A Rebuttal to the Techno-Capitalist Manifesto
An anthropologist's rebuttal to Marc Andreeson's document. The good, bad and ugly and why it's an important document for humanity.
A couple of weeks ago, vaunted Silicon Valley venture capitalist and well known post-humanist Marc Andreeson released his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. That he has played a vital role in shaping the modern internet-era is without doubt. Like many of the Silicon Valley elite, he’s not been without his controversies. Andreeson is certainly smart and well connected.
This is a rebuttal, in part and a critique of these missed points. It is not meant to shoot down the manifesto, but rather to add to a necessary societal discussion as we move deeper into the Digital Age with technologies that will have incredibly profound impacts on humanity.
This is also a condensed version. A longer one will take time.
His manifesto is a clear stake in the ground and a bold declaration of where the views of this elite, the Technorati, stand in terms of capitalism and the role of technology and humanity. It is distinctly libertarian and takes a deeply pragmatic engineers view. It is also resounding in its biases.
First I will look at what Andreeson and the technorati misunderstand or simply lack knowledge of in regards to humanity and technology. Then I’ll look at where there are some good points.
What The Techno-Capital Manifesto Gets Wrong
Mostly what it means to be human. Especially when it comes to co-evolutionary role of technology and humanity. Andreeson views technology and humans from a software engineering and venture capitalist lens. Narrowly, and largely devoid of the progressive thinking he argues for towards the end of the manifesto.
His arguments are often contradictory, such as that in which we are being lied to in how technology is bad and takes jobs away. If this were the case, Apple wouldn’t be worth trillions and Facebook, Google et al, would not exist. Boxing shadows and all that.
Andreeson goes on to suggest that we have glorified technology for hundreds of years only. Humans have been glorifying it, so to speak, for nearly two million years. From the stone axe to Artificial Intelligence. But we’ve never really “glorified” technology, maybe some technologies, but mostly we just see that it benefits us.
Marc suggests that through technology “we can advance to a far superior way of living, and being.” We’ve been doing that for many thousands of years. This statement however, is within the mindset of the post-humanist crowd. The ones that suggest we will upload our brains one day and all live happily ever after. While it is good that he recognizes utopia is impossible, he does go down a rather techtopian fantasy lane at times.
Andreeson has obviously never spoken to a cultural or technology anthropologist, sociologist, archeologist, historian or psychologist. Oddly enough he seems to not have read or spoken to Ray Dalio on the growth and decline of empires and civilizations in a financial sense. He might also read the work by Dr. Carlota Perez “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital” to understand cycles of technology revolutions.
Confirmation bias runs rampant throughout the manifesto. But then it is a manifesto, a set of ideas wrapped around a shaky vision. This is fine and such a declaration helps to clearly understand where Andreeson and his acolytes want to take humanity.
But his shallow understanding and lack of nuance in understanding the deep history of humans and technology and the role culture plays is damaging to his argument. One hopes he is a man willing to debate and understand other points of view.
Much of the manifesto comes across as an “us versus them” argument. Clear strains of libertarian thinking at times bordering on extreme ideologies against academia and certainly opposing any entertaining of the ideas of academia in the humanities.
It is abundantly clear that post-humanists like Andreeson, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Martine Rothblatt and so on, have little understand of what culture is or how humanity uses it. Which is as a survival mechanism because biological evolution is too slow.
It is clear that the manifesto dislikes current political systems. Andreeson states it is a philosophy and not political. This is incorrect. In part it is a philosophy, but in stating its argument against communism (in which he clearly shows he does not understand what actual communism is and that he is, in fact, communist. We all are, to varying degrees, he takes a political stance. Manifestos are however, political statements.
Andreeson also thinks that free markets solve everything, including monopolies and cartels, yet seems quite fine with oligarchies by default of his statements. This is an example of Regan era trickle-down economics. So how has that worked out? Right.
He suggests, interestingly, that the “old systems” are Orwellian and uses the book “1984” as their instruction manual. This is silly and contradictory. He is obviously not familiar with the book by Dr. Shoshana Zuboff “Surveillance Capitalism”, but the technorati dislike being called out on their contradictions. They follow the boorish pattern of such thinkers who have gone before them with other ideas. Pedantic at best.
There is this funny bit about intelligence. That machines will think like humans. This is simply impossible. They may, perhaps, one day “think” (we don’t know yet what consciousness, intelligence or thinking actually are), but they will never think like humans because they are machines. They cannot possibly think like humans. QED that Marc.
What The Techno-Capitalist Manifesto Gets Right
There are some good arguments within the manifesto. Such that current bureaucratic and political systems and much of present day academic institutions are not keeping up. Especially bureaucracies. But, like many people do, he forgets that bureaucracy is not a government invention, it is an invention of free market capitalism. Sorry about that Marc. I recommend reading anthropologist David Grabber’s book “The Utopia of Rules” if you want to go deeper.
He is largely right about institutions that are no longer vigorous and vital. The antipathy of the ivory tower academics is prevalent. Academia has become a capitalist machine in and of itself, no longer serving as a beacon of ideas, but rather more obsessed with endowments and political grandstanding.
He is right about “enemies” (terrible word choice that encourages anger rather than debate), such as Thomas More’s Utopia idea and Thomas Sowell’s “Unconstrained Vision” (which seems a bit ironic, but hey, the manifesto is filled with contradictions.) The Precautionary Principle is a bureaucratic reaction to significant social change and representative of how systems that will collapse with technological advancements fight back. This is normal. It has been this way for a very long time.
Andreeson suggests we are entering a new era of human intelligence. Yes. But we’ve been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years. Like, since we climbed down out of the trees and started banging rocks together to make tools. AI can indeed be a technology that benefits us. Done right. Unfortunately Andreeson and his ilk eschew ethics, finding them laborious and mere speedbumps to be demolished.
Where the Techno-Capitalist Manifesto Is Frightening
While clumsily written and certainly reviling of a desire for any true debate and having some good points, it has some very scary, dystopian overtones. And ones that are a blatant disregard for human agency and free will, despite seeming to declare they hold these things inviolable. Irony is an undercurrent in this manifesto.
While there is an abundance of ideas, there is not an abundance of mineral and physical resources. If there were and, as oddly claimed as it is, that we will keep finding more resources on earth, then why is there so much interest in space mining? I think many of these technorati play Minecraft and that’s where they get their idea of abundant, infinite resources. It is a stupid argument at best. But it is necessary for economic growth in the current model.
The manifesto blatantly ignores the fact that capitalism is undergoing a fundamental change. It embraces decentralisation, which is a nice idea that we’ve tried for thousands of years in various forms. It works for a bit. Until it doesn’t. We’ve been going back and forth since the time when we were puttering about looking for berries and seeds. Again, it is a failure of the technorati to understand culture and human history, how we organize as a species. How we actually use technology.
The manifesto seems to abhor academia as a whole and comes across as finding the study of the humanities as silly, patently useless and completely invalid in a technological world. It is blatant ignorance and is shameful coming from supposedly very intelligent people. It is very similar to the mindset of colonialist thinking; we were smarter than you and stole your land so shut-up and accept that we’re better and suck it up buttercup. It is the thinking of communism, fascism and similar ideologies. Andreeson claims to be opposed to “1984” yet the manifesto makes the case for it.
The manifesto talks at a high level of the ideas of post-humanism, that we will live forever with technology. We will upload our brains. Machines will think like humans (see above, they won’t.) But this ignores the fact that some people won’t want to.
Atheism is a common refrain amongst many post-humanists. Yet technically, atheism is in fact, a religion. This is another example of post-humanists disdain of freedom of thought by humans. Freedom of markets? Okay. Thought? We can create police for that, George tells us how. On to the summary…
Summary Of The Techno-Capitalist Manifesto
What really strikes me is how poorly this was all put together. Like Andreeson sat down with his laptop on a Sunday morning with a hot pot of coffee and slammed something out, sent it off to be edited for spelling and grammar, but no critical thinking feedback and told the PR person in the office to publish it thank-you very much and everyone else sod off.
It fails on the face of it is to actually understand the relationship between humans and technology, one that is not hundreds of years old, but nearly two million. One that actually connects with non-humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The manifesto shows a complete and utter disregard for human will, free agency and rights, especially around religion. Despite trying to say it is not political, by definition, it is. It argues against current political systems, that is a political statement. It has a narrow view of economics, oddly enough that is a system untenable with a decentralised market. While declaring it supports welfare, it despises it at the same time. He neglects to discuss the pump and dump of Web3 that his VC firm and others ran.
It is filled with contradictions. More of an anarchists alchemy written in a caffeine infused hallucination. A reality of an elite, devoid of much humanity. Sterile and putative. But it is important.
Sociocultural systems are changing. Capitalism is changing. Economic systems and models. Democracy is in a fight for its life against autocracies. Technology is, as it always has been, crucial to our survival.
This manifesto is out there, but it’s not how we will end up. Many of the ideas it holds forth have been around and tried many, many times over thousands of years in various forms. None of them ever work in the long term.
The fact is, culture is what determines how we use, adopt, adapt and change our way of living. Humanity may seem disparate and often has been. But we are a singular species, not matter our shapes, sizes, skin colours. We are all, wonderfully, messily, human. It is a shame that this manifesto seems to miss this.
Andreeson and the technorati would likely see this article (doubtful they’d even read it, or bother) as oppositional. Confirmation bias can kick in pretty hard sometimes. Hopefully, they would see it as a discussion point and an opportunity to evolve their position and not opposed at all to technology.