321–330 of 414 posts
Like the “It’s time to build” article, it’s great VC porn but a16z is still mostly funding SaaS companies instead of hard tech.
Have they brought down prices of food, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure?
Since the beginning pandemic, things are heading in the wrong direction for the median American.
Kinda feel like the true Techno-Optimists were the people collectively hacking together solutions under open source principles, and that quite a lot of the libertarian-eque mumbo-jumbo here invisibly stands on the shoulders of those giants.
The free market is arguably more aligned to a product that allows a monkey direct access to its dopamine center than one that lets a monkey rule the stars.
While I agree that technology growth is one of the most important metrics for the future health of a society, the idea that optimal growth necessitates uncontrolled markets or a whole host of the other things piggybacking on that core here is a bit silly.
A more narrowly scoped manifesto that was essentially just "tech accelerates beneficial progress; there's an opportunity cost to delaying tech" would likely have had better legs than an umbrella of rhetoric that tries to cover all bases and as such alienates everyone other than the author and the sycophants in their circle.
It's frustrating, as I agree with a lot of the broad sentiment and have been extremely disappointed in the tech pessimism I've been seeing grow dramatically over the past few months and years - but I really don't feel this manifesto speaks for nor to me, as optimistic about tech as I might be.
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?
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Status driven monkeys fighting over tree position That’s why we got Facebook over jet packs. That’s what we are. We need to accept it
We have jet packs. You can buy one if you want, although it isn't very practical. https://gravity.co/ Status is one of the main factors that drives innovation.
Cool, so I guess our enemy is you
> 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'…
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This isn't it, he was never part of the class in the first place and he does not share its insular self-serving worldview. He didn't go to Harvard, he went to Illinois. He built his own tech firm when taking that path wasn't even a thing for people to do, he did not inherit banking interests.
It's ironic he talks about markets yet Netscape came from Mosaic, developed at a public university (Urbana-Champaign in Illinois) without market forces. HTML and HTTP developed at CERN, another public institution.
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(a) indulge in abstract theories (b) engage in social engineering (c) disconnect from the real world (d) delude themselves (e) appoint themselves (f) play God with anyone else's life with total insulation from the consequences. That seems to describe developers, and this VC was one, Silicon Valley VC and/or SBF-types. Who the heck even comes close to (f) except Big Tech. With respect to (e), "unelected", does anyone…
I think the idea is that VCs and private companies can't force their will onto people. They can indulge in abstract theories, but it never becomes legislation that others have to abide to (e.g. laws that curtail speech meant to "protect democracy") They can socially engineer but voluntarily, or in other words propose social norms in form of ux and product. But things get out of hand very quickly in a market. For inst…