Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and a Sillicon Valley venture capitalist, published a 5000+ word essay titled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. The essay caused an instant backlash as soon as it was published fueling a pile on of negative feedback on many social media platforms. I didn’t know much about Andreessen, other than having mostly a positive impression of him. He had been making the rounds in the Podcast circuit. That’s how I became more aware of him as a tech intellectual and I’ve found him to be super smart and interesting. All this to say that I was thrown off a bit by the negative reactions and saw the pile on as evidence of cancel culture gone wild.
However, out of all the noise, there were two articles that I’ve found to be solid and fair critiques of the essay. There’s Ed Zitron’s Everything Looks Like a Nail and Dave Karpf’s Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new? Both articles expose why the essay is misguided, problematic, and actually kind of dangerous. Andreessen’s manifesto is essentially saying that “social justice or government regulation is bad’, and that technology accelerationism is good and makes everyone rich.
My favorite take and reaction to the Manifesto was Austin Kleon’s post Ducktales and techno-optimism. His post is what gave me the idea to write this article and it also…
