Marc Andreessen is a Techno-Extremist
Marc Andreessen is a Techno-Extremist
The aestheticization of the struggle to integrate technological innovation is a dangerous path.
Marc Andreessen has written an inconsistent screed i would ignore if he weren't a highly influential billionaire whose ideas are praised by a lot of people in tech circles. The thing has the odor of an enthusiastic highschool essay, and this guy quoting Carrie Fisher of all people makes me really angry.
This is the manifesto not of an optimist, but an extremist, pointing his fingers at enemies which include every tech criticism you can think of, accusing people who think that sustainability or ethics are a good idea of murder, and then goes on to praise the same old market fundamentalism we know from neoliberals since the 1970s.
He's also wrong about the history of tech, the contribution to societal progress of which always hinged on the struggle to integrate unbound innovation into the rules of law. This is what the luddites were about: Binding tech to societal rules to make them work for humanity.
I already linked to this piece on Daron Acemoğlu and Simon Johnson and their new book Progress and Power based on years of research in which they
showcase a series of major inventions over the course of the past 1,000 years that, contrary to what we've been told, did nothing to improve, and sometimes even worsened, the lives of most people. And in the periods when big technological breakthroughs did lead to widespread good — the examples that today's AI optimists cite — it was only because ruling elites were forced to share the gains of innovation widely, rather than keeping the profits and power for themselves.
"The broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress," Acemoglu and Johnson write. "We are beneficiaries of progress, mainly because our predecessors made the progress work for more people."
This shows that Andreessens take on techno optimism is built on the wrong premise: It's not unbound innovation which drives progress, but the integration into civilisatory boundaries, namely the law. Andreessen wants to do away with exactly this struggle, unleashing the raw power of unbound technological innovation. This makes him not an optimist, but an extremist, perfectly expressed in his whole section identifying enemies based on their believes.
If you agree with ideas like
“existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG” (Environmental, social, and corporate governance), “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”
and therefore believe that (not only) AI-development should be deaccelerated until we figure out the massive cost it may bring to society, then you are complicit in a "form of murder". At no point does he mention that algorithms already are complicit in a "form of murder", in Andreessens terms, when involved in healthcare decisions, cutting off those in need from crucial medication and services. Nowhere does he mention climate change and its rising death toll, reducing it to environmental concerns which can only solved by technological innovation, and ofcourse he never mentions rebound effects or Jevons paradox. This manifesto is not a place of nuance.
Nowhere in this "manifesto" he defines what he is talking about. The term "technology" stays nebulous and is reduced to it's etymological greek roots: "technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne", meaning the practical application of knowledge: art, skill and craft.
Technology is the externalization of body functions including mental operations. We use a lever to reach unreachable heights, we use wheels to transport stuff which is untransportable because we can't lift them, we use calculators to calculate numbers which are uncalculatable with our mind. This is what technology is: The multiplication of power to transform the environment by inventing and using tools, the "practical application of knowledge: art, skill and craft."
I like technology. I like the "practical application of knowledge" and i like the power this provides to transform my environment, to enable me to write a blog and speak directly to the mind of a reader in the hope to plant the one or the other meme, sometimes serious like this time, but mostly lighthearted critical and fun.
I like being able to draw and paint or generate thousands of fractal gardens with an algorithm, i like that tech enables us to edit our perception up to the point where i can immerse myself in virtual worlds whenever i like, that i can watch any movie at any time on a pocket computer in the subway. I like the tech of books which enables me to listen to the structured thoughts of any author i like. But all of these technologies went through the struggle of binding them to the foundation on which our civilization rests: The law, which itself is technology.
Technology enabled transfer of knowledge over generations by enabling systems for collective memory: Tools and media for writing, which made it possible for future generations to build on the knowledge of their ancestors. With these knowledge tools came the invention of law in Mesopotamia, first manifesting in the Code of Hammurabi, which bound tribes to rules set up to structure the larger emerging society of Babylonia. Andreessen wants to eliminate this middleman — the law, regulation — which is working as a mediator between societal progress benefiting the people and unbound innovation and application of power by a handful of leaders, like himself.
This is why i consider this manifesto not just an unhinged screed by a rich billionaire with the intellectual maturity of a highschooler, but a dangerous document of what Varoufakis terms Technofeudalism and which can be read as a continuation of the futurist roots in fascist italia.
He points at Nietzsches Last man, an allegory on a whiny whimp created by the safetyism of a world where it's unnecessary to work hard -- a world of abundance that Andreessen glorifies in his "essay" all over the place, all while he claims to write about becoming "technological supermen", a techno-nietzschean Ubermensch painted by him as the opposite of the Last Man. Thus, it's unclear if Andreessen wants to create a world of abundance full of last men, or a world of struggle in which an Ubermensch can rise above others, and we all know what that lead to in the past.
To call this inconsistent is a affront to inconsistency: Andreessen simply has no clue what he's talking about. But it get's worse.
He quotes Filippo Tommaso Marinettis 1909 Futurist Manifesto, saying:
Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology [poetry in the Futurist Manifesto] must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man
Marinetti was one of the founding fathers of italian fascism, who started a futurist party which later merged with Mussollinis Italian Fasces of Combat to form the Italian Fascist Party. On other occasions, he then goes on to quote cryptofascist Nick Land, who started the neo-reactionary movement.
It's exactly this violent language, that tech must be a "violent assault" to "force" people to bow before something or someone -- presumably the all-glorious savior of mankind: accelerationism --, which shows this "manifestos" true roots in totalitarianism, and it's the aestheticism of tech-politics, the reduction of the struggle to integrate technology into civilisatory process to accusations of murder, and the otherwise gloryfication of innovation as the sole driver of human prosperity, smeared all over the document in an embarrassing overaesthetic excess, which makes this not a manifesto of techno-optimism, but a manifesto of inconsistent, unhinged neo-fascist techno-extremism.
Ofcourse, for market fundamentalist neoliberal effective accelerationist like Andreessen or the people applauding this doc, none of this matters.
And let me get this straight: I don’t think Andreessen himself is evil or anything, i just think he has not read too many history books, has no clue what he’s talking about and is one of those tech-biz grifters shifting his schtick wherever the wind may blow. Yesterday it was crypto, today it’s the promise of infinite growth from explosive productivity gains from AI, and he’s simply drumming up hype for tech he’s literally invested in.
Andreessen ahistoric take on technological progress is a shallow and inconsistent marketing stunt at best and a dangerous neo-fascist manifesto by a techno-extremist when taken at face value.
So here’s a Carrie Fisher quote that seems approriate to this screed:
It's time for the Resistance to rise.
I suspect that Andreessen is conflating pragmatists and pessimists because the pragmatic questions demand answers and he doesn’t have any. (…)
You can't claim the mantle of Bayesian rationalism without learning a single thing from the failures of your own dominant philosophy over the past 30 years. If unchecked markets worked as well as Andreessen insists, we wouldn't be in this mess. The most powerful people in the world are technological optimists. They asked for our trust in the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s. They insisted that all we needed to do was clap louder. We clapped. They failed. We grew less trustful.
I tend to perceive Andreessen's manifestos (past and present) as a bellwether of Silicon Valley's mindset. As such, his latest manifesto represents a deeply disturbing worldview. I will leave the following quote from philosopher William Barrett as pertinent to Andreessen's screed: "It is notorious that brilliant people are often the most dense about their own human blind spot, precisely because their intelligence, so clever in other things, conceals it from them; multiply this situation a thousandfold, and you have a brilliant scientific and technological civilization that could run a muck out of its own sheer uprooted cleverness."
This is so excellent. Saying everything I’ve been thinking about the necessity for more not less regulation in these uncharted spaces. Thank you for this.