Regarding "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto"

When thought leaders can't stand the heat, they should shut the hell up.

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash

Five years ago, in the days of Twitter-That-Was, I had an exchange with Eric Weinstein. He did not care for my Spoiler Alerts take on the Intellectual Dark Web. Weinstein asked me to read more of his work before dubbing him a thought leader. So I did. My primary takeaway? “What’s true (which is a lot) isn’t new and what’s new isn’t true.”¹

I am increasingly of the opinion that this aphorism does a great job of capturing the dilemmas of engaging with enlightened centrists and/or Silicon Valley thought leaders. Yelling that everything they are saying is obviously wrong is not the right way to go. Very often a lot of what these folks are saying is accurate and already established by a lot of scholarship. It’s not new but it’s true.

When dealing with thought leaders, the key is to:

1. Pay close attention;

2. Determine what new stuff is being posited; and

3. Assess whether it’s true or not true.

There’s no trick to it, it’s just a simple trick!

And this brings us to Marc Andreessen.

Andreessen is a pretty smart guy! He helped develop Mosaic, the first web browser with a graphical interface. He pretty much invented the tweetstorm. He has had a twenty-year career as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley — so he’s also a pretty rich guy.²

And he has decided that he is now a thought leader. At least, that is my takeaway from reading “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” a 5000 word articulation of his worldview that he posted to the a16z site on Monday. Andreessen’s manifesto triggered a decent amount of mockery on my social media feeds. While some of it is admittedly amusing, the totality of it makes me a little bit uneasy. An awful lot of what Andreessen says is true, albeit not new. Take, for example, the one paragraph Andreessen devotes to international relations:

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.

As someone who has a rooting interest in the United States and liberal democracy I find nothing objectionable in what is quoted above. It’s not new — one could likely find some variation of that paragraph in every “Whither America?” essay published in Foreign Affairs over the last century — but it’s definitely true. As is Andreessen’s emphasis on the power of technological innovation. When he writes, “technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less,” he’s not wrong. That’s the very idea of productivity growth.

Unfortunately, Andreessen kept writing, and in the process got a few obvious things wrong.