This essay appeared on the weblog “Crooked Timber,” November 13, 2023
by Henry Farrell
Marc Andreessen’s current “tech optimist manifesto” is among the most important statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s truly much less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Faith of Progress. The phrases “we consider” seem at least 113 occasions within the textual content, not counting synonyms.
The core principle of this secular faith is religion in know-how. From Andreessen’s opening part: “We consider development is progress … the one perpetual supply of development is know-how … for this reason we aren’t nonetheless residing in mud huts … for this reason our descendents [sic] will stay within the stars.”
Andreessen invokes the correct wing economist, Friedrich von Hayek, as one of many “patron saints” of this dogma. Which may look like a stunning assertion. Hayek was ferociously crucial of what he described because the “faith of the engineers” – the efforts of Saint-Simon’s followers to create a quasi-messianic religion making use of engineering insights to society. Their fervid perception within the inevitable advantages of progress purportedly justified the efforts of an elite to remake society alongside higher and extra rational traces.
Hayek quotes an early Saint-Simonian journal as describing a program to “develop and increase the ideas of a philosophy of human nature primarily based on the popularity that the future of our race is to take advantage of and modify exterior nature to its best benefit.” Examine to Andreessen: “We consider in nature, however we additionally consider in overcoming nature. We’re not primitives, cowering in concern of the lightning bolt. We’re the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
The apparent distinction is that the sooner faith of the engineers glorified the state, whereas the brand new one glorifies markets (that’s why Hayek is one among its patron saints). However the similarities are at the least as vital. Each the outdated time faith and the brand new one invoke grand visions to wave away the mess, disagreements and complexities of the current. They depict those that oppose the actions of a tiny self-elected elite as champions of ignorance and enemies of progress. If we solely simply let the engineers run issues, we might ensure that our descendants can have the universe for his or her inheritance.
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I’ve been attempting to work out my ideas in regards to the relationship between the outdated and the brand new religions of the engineers for years. Hayek performs an fascinating and sophisticated function, as erstwhile CT contributor, Corey Robin has identified. His suggestion that wealthy elites will and will play an important function in guiding the progress of an apparently decentralized and pluralistic system helps justify the world-shaping ambitions of founders. So too, does Schumpeter’s concept of the entrepreneur and of the overall advantages of monopoly. However my sense of what’s going on was actually crystallized by Daron Acemoglu’s and Simon Johnson’s current ebook, Energy and Progress.
This ebook will get Andreessen’s shtick down chilly, in a ebook that was printed effectively earlier than the manifesto (Andreessen is expressing the collective knowledge of these round him as a lot as his personal ideas). Acemoglu and Johnson describe a typical optimistic mythology, in keeping with which we’re “heading relentlessly towards a greater world, because of unprecedented advances in know-how.” No matter issues we expertise are the beginning pangs of a greater world that’s simply across the nook. Of their description, “[p]eople perceive that not all the pieces promised by Invoice Gates, Elon Musk, and even Steve Jobs will seemingly come to cross. However, as a world, now we have turn into infused by their techno-optimism. Everybody in every single place ought to innovate as a lot as they will, work out what works, and iron out the tough edges later.”
Extra particularly, the ebook explains precisely how claims in regards to the superior freedoms of the markets are interwoven with sensible restrictions on folks’s liberties. It emphasizes the significance of Jeremy Bentham’s concepts in regards to the basic advantages of surveillance for economic system and politics: “earlier than the panopticon was a jail, it was a manufacturing facility.” These concepts paved the way in which for factories that turned employees into “mere cogs” and the later notions of Frederick Taylor and others who seemed to make use of new applied sciences of surveillance to squeeze as a lot productiveness out of employees. The usual response is that everybody advantages from this in the long term, however Acemoglu and Johnson stress that that is hardly a given. How the advantages are distributed relies on politics, and particularly on whether or not those that are on the receiving finish are in a position to manage and ally with others, to create “countervailing energy” that ensures that the advantages of latest applied sciences are evenly distributed, and to keep away from technological trajectories that maximize on exploitation fairly than basic advantages.
These historic classes have relevance at the moment. I’ve heard it stated (appropriately or incorrectly) that Andreessen’s tirade was largely motivated by his anger at AI skeptics. Definitely, one among his proposed articles of religion is that “We consider any deceleration of AI will price lives. Deaths that have been preventable by the AI that was prevented from current is a type of homicide.” Acemoglu and Johnson level out that AI is commonly getting used to exchange employees or to surveil them. They stress that it is a political choice, fairly than an inevitable consequence of know-how. We will select in another way, and we should.
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Like different religions – like Marxism too for that matter – the faith of the engineers is centered on a fantasy in regards to the world to come back. Lots of people speak in regards to the affect of science fiction on Silicon Valley, and the way folks like Peter Thiel and the Paypal Mafia have been impressed by Neal Stephenson’s concepts about cash. Stephenson is a vital a part of the story that Silicon Valley tells itself about its current – the Metaverse, Google Earth and so forth. However I can’t assist questioning if the Tradition novels of Iain M. Banks (cited for instance by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as core texts) are extra vital to the tales that Silicon Valley tells itself in regards to the future.
Banks’ future is one the place humanity (I simplify right here – the Tradition’s relationship to precise Earth-humans is difficult, and far occurs in our previous, Elsewhere within the Galaxy) has discovered learn how to produce common abundance. Inside very broad purpose, the folks of the Tradition can have no matter they need, touring the universe in large starships, developing huge Orbitals, glanding medicine, having a lot of intercourse, altering gender at a whim (Musk might have modified his thoughts on that bit) and throwing wild events, all overseen by more-or-less benign AIs. It’s a really engaging future, the place socialism and libertarianism blur into one another.
I can’t say whether or not Andreessen’s manifesto is straight influenced by Banks’ novels, however its imagined trajectory in any case adjoining, with AI as “our alchemy, our Thinker’s Stone” and a future by which:
We consider the worldwide inhabitants can fairly simply increase to 50 billion folks or extra, after which far past that as we in the end settle different planets. We consider that out of all of those folks will come scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries past our wildest desires. We consider the final word mission of know-how is to advance life each on Earth and within the stars.
In distinction, I’m fairly certain that Banks would have completely fucking hated the tech optimist manifesto and the challenge behind it. His books have a lot to say about individuals who promise paradise tomorrow to justify purgatory and hell at the moment. None of it’s complimentary. His books are all in regards to the complexities and the tragedies of politics.
There isn’t any room for complexity in Andreessen’s imaginative and prescient. The politics are all stripped out. There may be solely a wrestle between the Good who embrace technological progress, and the Enemies of Progress.
The faith of the engineers is the hopium of Silicon Valley elites. It’s much less a fancy theology than an eschatological soporific, a prosperity gospel for enterprise capitalists, founders and wannabes. It tells its votaries that earnings and progress level in precisely the identical path, and that by doing effectively they are going to most actually do good. It ought to barely want stating that the precise issues and promise of know-how lie within the present political struggles that this imaginative and prescient of the long run waves away.
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