It's curiosity that made me read Marc Andreessen's techno optimist manifesto. Until then I didn't even know who this guy was. It turns out he is a big deal in silicon valley, as he was a developer for the first widely used web browser, Mosaic and the founder of Netscape. He is now of course also a billionaire that owns an investment firm, because of course he is!

The manifesto reads like something written by an angry MBA student on cocaine. How did this happen how is it that someone so deeply invested in technology and progress can have such a skewed naive perspective on it?

The premise of the entire manifesto is that, and to quote:

We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.

The very basic thing he has somehow completely missed in this unhinged sermon for techno-capitalism is that it is trivially easy to point out things that technology has not solved. Take poverty for example.

Poverty simply cannot be solved by technology because technology is not a solution, but a tool. Poverty is based on the collective choices of society. Poverty is a choice to withold basic necessities from certain human beings based on their perceived lack of value to society. If you plop a computer in front of a poor person, poverty does not go away. If you give them one, that is not technology, that is welfare.

It should be completely obvious that technology is just an extension of human capability and has no effect on the choices we make with those capabilities. The industrial revolution created a massive amount of poverty where the poor had to work in dingy unsafe factories with absolutely no rights and not even the privelege of having Saturday off. These workers were often children. Oil, lead, mercury, asbestos. These were all ground breaking technologies. The poor suffered for it.

Technology gave European countries the ability to ravage their lands and their peoples with weapons that could kill at a scale that was unimaginable a century before. TWICE. War, like poverty, is a choice. Technology cannot stop or prevent war. If people want war, technology just makes killing more brutal, swift and effective. The devastation of the wars of the 20th century were not because of technology, neither were the choices to use technology for good, such as Jonas Salk's invention of the polio vaccine.

And Jonas Salk's polio vaccine is an excellent segue into the next major theme of the manifesto. The polio vaccine was never patented. The whole of society pitched in with donations to research the cure for Polio. In our current world of absolute free market hegemony, that would be unimaginable. According to Andreessen:

We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.

It's a really odd choice to lump technology with free markets, but not if you are a tech billionaire who lives in a reality that for the vast majority earth's population is incomprehensible. It's almost as if he forgot that the internet was developed by DARPA, a US government agency, and the web was created by Tim Berners Lee for CERN, a physics laborotory that is funded by European governments. The willing buyer, willing seller equation is not even present in these institutions.

And it is also trivial to find an example of willing buyer, unwilling seller. Poor people who are forced to sell their posessions for next to nothing are technically willing I guess, but the power dynamic between the buyer and the seller is clear. The fairy tale of equality between buyer and seller being believed by someone who has more wealth than some countries' entire GDPs doesn't make for an argument. All it is is a dogmatic belief in his own power. Convincing the serfs to believe that the land lord is right is something that has sadly worked for most of history, and modern serfdom really does exist.

That is because the majority of human beings sell their labour. They don't have yachts or mansions, and their negligible property portfolios are more than negated by their debt.

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

It's hard to believe that the successive market bubbles, crashes, recessions and crises were intelligent. Markets have never been intelligent. The fact that markets can be useful doesn't make them anything. They are just tools, just like technology. Markets are the reason why people have things they can't afford, debts they cannot repay and no reasonable way out, surviving on selling their labour in perpetuity to make ends meet.

Markets enabled the oil, tabbaco and sugar industry. These industries collectively destroy the lives of millions of people and because we now have a climate crisis, the earth as our home. Just like any powerful tool that is not handled properly, markets can mame, kill and destroy lives. Black markets are also markets.

Markets have no inherent ethics, just like any other tools. Human beings exploit markets to further their own goals, and it's insanely naive to imagine that letting them be used without any control or care would ultimately have a net positive effect.

The technology world is replete with markets being used to unfairly exploit others. Amazon pushes their workers to deny themselves bathroom breaks, Uber employs millions of drivers around the world but denies their status as employees in order to exploit them, AirBnB ruins cities by making affordable housing out of reach because property owners can exploit the market to sell holiday accomodation. I could go on, but most of these companies seemed like they used technology to improve and revolutionize the world but if you look behind the curtain they are doing the same things that have been making people without the means to decide their own fates suffer since the beginning of recorded history. Neither technology or markets seem to have solved the problem of the haves exploiting and abusing the have nots. That's because tools are nothing without us, and the tech billionaire manifesto is really a plea to look the other way while they continue business as usual.

How are we supposed to buy all of this? Well it's really simple:

David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.

(my emphasis)

We are supposed to buy all of this because we are supposed to believe that humans are one dimensional beings only capable of three motivations. Love, money or force. I am sure that given anything someone could try to explain it as fitting into one of those categories, but I could just as well make my own three things. So let's try: the pursuit of joy, the avoidance of misery, and survival. Why is it that I can make three categories that are seemingly more fundamental and relevant than David Friedman? It's not that it is better, it is that dichotomies, or in this case a trichotomy, simplifies reality so that everyone can understand.

We are meant to believe that because those three things are the only options, we should pick one. There are no others. Don't think about it! The reality of the entire human experience is reducible to three motives. Therefore we should take the cynical and pragmatic self serving option: money. I would leave it up to the reader to delve their hands into the burning man 2023 toilet that is the Austrian school, Ayn Rand and anarcho capitalism, but I can summarise it in one sentence: all these people sincerely believe that the free market is the only rational basis for all of morality. Given that, here comes the enemies of rationality in their eyes.

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 think you should have some very strong arguments if your enemies charactarize themselves with ideas like trust, safety and responsibility. What the rest here amounts to however is essentially "boo hoo I can't have unchecked power to do exactly what I want, when I want and to who I want"

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness. Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism. Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition. Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

But Marc, I thought the only things that could motivate people was love, force or money? Merit, ambition, striving and achievement are hard to force into those categories aren't they?

Now that we have surrendered to the cynical idea that people are only selfish individualists that only have three possible motives, we need to let Marc and his billionaire tech bro buddies take the reigns and drive us into the techno-capitalist utopia (or almost utopia as he puts it).

The manifesto doesn't read as optimism. It reads as cynical, pessimistic, based tech billionaire. I feel sorry for communists at this point. Despite being largely sidelined globally, they are still targeted. I am disappointed that feminism, critical race theory and "the woke agenda" didn't make the cut. That would have rounded off the billionaire tantrum.

But should we consider any of what has been said seriously? No, but we should take this very seriously. People like Andreessen who used to be catalysts for technology have become its enemy. We as a society choose how we use our tools. We can use them safely and responsibly to improve the lives of all the living beings on our planet, or we can throw caution to the wind and believe that somehow there are no limits to success when we employ technology. Tech billionaires thrive on gatekeeping these tools to make money.

We know from the magic of science that money is actually a poor motivator.

Intuitively, one would think that higher pay should produce better results, but scientific evidence indicates that the link between compensation, motivation and performance is much more complex. In fact, research suggests that even if we let people decide how much they should earn, they would probably not enjoy their job more. Harvard Business Review

Oh dear. So it's not money, love or force? This goes completely against the entire anarcho capitalist screed. I find it ironic that the man who built one of the first web browsers can't fact check using an internet search. Or is it that he chose not to? Is it that he chose to use the technology he helped to create to perpetuate falsehoods about humanity, instead of striving for truth? Perhaps it makes sense to use technology responsibly after all!

Humans are complex. Beyond our basic needs, we have bizarre psychology that is tied to an amazing gooey electro chemical intelligent computer. Not artificical intelligence either, mind you. We are capable of unimaginable atrocities, but also incomprehensible good will. Reductive simplifications of the human experience have always been met with a deluge of evidence to the contrary. We have such a poor understanding of ourselves that it's impossible to declare anarcho-techno-capitalism the end of history and the best there can be. We can do better. We deserve better.

We shouldn't deminish the role of technology in helping us to solve our problems, but we must do it responsibly and safely. Just recently, a trial of an aids vaccine started. This is amazing news and technology has played a massive role, but we can't just ignore the trials and studies we need to ensure that the solution is not worse than the problem we are trying to solve. I had high hopes for the internet when I was younger because I believed that people would have access to information that could liberate them from ignorance. So little caution was exercised because the optimism was so unrestrained. What followed was autocracies using the internet to monitor citizens, old people being scammed out of their retirement funds, teens committing suicide due to cyber bullying, misinformation bots destabilising governments, revenge porn, the list goes on. We also have amazing goods coming from the internet. Wikipedia and Kahn academy come to mind. Support groups for mental health and rare diseases, information that could help new parents or people wanting to repair their stuff. You can learn practically anything for free, for better or worse, but generally this has had a positive effect on society.

Rather than gloryfing our tools, we should glorify the virtuous use of tools. We can employ technology to save the world. We just have to want to do that. We don't need markets or profit or selfishness to get us to do that. There is nothing in this manifesto that represents the human need to do good or be good. That's why we should do everything in our power to speak out against it and dismiss it with the righteous contempt it really deserves, along with the billionaire tech bros that espouse these views. Maybe we can tax their billions? Just a thought.