As it so happens, the other day I happened to click on a YouTube video entitled, “Meet The Silicon Valley Billionaire Ruining The World” and as it turns out it made a very compelling argument that Marc Andreessen may in fact he one of the worst figures in tech. The video was compelling and I was happy to have spent 13 minutes watching it. It did however inspire me to look up some of the source material it referenced, most notably an essay that Marc wrote nearly three years back entitled, “The Techno Optimist Manifesto”.
Now as it so happens, this entire blog post is going to be my response to a particular section of this manifesto entitled “The Enemy”. However let me be very clear, just because I’m focusing on this particular section, doesn’t mean that the other sections aren’t worth your time and aren’t just as horrifying. I have no idea how I didn’t hear about this essay when it was published in October of 2023, but in a way I’m almost glad that it worked out this way. The statements made within its paragraphs really cut to the core of all of the abhorrent behavior we are seeing in tech nowadays, doubly so in regards to AI.
So what is it I found so insulting and skin crawling about this section that I just had to write a response to it? Well dear reader, lets go through it piece by piece, shall we?
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.
What really stands out here is the fact that nearly every principle mentioned in that paragraph represent values that I hold near and dear to my heart. I believe adherence to most if not all of those principles are what allows us to effectively distinguish between ethical engineers and unethical engineers. Of particular note is the reference to the “Precautionary Principle” which in case you aren’t aware, is defined as follows:
The Precautionary Principle in its simplest form states: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically”.
So in other words be cautious when faced with the unknown and do your best to minimize possible harm. Simple enough right? Of course as a principle this statement of virtue stands in direct opposition to at least one of the most idiotic adages passed around by other big tech billionaires and their legions of acolytes, namely:
“Move fast and break things”
Yeah guess what? I don’t want to break things. Breaking things creates problems for my clients and for me. My goal is reduce their problems and by extension, reduce my own. So yeah I’m a big believer in the “Precautionary Principle” and I would even go so far as to say that my general adherence to it is one of the primary reasons I have experienced any actual success within the context of my now dwindling engineering career.
But of course doing things in a way that is methodical, involves checking and rechecking and spending substantial amounts of time thinking about how the task at hand fits into the bigger picture (and I’m not just talking about scale, but rather society and the world at large) is no longer in vogue. This correlates with the rise of LLM based tech (aka AI for suckers) and the tidal wave of amoral behavior and adages that have taken this industry by storm over the last few years.
Finally, the fact he absolutely could not resist mentioning communism really says it all in my mind. That is a classic red herring that is so overused that it’s almost trite at this point. Well it would be if it didn’t work on vast swathes of our questionably-educated populace.
sigh
Let’s continue:
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.
There is a lot to unpack here, but I’m going to summarize it very succinctly. This statement by Marc, in a very Trumpian manner, is basically pure projection. Much like when Trump accuses others of being crooks by committing some act or another, he is basically projecting his own sins onto others. This is exactly what Marc is doing here.
If you look at the way Big Tech has evolved over the last few decades, they have basically created a culture of stagnation which is predicated on pushing all of the other virtues listed after that. LLMs basically double down on this by essentially guaranteeing our future will be stagnant because as more and more tech executives turn to LLMs as their primary source of inspiration, validation and brain storming they are pigeon holing themselves into an artificial world whose boundaries are defined by everything that came before it, at least whatever was inhaled into its matrix while the underlying model was being trained.
Big Tech is literally the poster child for authoritarianism, central planning and bureaucracy. Don’t believe me? What happens when AWS or Azure announces that a cloud service your company depends on is going to cease to exist? Do you get to push back? Are you given an opportunity to offer feedback? Is it put up for a vote? Hell no. You can’t even get these people on the fucking phone much less actually make an effective appeal to them.
The terms vetocracy, gerontocracy, corruption, monopolies and cartels really stand out as well. Why? Well that’s basically what big tech is. A gang of demiliches who have obtained so much power that their only two remaining instincts are to preserve the source of that power (aka their phylacteries) and to expand it by any means possible. Again in order to prove this notion, I need only point to the public and caustic actions taken by every big tech CEO ever since Trump took office for his second term in January of 2025.
They all flocked to Trump like moths would to a flame. Prior to that point, a lot of people were lying to themselves as they were convinced that big tech was at least somewhat progressive and liberal leaning. This could not be further from the truth. Big Tech is willing to cozy up to whomever it has to and engage in petty virtue signaling as often as it feels it needs to as a means to an end. That end of course is to increase their influence, their power and most importantly, their fortunes.
But wait, this just gets better and better:
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.
Whats truly notable here is that this is word for word how I would describe big tech in it’s present form. So yes this is basically more projection (there is a lot of that in Marc’s essay as it turns out). Even as people have begun to strongly reject AI and its ancillary tech symptoms like data centers for various reasons, this hasn’t made a dent in the number of soulless tech executives who keep getting in front of microphones, cameras and live audiences and extolling how AI is going to change the world by spiriting away our current ability to barely keep the lights on and feed our families.
They are literally playing God with our lives. They are disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected and unaccountable. They live within the proverbial ivory tower and lord their resulting dominion over us whenever possible. There are of course consequences that will one day arrive as a result of these actions. I for one will not shed a tear when their ivory tower comes toppling down, rather I will revel in the profound joy I will undoubtedly feel at that very moment.
Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual.
As a huge Orwell fan, this one really hits home for me. Coming from a billionaire who is one of the core architects of a world where big tech is gathering data on our every single move, this smacks of somebody who is either overtly lying or stunningly unaware of how he is perceived. Whether it be from our contact lists, our phones bluetooth pings, our license plates being scanned by an army of Flock cameras, or endless online storefronts in which every purchasing decision is scrutinized and every ounce of available data on prior activity is used to funnel us into purchasing even more shit we don’t need, big tech is the absolute modern day incarnation of Big Brother.
The only difference between our current reality and the fictional one described in 1984 is the fact that Government isn’t the main perpetrator but rather a ride along playmate that rubber stamps, legitimizes and seeks to reap the benefits of big tech’s intractable web of surveillance.
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.
Wow - this old riff. Nuclear power isn’t our future. At least not from the standpoint of fission (fusion could be but it, like quantum computing, is currently nothing more than a pipe dream fueled by science fiction and marketing malarkey). Fission had its place and it served its purpose but the cold hard reality is that there isn’t enough fissionable material to make it a universal reality. In addition storing the waste generated from these operations is a massive problem and our current solution essentially involves building containment systems for the waste that will outlive the human race but not the waste itself at which point the consequences will become some other species problem, assuming of course that we have enough courtesy to allow any of them to outlive us. TLDR: Worshipping at the altar of nuclear power is the sign of somebody who hasn’t fully considered the consequences.
We should of course be focusing on green energy. It’s the only option that makes long term sense. Getting our energy from the wind that blows and the sun that shines without consuming what are effectively unreplenishable materials makes sense because its already there just waiting for us to harness it. It’s usefulness will likely exceed the longevity of the human race and what will likely be our species short lifespan, making it effectively infinite in terms of supply.
The reality is that this essay is Marc’s mission statement. He is coming out of the closet as a techno-fascist draped in the vestiges of the tempting but ultimately intellectually bankrupt ethos of libertarians. He like any other card carrying fascist, is defining everything in terms of “us” and “them”. If you agree you are one of “us”. If you disagree you are one of “them”. He opens by claiming that the real enemies are bad ideas but he spends each and every sentence after that building the case for why “they” need to be purged by outlining all of the theoretical harms they have perpetrated on society as a whole.
I am one of them. Come get me asshole.
Finally, skipping to the end of the section:
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.
Marc finally ends his essay with a clarion call in which he strongly implies that we (a group encompassing anybody who finds themselves caught up in the wide net cast by his previous definitions of what ideas makes you one of “them”) will either join them or perish. Nearly three years after this was originally published, I think most of us are beginning to see the truth: The future being pushed by big tech is not bright. Our fears are warranted. We are becoming increasingly tired of being surveilled. We are angry that electricity is becoming a luxury commodity. We are sick of big tech commanding us at every turn. We are disgusted by the growing partnership between more traditional fascists and techno fascists that is now pushing society towards what can only be described as a red line.
To bring this full circle, the reason I find this particular section of Marc’s manifesto so disturbing is that it basically paints anybody who is even remotely concerned with the well being of others as a impedient to progress. That is a line of thought that I will never agree with. Marc’s manifesto makes it clear that he long ago stopped caring about the people whose lives and fortunes are upended by his growing unsated desire for power and wealth. To him they are nothing more than annoying ants boiling out from the remains of the ant hill that he and his oligarch friends just stepped on.
To close, I for one reject Marc’s vision of the future and urge everybody out there to join me in that pronouncement. I cannot wait for the day that somebody finds his phylactery and the phylacteries of his big tech billionaire compatriots and smashes them into a million pieces. The only way that we the people will ever be able to have an actual say in our future is to reclaim the power and autonomy that Marc and the other demiliches like him have robbed us of. This includes all of the other non-techno fascists out there as well. As long as we allow these soulless husks to maintain their death grip on the levers of power, we will remain entrapped by their deluded and ill-considered machinations. This must not be allowed to continue, regardless of the cost.