One of the main reasons I was so distraught by Marc Andreesen's The Techno-Optimist Manifesto was not only because of how so obviously ignorant it was, but because I also know that it echoes the sentiments of many folks in Silicon Valley and as such is a distillation of many of the guiding principles that shape a generation of wannabe-tech entrepreneurs whose only true motive is getting horrendously rich. Knowing that Greed is optically uncool, they must present their motives as something else, something socially beneficial. It may also be that this is a lie one must tell themselves in order to convince themselves they are actually good people, to stand to look at themselves in the mirror without disdain, and in the process begin to believe their own lies. They essentially drink the Kool-aid of their very own making. And the DNA of that Kool-aid is very clearly written into Andreesen's manifesto, and it's so clearly very bad. I'm inclined to do a takedown of the entire thing, but I don't want this newsletter to run 10 times longer than you're used to, so I'll settle for tackling the manifesto's opening section for now. Let's get into it:


Lies: 
"We are being lied to," says Andreesen. "We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment..."

• Jobs: Before sound could be imbedded into film, live orchestras performed in movie theatres to create the soundtracks to accompany film projections, live. With the advent of the "Talkies" however, roughly 20,000 musicians lost their jobs in America. There is plenty of historical president of people losing their jobs with the advent of a particular technology across a variety of fields. This is not an argument to go back to making silent films or backtrack on technological development where it is indeed beneficial. But at the same time, denying facts just to make a case that might fit your agenda is clearly wrong and/or indicative of someone who is wholly misinformed. Perhaps it might be better to acknowledge that yes, technology does indeed tend to take our jobs, but--and then weave an argument why you think that's okay (which I actually attempted to do to some degree in RF #203: A.I. Everything).

• Wages: 1812 - After the introduction of new industrial machines into the textile industry that required less-skilled labor, English workers were in fact subject to a decrease in wages from 40 shillings a week to only 12 shillings a week in just a handful of months. In the 1940's, writing for the pulps earned authors 0.5-1 cent per word. Writing for, say, Asimov's or Clarkesworld today gets you around 12 cents. Accounting for currency devaluation, that is about a 50% decrease. In the 1990's, the New Yorker Magazine paid its illustrators anywhere from $700-$1450. Today, it pays between $500-$1500, a terribly significant decrease if you take inflation and the ballooning cost of housing into account.

• Inequality: The top 1% of households in the US own 32% of the country's total wealth today. In the 1950's, the top 1% owned around 25%. It is in fact the #1 reason Americans tend to look back upon this era with a fair degree of fondness despite everything else that was wrong with it.
  
  
• Health: Approximately 144 deaths per 100,000 people are caused by cancer in America today. In the 1950's, the rate was 139 deaths per 100,000 people. A lower number, despite incredible advancements being made in the medical field. Why? Because the causes of cancer themselves, many of them induced by certain "technological advancements", have increased and proliferated at an even higher rate. Americans are also now experiencing what the U.S. Surgeon General calls an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, affecting half of U.S. adults, which directly relates to the increase of so-called social media platforms (another "technological development").
  
  
• Environment: 10% of animals native to North America have gone extinct since the arrival of the European settler. There was once 17,000 varieties of apples in North America, but there are now only 50. Our entire planet's ozone layer--essential for UV protection--is severely damaged. Over 75% of the Earth's land area is already degraded with desertification at an all-time high. Sea levels have risen approximately 4 inches since 1993 and are projected to rise by about a foot by 2050. Air pollution is more widespread than it was in the 1800s and includes a much broader range of pollutants. Capitalist-minded solutions such as massive solar power plants have led to intense heat zones and the subsequent killing of birds, butterflies, and other wildlife. I can go on.

I am not interested in making an argument that All Technology = Bad, but Andreesen's manifesto desires to make a wholly ill-informed case for All Technology being Good, and that is also not objective.

"We are told to denounce our birthright," Andreesen continues, "our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world." 

That right there is the central idea that seems to have guided all wrong-doing inflicted by a particular strain of humans upon the natural world. This idea that "our birthright" somehow entails the violent subjugation of the world, rather than "building a better world" by working with nature instead of against it. This highlights the absence of critical thinking within tech-bro/venture-capitalist circles. These are the circles that increasingly siphon more wealth that enables more societally and environmentally detrimental investments that wreak havoc upon us all. "We are told to be miserable about the future," Marc claims, not realizing that it is his manifesto that provides an outline for a terrible future, or if we're lucky: no future at all.

The biggest problems we face today are not technological, but are in fact cultural. Because we now inhabit a culture that makes spiritual leaders out of a group techno-fetishists. Not even for what they may have introduced on a technological level, but mostly because they have managed to accumulate great wealth from one introduction or another. We in fact inhabit a culture that values wealth over ideas, but we don't like telling ourselves that either, and as such often link one's wealth to--surely--the brilliance of their ideas. But our celebrities are not philosophers, and no poet of great insight ever appears on television. Popular manifestos no longer come from artists or politicians even, but from guys who wrote code for short-lived web browsers and managed to trick rich greedsters into overpaying for them.

We don't need to wait for the future to see the misery that awaits us, it's already here, we're living it. And some of us--hopefully enough of us--will not under any circumstance stand for it.


Ganzeer
Houston, TX
20.09.24

P.S. Andreesen may not be getting as much press as limelight-hungry Musk, but he is part of a coalition of Silicon Valley billionaires buying up farmland north of San Francisco in a maneuver to establish a new self-governed city presumably tailored for startups.