Are we ready to embrace and pursue progress—and what is holding us back?
A lot of answers to that have just been provided by Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and, long ago, co-author of the first Web browser. Some of the answers are in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”—and a lot of them are in the response he got.
Andreessen’s manifesto proclaims, “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential”—and he goes on to call for a lot more of it.
The whole thing is terrific. I had a few reservations here and there about an idea, a formulation, or a style of expression. But the manifesto’s only real problem is that it is too long and seems to be trying to cram in every thought Andreessen has ever had about technology and the human condition. He needed an editor, someone to tell him that fifteen hundred words of tightly focused prose is more effective than a scattershot of 5,000 words.
But that’s a small quibble, because I found myself nodding in agreement with Andreessen at nearly every point. Or rather, I found Andreessen to be in agreement with things I have long argued for. I’m not alone in arguing for these things, mind you. (Jim Pethokoukis takes the manifesto as vindication for his new book.) Andreessen gives credit along the way to a number of thinkers, living and dead, from whom he has drawn these ideas.
So anyone who wants to dismiss this as the vanity project of an out-of-touch billionaire will be missing out on the fact that Andreessen is expressing a growing school of thought about progress and technology. It is a manifesto speaking for a movement, or to the makings of a movement.
For example, Andreessen complains that “the myth of Prometheus—in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator—haunts our nightmares.” How could I not agree? My only complaint is that I was not one of the living writers who got a shout-out, since I’ve been banging the drum on the Curse of Frankenstein for a long time, as well as developing the metaphor of Prometheus.
As I concluded in my own article in favor of Prometheanism:
[A]ll we need to do is accept who we are. The power of human reason is our distinctive natural endowment, and from the beginning we have used it to gain knowledge of the world and to harness this knowledge to improve human life. This is the true divine fire, the transformative power that brings us innovation, prosperity, and the explosive growth we have enjoyed, particularly in the past few centuries.
Here is Andreessen: “We are told to denounce our birthright—our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.”
I’m not saying he reads my work, though it’s quite possible. But at the very least, we are drawing from many of the same inspirations.
Andreessen begins by describing the central role in our society of technological progress and growth.
We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”
We believe everything good is downstream of growth.
We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.
He takes on many common arguments against technological progress.
We believe technological change, far from reducing the need for human work, increases it, by broadening the scope of what humans can productively do.
We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.
Again, an argument I have frequently made. And here is his take on the Basic Income.
We believe a Universal Basic Income 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, to be productive, to be proud.
That also sounds familiar. There is not a section in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto where I couldn’t link you to at least one article I have written over the years.
Andreessen argues that free markets are the engine of progress, presenting an intriguing formulation: “We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.” This in itself is a whole new article I ought to write.
Here is the central idea of Andreessen’s argument: “We believe the cornerstone resources of the techno-capital upward spiral are intelligence and energy—ideas, and the power to make them real.”
By “intelligence,” he means human intelligence, citing Julian Simon and his argument that the human mind is “the ultimate resource.” But he also hails the potential of artificial intelligence—“we are literally making sand think”—and he anticipates a combination of the two: augmented intelligence. “Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do.” Again, this sounds familiar.
On energy, he joins a growing chorus in favor, not of reducing or “conserving” our civilization’s energy usage, but expanding it.
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….
We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.
I thought on this issue he might be cribbing, not from me, but from Alex Epstein. But instead of embracing fossil fuels, he mostly focuses on calling for an end to our absurd and dogmatic de facto ban on nuclear power.
At other points, he seems to be deliberately echoing Ayn Rand. One passage sounds a bit like a speech from Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.
We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.
We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.
We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.
We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.
We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.
We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
Then there is this passage: “We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.”
The “romance of industry” and the “eros of the train and the skyscraper”? If we didn’t already know it from his Twitter feed—where he has posted excerpts from Ayn Rand—I think we can all guess what book he’s been reading. (He is strangely coy about it, though. The end of the manifesto has a long list of authors to read, one of whom is “John Galt,” an indirect way of referring to Rand.)
Like I said, there are a few things I could quibble with. The Ayn Rand influence is leavened by a little Nietzsche, as well as a very oblique reference to the crazy Italian Futurists. (“Beauty exists only in struggle.”) This is reflected in some formulations that seem shaped by the pseudo-masculinity of certain modern pundits: “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness—strength.” There is a difference between ambition and aggression, and the two should not be conflated.
But if there’s a bit of a right-wing tinge to this part of the manifesto, other passages swing more to the center-left, including a bit of a compromise with the welfare state.
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.
And there are passages that liberals of any variety can endorse.
We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof.
If you’ve seen a photo of Andreessen, you get the joke. And also:
Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.
And:
Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually.
And yep, I’ve written that article, too.
This is a manifesto that gathers together many different intellectual strains and starts a discussion that may help those ideas coalesce into a well-defined pro-progress movement. It begins the process by performing the integrative function of putting all of those ideas together in one place.
As you may have already guessed, though, the Techno-Optimist Manifesto was not well received on the mainstream left. If such a strong exposition of the importance of growth and innovation meets with a strong current of hostility, there are some important lessons to be drawn about what holds back progress—which we will examine in part two of this article.