Marc Andressen’s Techno Optimist Manifesto

Marc Lowell Andreessen is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites and an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen’s net-worth is estimated at $1.7 billion. Andreessen Horowitz and invested in many successful companies including, Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter. Andreesen Horowitz manages over $35 billion.

In his Techno-optimist manifesto he explains why technology is good and absolutely necessary. Civiliation is like a shark in that it must keep moving forward, growing or it will die.

Lies
We are being lied to.

We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.

We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.

We are told to be pessimistic.

The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares.

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

We are told to be miserable about the future.

Truths

Our civilization was built on technology.

Our civilization is built on technology.

Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

I [Andreesen] am here to bring the good news.

We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.

We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.

We have the will.

It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.

It is time to be Techno-Optimists.

Technology

Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.

We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.

We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

We believe everything good is downstream of growth.

We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.

There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.

Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.

Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.

And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology.

In fact, technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne – has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible.

We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less.

Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.

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.

We believe this is why our descendents will live in the stars.

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

We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.

We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.

We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.

We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.

We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.

We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.

We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.

Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.

Nextbigfuture Summary of Andreessen Sections on Markets- Techno Capital Machine, Energy, Intelligence, Abundance, Utopia

* markets lift people out of poverty
* markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? [NBF- Self-interests get aligned]
* The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio

*Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
*the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.
* The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.

* intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure.
* Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.
* Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver. And we have a lot of problems to solve.
* Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do.

* a technologically stagnant society has limited energy at the cost of environmental ruin; a technologically advanced society has unlimited clean energy for everyone.
* Everyone can have 1000X the energy of the current American and it can all be clean energy
* Abundant clean fission and fusion can solve clean energy

Making Things Better With Thousands of Years of Evidence and Data is Not Utopian

* Not Utopians. We are adherents to what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision.
* Constrained Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Utopia, Communism, and Expertise – means taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices.
* We believe in not Utopia, but also not Apocalypse.

Becoming Technological Supermen
* We believe that advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do.
* We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology.
* Believe in nature, greatness, adventure and humanity

Technological Values [complete Section]

We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness – strength.

We believe in merit and achievement.

We believe in bravery, in courage.

We believe in pride, confidence, and self respect – when earned.

We believe in free thought, free speech, and free inquiry.

We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts.

We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

And, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

We believe in local knowledge, the people with actual information making decisions, not in playing God.

We believe in embracing variance, in increasing interestingness.

We believe in risk, in leaps into the unknown.

We believe in agency, in individualism.

We believe in radical competence.

We believe in an absolute rejection of resentment. As Carrie Fisher said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” We take responsibility and we overcome.

We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution.

We believe in evolution, because we believe in life.

We believe in the truth.

We believe rich is better than poor, cheap is better than expensive, and abundant is better than scarce.

We believe in making everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.

We believe extrinsic motivations – wealth, fame, revenge – are fine as far as they go. But we believe intrinsic motivations – the satisfaction of building something new, the camaraderie of being on a team, the achievement of becoming a better version of oneself – are more fulfilling and more lasting.

We believe in what the Greeks called eudaimonia through arete – flourishing through excellence.

We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.

We believe in the Silicon Valley code of “pay it forward”, trust via aligned incentives, generosity of spirit to help one another learn and grow.

We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world. Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.

We believe technology makes greatness more possible and more likely.

We believe in fulfilling our potential, becoming fully human – for ourselves, our communities, and our society.

The Meaning of Life
Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.

We are not necessarily left wing, although some of us are.

We are not necessarily right wing, although some of us are.

We are materially focused, for a reason – to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid material abundance.

A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true, yet more than offset by the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.

Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually.

We believe technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.

We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human.

The Enemy [Full Section]

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.

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”.

This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.

Our enemy is stagnation.

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.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual.

Our enemy is Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained Vision, Alexander Kojeve’s Universal and Homogeneous State, Thomas More’s Utopia.

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation – the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.

Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man:

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself…

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” — so asks the Last Man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest…

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome…

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,” — say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision…

“We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

Our enemy is… that.

We aspire to be… not that.

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe these captured people are suffering from ressentiment – a witches’ brew of resentment, bitterness, and rage that is causing them to hold mistaken values, values that are damaging to both themselves and the people they care about.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us in Techno-Optimism.

The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.

The Future [Full Section]
Where did we come from?

Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of exploration, of industrialization.

Where are we going?

What world are we building for our children and their children, and their children?

A world of fear, guilt, and resentment?

Or a world of ambition, abundance, and adventure?

We believe in the words of David Deutsch: “We have a duty to be optimistic. Because the future is open, not predetermined and therefore cannot just be accepted: we are all responsible for what it holds. Thus it is our duty to fight for a better world.”

We owe the past, and the future.

It’s time to be a Techno-Optimist.

It’s time to build.