freedom must not be sacrificed in favor of technology for technology's sake.

Can we even do this? I don't know.

This is decent as a "rah rah techno-optimism" piece, but it continues Marc's pattern of cheapening the discourse when opining on the topic of AI existential risk.

It's easy to mistake this piece as making an argument for accelerating AI development by touting the virtues of techno-optimism. It's not, though.

The claim that "AI has a high risk of becoming unaligned & uncontrollable in our lifetimes", if sufficiently true (e.g. 99% confidence), implies that the current speed of AI development is unwise, independent of how much one likes techno-optimism in general.

At the end of the day, technology does little to nothing. It's the people who use it for good or ill, and the people who organize economic, political and other social systems to capture markets, enhance or suppress wages, create or remove regulation, compete or stifle competition. This essay doesn't really address the people side, just that "we" (he and some others) believe that tech is enough.

This is so ignorant: > 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.

PFOAs are tech. Unexploded cluster bomblets are tech. Fracking fluids are tech. Plastics in the guts of ocean life are tech. Ransomware and doxxing trucks are tech. There's a lot of tech that pmarca wishes would be far away from his gated home.

Then there are dental anesthetics, Polartec, electric cars, power tools, elevators, and snowplows. Lots of tech does good. No one complains much about power tools or elevators.

Minority viewpoints are set up as a strawman. A piece like this should be more thoughtful to be taken seriously.

The problem with Marc’s exposition is that it mixes up techno-optimist ideas with personal right wing ideologies.

More fission reactors? Yes. Massively accelerate technological progress, and reduce the barriers to doing so? Yes. Is AI “extinction risk” overblown to the extent of being an obstacle to progress? Yes.

But markets aren’t self-balancing and do not prevent monopolies or cartels on their own. “Experts” generally know a lot, even though there’s gate keeping and credentialism. The ESG paragraph probably should just focus on the fact that making policy through finance is anti-democratic.

Beff Jezos, who Marc is cribbing here (and who is partially cribbing Nick Land) is pretty openly to the right.

In a document that’s being framed as capturing all of techno-optimism, these arguments are out of place. Without addressing the validity of the arguments themselves, they should have sanded off the explicitly political edges to maximize effectiveness.

First, ignore the boiling planet like a good frog, technology will solve all the problems technology caused if you just believe hard enough. Second, get high on the idea of hardcore Randian Objectivism because you're definitely just a temporarily embarrassed billionaire sitting on the next unicorn. Third, keep billions in poverty and precarity for your own ends/amusement before tossing them to die in the inevitable resource wars that will spread by 2040 (2030 imo).

/savedyouaclick

This aligns well with the Cyberparadism aesthetic: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberparadism

> Cyberparadism is a subset of Cyberprep and therefore of Post-Cyberpunk. The word is an amalgam of the prefix "cyber-", referring to cybernetics, and "paradism" as in paradise, meaning that a paradisal aspect has to be present within the cybernetic part of the aesthetic. The paradisal aspect can either manifest itself in literal terms as it would when representing a derivation of a Garden of Eden or the Elysian Fields, or alternatively in a more abstract way as a reflection of a utopia state of things. > > It differs itself from Cyberprep insofar that not only the positive benefits of technological progress are a central tenet, but that said technological progress has reached a level of sophistication where the principles of economics and conventional labour are fundamentally transformed in such that the subjects at hand can and are likely to pursue higher goals of scientific, technological, civilizatory and/or spiritual fulfillment.

There’s also a manifesto for Cyberparadism: https://github.com/zarazinsfuss/cyberparadism-manifesto/blob...

> We believe that technology can be a powerful force for good, when used in a responsible and thoughtful way. By harnessing the power of technology, we can create a world of abundance and prosperity, where all individuals have the opportunity to thrive and reach their full potential.

What ideas pop up in your head about someone who deems their enemies "trust and safety" or "risk management"?

Especially risk takers should manage their risks. Someone who complains about risk management when taking risks is usually not an innovator, but an opportunistic liability to progress and shared benefits.

You are free to take risks where negative downsides of unchecked technology are taken by you, but AI will impact everyone ("playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.").

It is precisely because the potential and power of AI are so impactful and transformative that AI developers have more responsibility to not squander this and mess this up. Being optimistic about the benefits, should make one pessimistic about the risks.

So, yes. Promote benefits. Build, create, fail, refine. Focus you attention fully on it. Ignore risks and risks management and trust and safety. But don't label these an enemy when these speak up.

Doomerism has hurt AI safety discourse tremendously. Unrealistic and restrictive risk management hurts progress and reasoned debates. Roko and Yudkowski get way too much attention and dominate and control the public debate, pushing out moderate and careful arguments. The e/acc crowd similarly hurt AI safety: almost like these don't believe that either technology can be dangerous, or that such danger is to be accepted, or even required, to make progress.

Maximize benefits, while minimizing risks. Both can work. One without the other won't. Don't try to launder your Waifu-generators as decentralization or progress. Don't damage AI safety by making everyone disgusted at the thought, because you just had to talk about existential threats of nano-bots, not the current and very real risks associated with (generative) AI.

The problem with the current debate on AI safety, is that AI ethicists are too enthusiastic to come up with many rules to bind AI and stifle progress. While the AI acceleration have trouble to come up with just one rule we could put to a democratic vote. If you really can not come up with severe and avoidable negative consequences from computing, then maybe you should not have strong opinions on computer safety.

Accelerate benefits, reduce risks. We owe it to the future we are building right now.

While I love the article and premise, he doesn’t make any points on preventing monopolies, rent seeking and regulatory capture.

Like the “It’s time to build” article, it’s great VC porn but a16z is still mostly funding SaaS companies instead of hard tech.

Have they brought down prices of food, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure?

Since the beginning pandemic, things are heading in the wrong direction for the median American.

I am a techno optimist and love to see the rise of it, even if there are risks associated with it.

But I also see the sky rocketing rates of mental health issues and suicide rates in the most techno developed nations. I don't now if there's a correlation or causation. But would like to understand. Is humanity built to be simple and at the mercy of nature?

Quoting Charlie Munger:

> Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

Unfortunately for the original spirit of the internet that they've cashed in on over and over in the previous 25 years, I can't imagine a more Marc Andreessen/Andreessen Horowitz post, today, than this one here.

Sitting on the Board of Facebook must really mess with you...

Somehow this reminds me of pre-y2k Nick Land (Meltdown [0] etc.) (Hope that doesn't correlate with the emergence of a 'post-y2k-Landian' Andreesen-Horowitz!)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiaWsgtJrNI

The level of lack of nuance (given how high profile the fund is) is eye popping.

Okay one thing I had to laugh out loud about in this piece is the "Techno Capital Machine" section:

"Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine[...] We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us"

Mark might find it fashionable to quote Land but I'm unsure if he's actually read him. Here's what Land had to say on the techno-capital machine working for us, from Fanged Noumena:

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”

... that reads like a conspiracy theory.

> When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get.

That is... really putting absurd amounts of weight on the term "Market Discipline".

For anyone trying to engage with this nonsense seriously: this is just a man with a fragile ego who is annoyed that the public no longer take his brand seriously after the collapse of crypto and other SV-adjacent grifts and wants to keep his latest AI grift going on as long as possible.

Honestly reads like an essay written by a 15 year old who has just got introduced to Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand.

>Our enemy is the ivory tower

Cool, so I guess our enemy is you

>> '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”.'

I wonder how many of these terms were focus grouped and promoted by him or people in his cohort.

This is all well and good and I agree with most of it, but at some point you need to ask does abundance doesn’t mean happiness or true satisfaction. Can A society they thrives off always pushing be truly content? And if not then what is the point?

I used to be completely optimistic about technology.

A Personal computer! what a wonderful concept. It was mine, and enhanced my abilities.

But there was a change when businesses connected and became anti-customer. They learned to manipulate, surveil and control their customers and products. sigh.

I dunno man.

Kinda feel like the true Techno-Optimists were the people collectively hacking together solutions under open source principles, and that quite a lot of the libertarian-eque mumbo-jumbo here invisibly stands on the shoulders of those giants.

The free market is arguably more aligned to a product that allows a monkey direct access to its dopamine center than one that lets a monkey rule the stars.

While I agree that technology growth is one of the most important metrics for the future health of a society, the idea that optimal growth necessitates uncontrolled markets or a whole host of the other things piggybacking on that core here is a bit silly.

A more narrowly scoped manifesto that was essentially just "tech accelerates beneficial progress; there's an opportunity cost to delaying tech" would likely have had better legs than an umbrella of rhetoric that tries to cover all bases and as such alienates everyone other than the author and the sycophants in their circle.

It's frustrating, as I agree with a lot of the broad sentiment and have been extremely disappointed in the tech pessimism I've been seeing grow dramatically over the past few months and years - but I really don't feel this manifesto speaks for nor to me, as optimistic about tech as I might be.

I appreciate the optimism, and sometimes its great to put out a manifesto filled with hope.

But this part: [The Enemy] Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.

This is true - but it really doesn't engage with how the Enemy operates, and why many Bad ideas do MUCH better than good ideas.

> We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.

This assumes that only human agency is possible, I doubt that.

Techno-optimism? lifts hood hey, it was techo-feudalism all along!

When writing a manifesto about embracing the benefits of change through technology, maybe don't use as your first analogy an animal whose gross anatomy hasn't changed in 450 million years.

The relationship between technology and society is one filled with complexity. A statement like: "We had a problem with darkness so we invented electrical lighting", isn't representative of the real thing.

If we think for example about the printing press it should be clear that there are certain forms of society that would make the invention of the printing press more likely — namely ones where books played a big role and literacy became more desireable. But on the other side the invention of the printing press had huge impacts on the societies that adopted them and branched them off into a totally different timeline.

The relationship between a society and a technology is always dialectical: society changes technology and technology changes society. Part of our role as technologists is to be aware of that — if we care about where humanity is moving at all.

Now if you jump back into the beginning of the last century a lot of the promises made by modernity were about automation making our lives easier. One could say: "We had hard labour so we invented automation" — only that the fruits of these automations haven't reached those whose jobs got replaced.

Somebody working an average job 40 years ago could easily sustain a family. That is no longer possible. Technology got nothing to do with it, where the money flows does.

A household appliance 40 years ago would last you decades. Today you are lucky if it lasts you 4 years. Technology, again, got nothing to do with it, where the money flows does.

Endless growth works till you hit saturation. All growth requires external inputs in order to work. And in an finite world those inputs are finite as well. You can't put a mic into a loudspeaker and get infinite loudness because that would take infinite energy and all components in the circuit would have to be able to handle that.

There is no free such thing as free lunch — also not with economic growth.

There are many things that can look really great if you are good at selectively ignoring a big chunk of it's systemic in- and outputs or handwave them away.

I just don't understand how you could, in good faith, start off a manifesto in favor of techno-optimism with a quote from, of all people, Walker Percy.

Gosh this is weird. So many of the points here seem really good and important, yet many of the other points here are so distorted as to be almost unrecognizable. It reads to me like bad religion.

E.g. he knows about the Aral sea and yet argues against the "Precautionary Principle"!?

(It seems strange to me to mention the Aral sea as an example of Soviet ecological incompetence, which it surely is, but then fail to mention the Salton sea, a similar disaster perpetuated by non-Communists.)

The biggest problem I have with this manifesto is that there's nothing actionable in it. What are we, the little people who aren't techno-elite billionaires, supposed to do now? Just wait for techno-Jesus to save us?

I'm very skeptical of anyone trying to fit history in a single narrative. This whole text sounds like an over simplification.

It also presents the usual contradiction that any neo-liberal argument is "not a political argument". The author states :

> Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.

Then proceeds to glorify the techno-capital (their term) and shun communism. How is that not political ?

While I do like technology and optimism, I prefer a more honest view. I think I'm glad this manifest exists: I disagree with almost every item of the list, but it's useful as a reference of the views of rich techno-advocates capitalist and everything wrong with it.

Very poorly reasoned. How is advocating for quality of life in terms of environmental or social responsibility anti-growth, anti-development or anti-technology? It's none of those things. It's anti-greed. It's against GDP as a proxy for prosperity. It's the true essence of free market economics that hasn't been captured by narrow-minded capitalists. And his entire opening statement is straw man after straw man. "They told us" a whole load of things that represent the opinion of a handful of people through the lens of a person who personally dislikes them.

Not a single mention of "privacy", so I'm going to assume that this is a manifesto written by someone who just wants everyone's private data.

Reminds me of the spirit of "Data for Good", which has become a whitewashed phrase to avoid ethical scrutiny (see: shotspotter, Wejo, palantir)

The real message here is: "subscribe to my bad ideas if you ever want funding."

e/acc and its consequences have been a disaster for online technology discourse

It's alarming to see this particular blend of ideas without any historical acknowledgment. The mix of Nietzsche's ideas about the superman, a messianic belief in the transformative power of industry, and a paranoid fear and hatred of "wreckers" who would deny and destroy greatness all have an awfully dark history.

Everyone needs to read The Limits to Growth and then come back to this piece for a laugh. Donella Meadows is far more profound and intelligent then the vast majority of non-system thinkers who stumbled into the halls of power.

This is a super bizarre read coming from a16z.

Riiight, please ignore the existential planetary destruction we are hurtling towards, trust these ubermensch to decide what's best for you.

Man does not live by bread alone. If you want to make technology and the standard of living a god, that might be rational, just as communism may be an earlier rational attempt in the same vein. But I believe these ideas are naive. The central idea seems to be “eliminate enough of man’s animal suffering and cater to his animal wants and you’ll have paradise” but I think these schemes undervalue the human need for freedom, love, self discovery, and meaning.

Is this missing an /s at the end?

I do believe in the power of technology to make a better world. That's why a venture capitalist using it for profit and then writing a manifesto about how virtuous it is, is the sort of disgusting corruption that makes me skeptic about technology.

But hackernews is the perfect venue to get some minor support from techbros that have grown accustomed to this rat race.

Why does he include "John Galt" in the list of (real) authors to read, but not Ayn Rand? What am I missing?

Indeed, in the spirit of Rand using an agreeable term "Objectivism" to label her confused hyperindividualism, A16Z uses the agreeable "Techno-Optimism" to repackage the same.

I'm highly optimistic about technology, but not whatever this blog post is about.

This is too full of Silicon Valley VC language. ugh

Go to the source materials.

- Rational Optimist. Matt Ridley

- The Better Angels of Our Nature. Steve pinker

- Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Johan Norberg

- the capitalist manifesto: why the global free market will save the world. Norberg

- Wizard and the prophet. Charles Mann

- Factfulness. Hans rosling

Or, just look at the data

  http://ourworldindata.org/

  http://www.gapminder.org/

DNF. Seems like this thread has more supporters so I'll just say it again for fun. Put your money where your mouth is Marc. So sick of you and the geezers lies, haven't you and that monoculture ilk extracted enough wealth over that juicer shaped head of yours?

"We believe ..."

Modernity requires reasoned argument and evidence.

Marc

Thank you for taking the time to so carefully lay out your philosophy on how technology will save humanity. I think it would have been simpler and to the point if you just posted a hand drawn picture with you in Superman costume so people could really understand what a hero you are.

Truly, it is tremendously selfless of you to advance society with your investments designed explicitly to maximize your returns. What a massive coincidence that so much of your investment over the past 5-6 years has been so focused on web3 and crypto - many, many alt coins that you have successfully committed securities fraud with by dumping them on unwitting retail investors who then eat the loss. Progress!

We, the commoners, are so so grateful that you have enlightened us with your incredibly deep take on how the world will advance specifically through technological ideas that all have one thing in common: they all are explicitly designed to line your pockets first and foremost - societal benefits are an afterthought. Oops, I must have gotten that backwards.

At this point in my essay I will quote a philosopher to sound very very deep and contemplative like you - somehow I bet you are a fan of Ayn Rand and objectivism so I'll use her.

In the Atlas Shrugged version of the world, this worldview places you as the modern day John Galt. We are all oh-so-grateful for your ability to save the world by exclusively investing in tech projects that give you massive returns. We are all so grateful that the modern day Galt's Gulch is not a humble valley disconnected from society where honest men work together, but rather a $155 million dollar coastal property in Malibu from which you command your minions. It is literally the most expensive property in all of California. A home befitting the god that you are, reigning on high over all the peasants who don't understand or appreciate your benevolence.

Don't change a thing, don’t listen to anyone who says you have delusions of grandeur. Thank you for saving the world and meagerly only asking for a few billions of dollars and an insane amount of international power and influence in return. You truly are the most selfless and deep philosopher of this age. What a hero.

Get a load of this clown.

Not sure how optimism in technology translates into raging free market libertarian in a few sentences, but then this guy's never been very subtle or aware. I'm sure his 30-year-younger self would want to kick his today's ass.

I could see one being a techno-optimist and also not be a capitalist, but this strikes me more of a half-baked libertarian manifesto with some technology sprinkled in as a garnish.

My main bugbear with this is that - similar to many American screeds on free markets - it conflates "free markets" with "capitalism". You can have one without the other (employee co-operatives, partnerships), and vice versa (monopolies, cartels).

Free markets are about letting the market set the price. That requires multiple providers who are not allowed to engage in extreme anti-competitive behavior that prevents new entrants from becoming providers.

Capitalism is about being able to own shares in an organisation (you provide capital), where others do work and you get a share of the profits generated from that work proportionate to the size of share you own.

A lot of people say "I'm a capitalist", who go to work each day and get paid a wage. These are not capitalists. They're employees. They are normally an expressing an opinion that is pro-free market, and think that investment can drive more opportunities for work for themselves. They may own shares, and hope for it become a primary income source one day, but the majority have to have jobs.

It is reasonable to be optimistic about technology, and to make the case for free markets. It is not reasonable to suggest the only mechanism to make this happen is capitalism.

Capitalism drives the fly-wheel of what Cory Doctorow has called "enshitification". There is a constant need to service ever growing numbers in order to sate the appetite of truly pure capitalists, because it's the only thing they care about. This means we see the slow, painful death of multiple products we care about, because the things that make them something we care about are nothing to do with shareholder value, but functional value (even if that function is "fun").

I earnestly believe that technology firms need to start looking away from all forms of external investment - including venture capital - and to alternative economic models and structures of ownership. If you want to build a unicorn, they might get you there, for a while. But it you want to build something that really lasts, that you get to enjoy running and owning as a career (and why would you want to build any other kind of company), there are other models. And those models will eventually win out, because they are fundamentally, foundationally, impossible to "enshitificate".

This paragraph in particular made me laugh:

> 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.

A bunch of VCs whose only work is taking pitch meetings and allocating capital to who they think will win and who will lose, sat down and wrote this. Think about that.

Go start your big idea now with friends and family and people you like, making sure you build it in a way that is resistant to capitalism, but open to exploiting everything the free market offers. Technology is brilliant. But these idiots have all the gear and no idea - they're about to be found out, and their beloved copies of Ayn Rand books aren't going to help them.

Someone should hand Marc Andreessen a copy of “The Technological Society” by Jacques Ellul

It has the hall marks of Ayn Rand philosophy. Not bad per say.

Techno-optimism manifesto written by a multi-billionaire founder of a venture capital. It doesn't get more dystopian than this.

Where have the hackers gone?

More like a Techno-Capitalist Fantasy. This part had me laughing out loud:

> Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

No, markets naturally culminate into monopolies and cartels. That's just human nature.

History has shown over and over again that monopolies and cartels are naturally occurring and that the only successful way to deal with them is to break them up via government intervention. Sure, some monopolies may eventually dissolve due to things like technical obsolescence but that's the type of thing that takes so long that entire generations can come and go, suffering the effects the entire time, before they break up.

This manifesto also doesn't seem to have a solution to "natural monopolies" like ISPs or utilities (water, sewer, electricity). It just pretends such things don't exist.

It also doesn't have anything at all to say about economic externalities (e.g. pollution/downstream impacts), policing of bad behavior, or "tragedy of the commons" sorts of problems.

If you had a technology-oriented country that sends all of its pollution to another country it could be the perfect world envisioned by this "Techno-Optimist Manifesto".

> The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein

"if you democratize power, the powerful will hate you for it" and "if you play with powers beyond your ability to control, they may backfire" seem like really different myths to me

> We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.

huh, I don't know that I've ever been told this

> We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.

I love how intellectually shallow the power of this reasoning is. Oh, a person who is drowning will pay more for a gulp of air? Wow, what an amazing conclusion, how could we have ever figured that out without the beautiful Divine Glory of The Market?

> Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone; centralization will starve you to death. ... Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

centralization is bad, collectivism is bad, only markets and individuals are good... yeah, this is anarcho-capitalism. Like at no point do they recognize that under this line of thinking, people with a lot of money may be incentivized to cause harm to people without a lot of money, gee I wonder why they might not be so keen to acknowledge that?

> Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

ah yes that's why the market produced the Sherman act. oh, wait, shoot, that was statist action motivated by collectivist goals.

> We believe there is no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable.

I dunno man, thought experiment here, do you make more money by curing someone of a sickness or by keeping them sick and charging them for treatment forever?

> 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.

yeah the idea that everyone wants to be either a murderer, cult leader, or billionaire is ... a totally normal idea that totally normal people have. Beyond being a deeply problematic worldview, the existence of the military-industrial complex challenges the notion that "if if weren't for markets people would do war". Marvelous logic on display here.

> To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

he's quoting the Futurist Manifesto here, which ... pretty weird move, my dude. The Futurist Manifesto paved the way for the Fascist Manifesto, and if you're going "that's a reach", the guy that wrote the Futurist Manifesto cowrote the Fascist Manifesto with Mussolini. Yes, THAT Mussolini.

> Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.

brave to make a bunch of sweeping politically-motivated generalizations and then to say it's not a political philosophy. Ok, if you say so!

I'm really a bit shocked this was flagged. A blog post (marketed as a manifesto no less!) from the founder of Netscape and one of the biggest VCs in the business about the future of technology. I understand its potential for flame wars, but how could this not be on-topic for HN?

Open question (I don't have an answer and I'm curious):

I have a friend who is an extremely talented musician. They get by, they're not starving or anything, but it's very hand-to-mouth. I have other friends who are massively less talented at other things, but those things are more commercially rewarded (selling, coding, management, etc).

Why does our system (and this manifesto) reward one set of talents and not the other so differently?

Related: are we really, as a society, going to push our most talented musicians/artists/creatives to do other things because of this? If you were born with a gift for music but could also write some software (not badly, but not at the same level) shouldn't we as a society push you to make great music rather than average code?

Andreessen always argues for "growth" and declares "time to build," but as soon as someone tries to build an apartment in his town of Atherton, he's going to fight it: https://fortune.com/2023/02/23/atherton-steph-curry-marc-and...

Atherton is prime silicon valley real estate that could allow engineers and startup founders to live there at a reasonable price and fuel growth in the tech economy. But if it's going to inconvenience Marc or compromise his nice views, growth is no longer important to him.

This is a profession of faith for tech bros so devoid of meaning and humanity in their lives that they have to worship "progress" to justify their existence.

> 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.

Interestingly, nearly every sentence begins with "we believe," a fundamentally religious statement.

Argument is invalid; r > g.

Why was it flagged?

I truly and thoroughly loved this essay, and am appalled (but not too surprised, unfortunately) by the pearl-clutching comments from a few apparent neoluddites in here.

Looks like a lot of people got triggered by the message. I think the manifesto is descriptively correct (by assigning to technology and markets the wealth increase of the last centuries) and prescriptively sound (just keep doing what we know it works).

What makes that post necessary is the sentiment has been largely anonymous so far and there hasn't been any way of connecting people who share these ideas to each other. I admire their enthusiasm. Have fun storming the cathedral!

It has been quite interesting to observe Marc Andreesen's idealogical arc over the past 5 years. An article from a mainstream VC citing Nick Land and Nietzche definitely points to a "vibe shift" occurring, with new ideas gaining hold after a long period of stagnation.

I think one big thing I agree with is that folks are making themselves miserable by adopting this "woe is me" narrative about how life is so hard now and so on and so forth. Life is pretty good. I remember as a child being awed by what I thought then was the rate of progress and now it's even faster: AI, Space, and just appliance tech.

I'm pretty anti-pessimist so many of these things appeal to me. Ultimately, though, it's hard to care that much because I know that Marc Andreessen is just content marketing here.

His efforts to literally stop building homes in his town after publishing a work titled "It's time to build" really tarnishes everything he says and makes it obvious he's a bullshitter.