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the day the Dream went right back to base there’s blood on the ground
blood on the sand blood all around
Minnie and Mickey Brer and Pluto secretly prayed
there was no doubt at all no maybe about it
was the day Disney's Dream debased
You grow weary with the varieties of knuckleheadism ruling the land these days. The most recent example, Marc Andreessen's crayon drawn “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” The title says it all. It deserves attention not for what's written, but who's writing. It represents a mind frame with far too much influence on the world in the 21st century.
To understand how something so fantastically awful can be written by someone with a fair deal of influence you need to understand the more or less fairytale life of the author. In the early '90s, Marc was earning his computer science degree at the University of Illinois giving him access to the school run, federally funded, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). At this point, Andreessen was introduced to CERN's Tim Berners-Lee just developed World Wide Web. Marc help developed NCSA Mosaic, one of the first Web browsers making the internet easily accessible.
Browsers weren't particularly sophisticated bits of software, many immediately popped up. Berners-Lee assessed Andreessen's role as,
“Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browser which was easy to install and use. ...Most importantly, Marc followed up his and Eric's coding with very fast 24hr customer support, really addressing what it took to make the app easy and natural to use, and trivial to install. Other apps had other things going for them... But Mosaic was the easiest step onto the Web for a beginner, and so was a critical element of the Web explosion.”
I remember downloading Mosaic, it was simple and it worked. Andreessen's real luck came with being poached by a smart tech business guy, Jim Clark, who had founded Silicon Graphics, a company that helped speed along computer graphic capabilities. Clark was one of many understanding the internet's potential and grabbed Andreessen and Mosaic from the NCSA. However, they were forced to give up the Mosaic name, becoming Netscape, a company that made Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen oodles of money in a few short years when they sold it to AOL.
Despite all the individualistic, he-man stories of Valley legend, in the end all are valued foremost on how much cash is carried away, the computer industry, tech, has always very much been a communal activity. Every aspect ever developed was built atop combined technological bits contributed by innumerable people, much initially government funded. The status of any given individual has always largely been based on getting a certain product to market, not necessarily the first, and then most importantly, making a fortune. Above all else, the industry generates lots and lots of money and in America the only really respected measure of success is wealth. Marc accumulated plenty, especially after he left Netscape and opened an investment firm where he helped launch Facebook and Twitter. Great for Marc, arguable of much value for the rest of us.
So, Marc’s lived a very rarefied life, lucky beyond the odds. Don't get me wrong, as the Romans well understood, Fortune should never be affronted, while Napoleon once said he'd rather have a lucky general than a talented one. Yet, this luck helped someone with an extremely limited life outlook, largely experiencing the world through a very narrow tech lens, specifically, spending countless hours staring into a screen, to have great power shaping an industry that in turn greatly shapes and reshapes the world. What is clear from the manifesto is this restricted view left Marc completely bereft of any healthy perspective on the challenges the world faces in the 21st century or even those facing the very industry that made him wealthy as Croesus.
It is too little publicly understood that many of our technologists have what can only be described as a religious faith in technology. A belief the development of technology is leading to some tech-nirvana (just look at the graphic at the top of manifesto). No doubt each technologist has their own individualist view of nirvana. It would serve us all well if they were obliged to publicly divulge them. For example, more than a few believe they're going to gain immortality “jacked into the matrix,” one reason speed of development has become the ultimate tech-virtue, though still not as great as getting rich.
This idea of ultimate ends in tech development is an increasingly hazardous misunderstanding. It is ignorance of one of the greatest bits of knowledge humanity’s learned or maybe relearned over the last two centuries. All life is in constant interaction with other life and with the larger environment in which it exists. There are no ends, just change in response to the influence of the greater environment and in return life's influence on the greater environment. After two centuries of industrialism, changes caused by industrial technology from resource depletion to the alteration and destruction of ecological systems demand a rethinking on how we develop technology. We have been provided assorted feedback from the actions we’ve initiated, feedback we have largely ignored. The seminal thinker and initial engineer of cybernetic systems Norbert Wiener stated, “Feedback mechanisms are a necessity for life.” Nonetheless, Marc's answer to challenges faced, and by no means is he alone here, ignores incorporating the last century’s feedback from both society and the planet's greater ecological systems, instead, he simply calls to plow full speed ahead and faster:
“We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.”
Phew, that's a jumble and most would have stopped reading there, but not your friend and humble narrator. Ironically, though maybe not considering what Marc reveals of his scientific knowledge, it is not an understanding based on “hard” science or the very real constraints imposed by any technology, but simply belief. It's amusing for a person who gained great wealth on A + B = C, the entire manifesto professes “we believe” ad nauseum. Mostly, the manifesto is a simplistic profession of faith in technology in the same vein as the Apostle's Creed is a profession of belief in the Catholic Church.
I've selected a few representations of the bad, spoiled for choice really. The whole piece reads like tech is under some sort of siege. The manifesto is sprinkled with a number of statements like,
“We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.”
We are told to be pessimistic.
We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.”
Lord, who is doing this telling? Marc needs to quit spending so much time on the internet. It does however betray the underlying, at times great, insecurity of many holding unchecked and unbalanced power, an insecurity history recognizes far too little.
After a bit more paranoia come repeated professions of faith,
“Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.”
Ok, there's so much to rip apart here. Certainly technology, from the beginning has helped define Homo sapiens, though by no means exclusively. We still remain much more defined by the innumerable ecological systems we have altered or destroyed, while the influence of technology continues to be far too little understood. Progress, as Marc uses it here, is an immensely relative term that came into being in the 19th century to promote industrialism. Industry, any industry defined progress. Thinking that a given technology might be developed or implemented differently, or not developed at all, designated you an enemy of progress. “The realization of our potential” is completely dependent on how that potential is defined.
Marc's future is intensely juvenile, but if you spent much of your youth cloistered behind a screen, becoming fabulously wealthy before 30, life might remain largely fantastical. Reading this makes one realize the most dangerous technological center of the last century was Hollywood, particularly its Flash Gordon/Jetsons science fiction. More than a few took it far too seriously. His biological understanding represented with the flawed metaphor, “Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.” It's swim or die, which isn't true, not trying to be petty, nonetheless.
He then does something that has long driven me crazy. When established power or ways of thinking and doing are confronted with a critique, they immediately suggest the only alternative is a 180 degree, quite disagreeable alternative. This trait is especially rampant in many of the best educated. Marc writes,
“We believe this is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us.”
Geez, such a ridiculous statement. It's either Facebook or back to the primordial ooze. Again, this is a very old method to stop discussion about doing things differently, especially alternatives that threaten established power.
He writes quite correctly, “Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.” But then adds, “And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology.” It seems Marc's computer isn't made of or powered by any natural resources. Just ask any half-good physicist about the perpetual motion needed for perpetual growth — see the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
But Marc's on this, he states,
“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.”
Phew, he got one thing almost right, energy is foundational to industrial civilization and integral to the whole compute revolution. But the fossil fuel sources that supplied the energy for industrialization are limited in supply and their use has inflicted massive change on the ecological systems we remain existentially dependent. In regards to energy, in the 90s I did work across California, basically consisting first and foremost of just getting people to think about the energy usage defining their lives. At the time, no one in the Valley was thinking about energy. You'd think there'd been some thought about energy in the Valley's great halls of venture capital. I assure you there was pretty close to zero. The only thought the Valley had about energy was the computer booting up when switched on. Ok, there was some thought to stability, computer's don't run well with power surges and frequency changes, but supply, nah, as any good American knows, that's perpetual, until it isn’t. In 2000, California’s corruption induced rolling blackouts came, the Valley began to pay some attention.
So its hard to imagine, well really you don't have to imagine you can just read what he wrote, that Marc's thought much about energy and like most of the tech industry what thought there is immediately becomes reactionary support for nukes. He even beckons back to Mistah Nixon's response to the first “Oil Shock” for a thousand new nuclear plants by 2000. Lord, how many countries would we need to blow up to “secure” the uranium? He then adds, “We believe a second energy silver bullet is coming – nuclear fusion.” But if fission was the first silver bullet, why the need for a second? Fusion's been a couple decades away for 75 years now and it still ain't nowhere near. There is however, if you look up, this astronomical fusion reactor in the sky, we call it the sun, offering vast amounts of energy for at least a few billion more years. One way or other, from the get go, the sun's provided all the energy for life on earth. We need to learn how to better use it.
This is an excellent example how with technology development there are no ultimate ends, only continual change as one technology evolves, impacting existing technologies, society as a whole, and the greater environment. In this case, compute technology developed within established, very energy intensive industrial society, requiring an increase in energy usage, even more so with the next generation of compute.
I suppose the whole cause for Marc writing the manifesto was in promotion of AI. He's already invested. He writes, “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone.” Maybe this is good, because there never was alchemy, a Philosopher’s Stone, so maybe there will be no AI? However, there definitely is a next very powerful generation of compute technology labeled AI and it is massively energy intensive.
It probably doesn't need to be mentioned Marc defends and rationalizes his own position of fabulous wealth and how he got it and it wasn't technology that gave it to him, it was whatever this economic system we currently call, not very helpfully, markets. He writes, “We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy” and continues,
“We believe in market discipline. The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market....Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.”
It makes you wonder if a guy with so much money has watched the financial markets of the last decades. Discipline? As far as monopolies and cartels, the majority of the Valley's thinks about how to make their company a monopoly. He should talk to his fellow tech-oligarch, heavily government funded Peter Thiel, who wrote a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal, “Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.” All Marc’s simplistic market mouthing just reveals for all the manifesto's supposed promotion of change, it's not in anyway about changing how and who decides.
Marc concludes he's not a utopian, but you'd be hard pressed to not compare it to that great utopian manifesto of the mid-19th century. Like Techno-Optimism’s “material philosophy” destined to be fulfilled, so too Marx wrongly professed materialistic inevitability. The difference, Marx is historical gibberish, while Marc's is ahistorical gibberish – call it progress. The manifesto best illustrates the desperate need for a politics of technology. The power to decide the whats and hows of technological development needs to be spread far beyond the exclusive domains of technologists and their bankers.
Addendum:
I need to point out Substack has in part been funded by Marc Andreessen. When considering starting “Life in the 21st Century,” I was pointed here by some writer friends. “It's easy” and yes it is. However, I did first seek the advise of Dan Gillmor, who I've known for some time. Dan's a very fine fellow whose opinion I greatly respect. In the 90s, he was the San Jose Mercury News correspondent on tech. At the time, he was one of the very few, and I mean very few, writing intelligently about the growing stranglehold Microsoft had developed over the industry. In fact, despite Andreessen's pooh-poohing the need for tech politics, if it wasn't for the DOJ's 1998 anti-trust case against Microsoft, much of the money Marc sits atop would never have existed outside MS' coffers. Indeed, Netscape itself was faltering badly when they sold to AOL, Microsoft had entered the market and was quickly engulfing the browser game.
Anyway, I shrugged off Dan's good advise saying, “I'm not doing politics, this is entertainment or education, whichever pays more. I gotta give money to one tech knucklehead or other. Hell, I still use Windows.”
So, dear readers, look at this piece as an educational piece on bad fantasy entertainment.
I first heard about accelerationism (which appears to be what that ass Andreessen is driveling on about) in this pretty decent piece a friend sent me from The Awl:
https://www.theawl.com/2015/09/the-darkness-before-the-right/
It is a good read if you have not come across it before.
Enjoying the piece Joe. Andreessen is awful. Nicholas Carr had a funny piece about Andreessen a while back.
https://www.roughtype.com/?p=9020
I don’t know what Carr’s politics are, but I usually enjoy his writing. His writing has shades of yours here and there imo (if you don’t mind my saying so). Though he doesn’t cover the same topics you cover, except where you overlap wrt the tech creeps.
Anyway he is also pretty astute in his nailing of the tech creeps. I like his work exploring how the internet generally is awful for the the human brain. While I would not go as far as Tim Wu and say the internet should altogether be eschewed, I think it is best used in small doses for many of us who have work that requires long hours of concentration sans distractions. Candide had a point with that whole “grow your garden” thing..
Carr has somehow become my default model of a reasonable conservative-if he is even one. As opposed to say Andreessen etc. whom I consider an example of everything wrong with everything ;-/.
And even though Carr writes for The New Atlantis and quotes Virginia Heffernon, I’d like to believe he is not a creationist/IDer like Heffernan (or Rosalind Picard of the MIT Media Lab/Affectiva-that hideous emotion ai company). He seems too intelligent for that.
Even Francis Collins has some sort of faith and he is not crazy. While I cannot say I am very comfortable with faith in any form, there are some reasonable enough people out there who have some form of mild faith.
Carr is the person from whom I first heard about Marshall McLuhan whom you cite sometimes .