I agree with the premise, but why does this read like a tech bro and his finance/business major buddy in their early 20s got high and wrote it with the help of an LLM trained on /r/iam14andthisisdeep?
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
111–120 of 414 posts
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#112> Markets prevent monopolies and cartels. A lot of the optimism seems to rely on this statement and...I'm not convinced? But I also admit I'm not well informed on the topic. Does anyone have suggested reading on 'market discipline', as they're calling it? I mean, the first person on their "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism" is Jeff Bezos, who is actively dealing with an antitrust lawsuit from the FTC regarding Amazon'…
I really want to love this manifesto. This is my one sticking point. Regulatory capture, monopolies, and cartels are the fatal flaw in this techno-optimism, and they break everything. Let's say I subscribe to this wonderful story Marc tells. Please tell me the purpose of government if it is not to destroy cartels and monopolies. They are every bit as bad as the government, which is a type of monopoly itself.
Isn't that them speaking from multiple sides of the mouth? It's a manifesto by... venture capitalists. They have a very specific and diverse audience that they want to read this.
I mean, there is not going to be any low-interest capital flowing in to fuel all these techno-optimist ideals if the start-ups can't later be acquired by the existing monopolies.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the capitalist manifesto: why the global free market will save the world pretty crazy they'd put a fallacy in the title of their book
read the book. Overall, since the 1990s total global inequality (inequality across all individuals in the world) declined ... In 1990, 36% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. By 2019, this number had fallen to 9.2%. It's not a fallacy ... it's reality
what is the source of this data?
the fallacy is that global free markets are exclusive to capitalism. we're trading with china, and aren't they supposed to be socialist?
and i'll add to my reading list to challenge my bias!
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#114> Markets > We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us > We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral There's many things off with this. The USSR from the 1920s to early 1950s had enormous economic growth - particularly in the 1930s when so-called free markets in the West had collapsed, by the 1…
There is a lot wrong with your statement. The US economy has parts that are centrally planned.
The PRC had enormous economic growth - and also a famine that killed millions of people. It was a centrally planned absolute catastrophe. Then in the 1970s, they realized that central planning wasn't going to keep working, so they moved to more of a free market approach - not totally, but much more than they had. And growth continued for several more decades.
> But the distribution portion of the economy for the US is compared to the centrally planned production if the other economy. It makes no sense.
Where are you getting this from? Certainly not from the parts you quote.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really want to love this manifesto. This is my one sticking point. Regulatory capture, monopolies, and cartels are the fatal flaw in this techno-optimism, and they break everything. Let's say I subscribe to this wonderful story Marc tells. Please tell me the purpose of government if it is not to destroy cartels and monopolies. They are every bit as bad as the government, which is a type of monopoly itself.
Point me to a resistant monopoly or cartel and I will show you a government granted/supported one. Free markets are naturally resistant through free competition (startups!) and, you know, laws.
And how do you think a government reinforcing a monopoly comes to be?
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's wholesale falsehood. The wins in the last 200 years are so dramatic for the average person, especially in the West. Infant mortality rate and the chance of survival to adulthood alone are such glorious victories against Death that I would gladly vote for any system that would give us those wins and create a trillionaire. All that wondrous science has come from this system. No. Evidence is evidence. Thi…
We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. Some of us do. If you're at the poorer end of society things are still pretty damn bleak. People live with long term treatable illness. People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. Sure, those of us who can afford them have lots of shiny gadgets that save us from a bit of manu…
> People live with long term treatable illness.
None of what were treatable at the 1800.
> People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water.
In relative terms, almost none. I'm not sure how they compare in absolute terms, but just the answer not being obvious while the population increased by an order of magnitude already makes your claim quite bad.
> People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery.
And nobody had no prospect back them.
You can complain that there are some people living almost as badly as people lived in the 1800s. But it's not the majority by far, and you can't claim they are currently living worse.
And, of course, none of that is reason to not demand better things.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#117> The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein
"if you democratize power, the powerful will hate you for it" and "if you play with powers beyond your ability to control, they may backfire" seem like really different myths to me
> We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.
huh, I don't know that I've ever been told this
> We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.
I love how intellectually shallow the power of this reasoning is. Oh, a person who is drowning will pay more for a gulp of air? Wow, what an amazing conclusion, how could we have ever figured that out without the beautiful Divine Glory of The Market?
> Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone; centralization will starve you to death. ... Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.
centralization is bad, collectivism is bad, only markets and individuals are good... yeah, this is anarcho-capitalism. Like at no point do they recognize that under this line of thinking, people with a lot of money may be incentivized to cause harm to people without a lot of money, gee I wonder why they might not be so keen to acknowledge that?
> Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.
ah yes that's why the market produced the Sherman act. oh, wait, shoot, that was statist action motivated by collectivist goals.
> We believe there is no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable.
I dunno man, thought experiment here, do you make more money by curing someone of a sickness or by keeping them sick and charging them for treatment forever?
> We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.
yeah the idea that everyone wants to be either a murderer, cult leader, or billionaire is ... a totally normal idea that totally normal people have. Beyond being a deeply problematic worldview, the existence of the military-industrial complex challenges the notion that "if if weren't for markets people would do war". Marvelous logic on display here.
> To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
he's quoting the Futurist Manifesto here, which ... pretty weird move, my dude. The Futurist Manifesto paved the way for the Fascist Manifesto, and if you're going "that's a reach", the guy that wrote the Futurist Manifesto cowrote the Fascist Manifesto with Mussolini. Yes, THAT Mussolini.
> Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.
brave to make a bunch of sweeping politically-motivated generalizations and then to say it's not a political philosophy. Ok, if you say so!
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#118Somehow this reminds me of pre-y2k Nick Land ( Meltdown [0] etc.) (Hope that doesn't correlate with the emergence of a 'post-y2k-Landian' Andreesen-Horowitz!) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiaWsgtJrNI
Yeah, I have a soft spot for this kind of thinking but it always goes off the rails . It either gets unhinged and culty or flips and goes hard-reactionary or even luddite. I think the fallacy might be a little too much "magic happens here." Yes you can be optimistic about the future, but a good future is not automatically guaranteed. It requires very hard work and constant vigilance. It's not just a matter of having…
It’s romanticism that’s afraid to admit it and dresses itself up in dubious “reason” and “rationality”, which is why it always ends up seeming confused and self-contradictory and to be relying on a lot of magic to fill in the gaps.
This piece is better than some in that it at least makes the romanticism explicit near the end, but it’s burdened with the same self-conscious need to try to “prove” it’ll also make everything better in any terms one might choose, which is why these are all silly: they want to make believe that there aren’t meaningful costs or trade-offs for their romantic ideal. Nuance and shades of truth can’t be allowed, because they threaten the fake-reasoned rationalization for the romanticism, which romanticism is the point of the whole exercise, so cannot be threatened or alloyed, else they’d lose interest in it.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#119I could see one being a techno-optimist and also not be a capitalist, but this strikes me more of a half-baked libertarian manifesto with some technology sprinkled in as a garnish.
Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
#120It's alarming to see this particular blend of ideas without any historical acknowledgment. The mix of Nietzsche's ideas about the superman, a messianic belief in the transformative power of industry, and a paranoid fear and hatred of "wreckers" who would deny and destroy greatness all have an awfully dark history.