One of the worst pieces of content I’ve read all year
It’s time for a rant.
While I couldn’t bring myself to read Marc Andreessen’s “manifesto” in its entirety — even I have limits — I took a few minutes to read the part ominously called “The Enemy.” With the choice of such a strong word, I was intrigued, and this Mastodon post by Dan Gilmor revived my curiosity. So I’ll just quote a few bits and comment on them below.
We have enemies.
Again, maybe a strong choice of word in the world of business and technology; I think the word is used specifically to give this cause more importance than it really has. “Adversaries” was probably too soft for something as ambitious as a “manifesto.”1
Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Bad people are fine though!
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”.
Sustainability, social responsibility, ethics, trust and safety — and here I was naively thinking those were good things…
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.
Derived from Communism? Really?
Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.
There is truly nothing as convincing and honest as an American venture capitalist putting authoritarianism and socialism in the same sentence.
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.
Yes, the fact that this paragraph perfectly applies to the author of the “manifesto” is not lost on me.
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, great reasoning and arguments there (!)2
Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man […]
There’s nothing like quoting Nietzsche to make you appear smarter than you really are.
We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.
We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.
May I suggest this good read to go with this part?
The water is warm. Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.
** Insert “Sure, Jan” gif here **
This whole part was basically hard-to-read shenanigans. It felt very cringeworthy, unnecessary, and not very well written either (so much for embracing the power of AI). The other parts seem more or less the same according to the tweets and posts I have seen.
By simply scrolling and reading another random part, I am truly amazed:
We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.
Well, the Philosopher’s Stone is a myth, so…
We believe everything good is downstream of growth.
“Growth” has become one of the grossest words one can use, and this “manifesto” confirms it.
We believe in not Utopia, but also not Apocalypse.
That’s a precise position, and I’m sure the Nobel Committee is looking at ways to consider this for next year’s round of prizes.3
We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.
OK, Zeus.
What is this “manifesto” good for, anyway? Sure, I’m talking about it, so it must do something. But what does it accomplish if not confirming to the whole world that when extremely rich white guys grow old and out of relevancy, they tend to cling on to their fame in the most ridiculous ways possible. At least some of those guys have the decency to spend billions of dollars on a social media company before going crazy bananas.
UPDATE: I’ve just read Dave Karpf brilliant piece on the matter, and, now that you have gone through my silly rant (sorry!), I think you should too. Excellent, excellent read.