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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

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Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#41

> 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'…

Market discipline acts as a challenge, and humans figure out ways around challenges to maximize some reward (money). Market discipline is only enforced by humans and they have weaknesses.

This manifesto wants to pretend that the rules enforce themselves by some natural property of the system akin to physics or biology, and not from humans.

The manifesto is completely flawed on markets because what requires people to be discriminatory buyers is scarcity, which is opposite of what this manifesto is suggesting we work towards. It has no plans on how to handle technological abundance's (not post-scarcity) affect on market behavior:

>We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else we want to pay for

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#43
My main bugbear with this is that - similar to many American screeds on free markets - it conflates "free markets" with "capitalism". You can have one without the other (employee co-operatives, partnerships), and vice versa (monopolies, cartels).

Free markets are about letting the market set the price. That requires multiple providers who are not allowed to engage in extreme anti-competitive behavior that prevents new entrants from becoming providers.

Capitalism is about being able to own shares in an organisation (you provide capital), where others do work and you get a share of the profits generated from that work proportionate to the size of share you own.

A lot of people say "I'm a capitalist", who go to work each day and get paid a wage. These are not capitalists. They're employees. They are normally an expressing an opinion that is pro-free market, and think that investment can drive more opportunities for work for themselves. They may own shares, and hope for it become a primary income source one day, but the majority have to have jobs.

It is reasonable to be optimistic about technology, and to make the case for free markets. It is not reasonable to suggest the only mechanism to make this happen is capitalism.

Capitalism drives the fly-wheel of what Cory Doctorow has called "enshitification". There is a constant need to service ever growing numbers in order to sate the appetite of truly pure capitalists, because it's the only thing they care about. This means we see the slow, painful death of multiple products we care about, because the things that make them something we care about are nothing to do with shareholder value, but functional value (even if that function is "fun").

I earnestly believe that technology firms need to start looking away from all forms of external investment - including venture capital - and to alternative economic models and structures of ownership. If you want to build a unicorn, they might get you there, for a while. But it you want to build something that really lasts, that you get to enjoy running and owning as a career (and why would you want to build any other kind of company), there are other models. And those models will eventually win out, because they are fundamentally, foundationally, impossible to "enshitificate".

This paragraph in particular made me laugh:

> 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.

A bunch of VCs whose only work is taking pitch meetings and allocating capital to who they think will win and who will lose, sat down and wrote this. Think about that.

Go start your big idea now with friends and family and people you like, making sure you build it in a way that is resistant to capitalism, but open to exploiting everything the free market offers. Technology is brilliant. But these idiots have all the gear and no idea - they're about to be found out, and their beloved copies of Ayn Rand books aren't going to help them.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#44

> 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. Interestingly, nearly every sentence begins with "we believe," a fundamentally religious statement.

Well, it's a manifesto. That's kind of what a manifesto is - a statement of your positions. If your manifesto is not going to devise those from first principles, then "we believe" isn't a bad way of putting it. (And even if it does devise them from first principles, you still have to justify your first principles.)

That's not a "religion" by normal definitions, but it's perhaps a religious way of stating it. (It could in fact be a secular religion, but the wording of the manifesto isn't enough to show that it is.)

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#46
post #25

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently. We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people throughout history have been adamantly against the rapid progress of technology. The Luddites are the most famous group but there have been lots more. Even if you ignore those people for being frankly a bit weird, the driving force behind technology for the firs…

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…

At the scale of 200 years, you have some absolutely staggering human atrocities, fueled by technology. Colonialism, modern warfare, carpet bombing/nukes, industrialized genocide, truly ghastly urban factory life. We can maybe look at the past few decades as the point at which most of the world finally began to enjoy the effects of the industrial revolution. Although the cost may be the collapse of the carrying capacity of the earth for humans and many, many other species.

There's maybe a world in which we select for the biggest wins for human lifespan, like modern medicine, and filter out the parts that are destructive. But that's not the world we live in.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#47
There's a lot of this that I agree with wholeheartedly and aggressively. One of the worst modern impulses is techno-pessimism in my opinion, but some of it is somewhere between strange and frankly downright stupid.

Take the "patron saints of techno-optimism". It includes "BasedBeffJezos", a pseudonymous Twitter account that subscribes to NRx ideology, and Nick Land, the progenitor of elitist, bigoted NRx ideology. How exactly do these deserve to be on the same list as great Americans like John Von Neumann? Likewise Thomas Sowell, Mises, the fictional John Galt?

This isn't a serious manifesto, and I say this as someone that would love to see techno-optimism pushed further into the forefront of politics and culture. This is Twitter inside-baseball, not designed to convince anyone that isn't already following a smattering of e/acc accounts that spend 1/3 of their time posting racist memes.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#48

> 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'…

Sigh, sad b/c I actually know this, but just a small correction. That's an anonymous Twitter/X account @BasedBeffJezos not the actual head Jeff himself. Founder(?) of the e/acc philosophy

This is worse than the actual Jeff Bezos, who constructed a trillion dollar company that underpins the internet, and is instead just an alt-right NRx troll on the internet.

Re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

#50
Gosh this is weird. So many of the points here seem really good and important, yet many of the other points here are so distorted as to be almost unrecognizable. It reads to me like bad religion.

E.g. he knows about the Aral sea and yet argues against the "Precautionary Principle"!?

(It seems strange to me to mention the Aral sea as an example of Soviet ecological incompetence, which it surely is, but then fail to mention the Salton sea, a similar disaster perpetuated by non-Communists.)

The biggest problem I have with this manifesto is that there's nothing actionable in it. What are we, the little people who aren't techno-elite billionaires, supposed to do now? Just wait for techno-Jesus to save us?

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