The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Marc

Thank you for taking the time to so carefully lay out your philosophy on how technology will save humanity. I think it would have been simpler and to the point if you just posted a hand drawn picture with you in Superman costume so people could really understand what a hero you are.

Truly, it is tremendously selfless of you to advance society with your investments designed explicitly to maximize your returns. What a massive coincidence that so much of your investment over the past 5-6 years has been so focused on web3 and crypto - many, many alt coins that you have successfully committed securities fraud with by dumping them on unwitting retail investors who then eat the loss. Progress!

We, the commoners, are so so grateful that you have enlightened us with your incredibly deep take on how the world will advance specifically through technological ideas that all have one thing in common: they all are explicitly designed to line your pockets first and foremost - societal benefits are an afterthought. Oops, I must have gotten that backwards.

At this point in my essay I will quote a philosopher to sound very very deep and contemplative like you - somehow I bet you are a fan of Ayn Rand and objectivism so I'll use her.

In the Atlas Shrugged version of the world, this worldview places you as the modern day John Galt. We are all oh-so-grateful for your ability to save the world by exclusively investing in tech projects that give you massive returns. We are all so grateful that the modern day Galt's Gulch is not a humble valley disconnected from society where honest men work together, but rather a $155 million dollar coastal property in Malibu from which you command your minions. It is literally the most expensive property in all of California. A home befitting the god that you are, reigning on high over all the peasants who don't understand or appreciate your benevolence.

Don't change a thing, don’t listen to anyone who says you have delusions of grandeur. Thank you for saving the world and meagerly only asking for a few billions of dollars and an insane amount of international power and influence in return. You truly are the most selfless and deep philosopher of this age. What a hero.

Trust your technolust?

It seems like there is a tendency to become occupied with obligations as you age, regardless of exactly how the discretionary time / money is eaten up.

I wouldn't say I "used to" have a similar worldview. In fact I find myself agreeing with most every passage in the manifesto. Agreeing with "yes, but..." - because while we can assert our "belief" in things, when those beliefs are taken for granted while not lining up with actual reality, they form their own oppressive dogma! For example it's quite rich for a VC to make assertions about free markets while simultaneously having drastically altered their investment strategy due to government ending the decade long feeding trough of near-zero interest rates. Hence the general criticism of being out of touch.

Your comment is a good synthesis point. In fact one might say the amount of criticism and nay-saying is directly related to the inequality, either economic or social (dis)enfranchisement of lacking purpose. So pushing in the opposite direction isn't really helping the cause of growth, but rather causing that gulf to widen and the criticism of "techno optimism" to grow.

The fundamental problem I see is making sure governments pass productive laws that encourage computational wealth to remain distributed, as opposed to authoritarian laws that actually cement routine corporate control while reserving ultimate control to the state. The latter approach basically only works with quantifiable monetary wealth, in that the state can collect taxes and then convert them into material welfare. But this approach doesn't work with non-fungible liberty, where the distributed structure must be preserved rather than ever being centralized to begin with. eg GDPR vs TikTok hysteria. Or antitrust enforcement to end this anticompetitive bundling of software, services, and hosting, versus "eliminate sec 230".

I don't know it in the way that I know about gravity or garbage collection. But I know it in the sense that the end results of this complex system are at best subject to debate as a net win given metrics that include the environment and equitability. A system with the set of pros and cons that the current one demonstrates on a daily basis seems incredibly unlikely to me to be remotely close to optimal.

Now, what does seem true is that it is easy to tell stories about this system that focus on its pros, of which there are many, and thus to construct the overall impression that we should be cautious about changing or discarding it.

In and of itself, that's not a problem. However, combined with the fact stories about the cons are routinely marginalized, discarded as not serious, simply ignored and forth, this is a problem. It leads to a strong bias in favor of the status quo - look at the all the good things we get! we must careful not to lose them! - and an equally strong bias against change attempting to target the much, much less culturally visible cons.

When I see a system that combines externalities, wild inequality of outcome and this sort of builtin restistance to tackling the cons, my facile knee jerk reaction is to assume that it is rigged. More pertinently, even if the alternatives do present various risks, we should be exploring "the neighborhood" with an awareness that we may not even be in a local optimum, let alone a global one.