The Pessimism of Techno-Optimism
MARC Andreessen recently delivered a “techo-optimist” manifesto via Twitter, which, like many of Andressen’s posts, attracted adulation from tech fans and abuse from tech skeptics. It lays out his views about the benefits of growth, technology, and free markets, and how these interact to solve even our deepest problems like poverty. In order to cut to the chase quickly, I’m willing to stipulate almost all of these points as true: that markets are far more effective at reducing poverty than communist central planning; that overall economic well-being increases with free markets and technological innovation in spite of (and because of) temporary dislocations and disruptions. My problem with the manifesto is not so much what it says, but the many things it fails to say. And those unsaid things mostly relate to the complete insufficiency of technology when it comes to creating the circumstances that make this conversation possible. Andressen’s techno-optimism–and the markets and growth and technological innovation that fuel it–sits atop a mountain of values that he pretends either are not there or do not need to be defended, even as he passionately advocates for the things built on top of the mountain. It’s as if they are floating on a cloud.
The first omission comes in Andreessen’s catalog of the sources of growth. As he sees it, there are three: population, natural resources, and technology. But he has missed one: cooperation. Obviously, people working together can accomplish things they cannot do individually. And it’s not just that two people can install bathtubs more than twice as fast as one person; it’s that people cooperating are not actively impeding or destroying each other’s progress. Social organization itself is a huge historical driver of growth. The success of the American republic, to no small extent, stems from a founding agreement to operate a formally non-sectarian state in which we would all agree to disagree and cooperate on the creation of a single polity in spite of that. True free markets become possible after that agreement.
This omission starts to reveal a whole host of other lacunae in Andreessen’s manifesto–like the real tradeoffs implicit in every new technology. Markets and technology present consumers with choices. Construction techniques and technologies may change such that a builder of tract homes comes into a traditional community and provides many low cost suburban houses with more space and amenities than current dwellings. Let’s say, however, that the buildings are ugly, much uglier than the traditional (and more costly) forms of construction that came before. A consumer may be willing to make this trade because he gains new convenience and more space while losing very little in terms of his experience of his community and landscape–until a thousand of his compatriots do the same, and now the atmosphere has changed irrevocably. The world is noticeably, profoundly uglier. Morale shifts. Values shift. That first consumer didn’t know he was making this trade, and even if he did, what can he really do? “If I don’t buy this house,” he might rightly say, “Someone else will, and this vision of Potterville you’re projecting in front of me will come true anyway, and the only difference is that I won’t have a second bathroom.”
In other words, technology presents us with a constant parade of prisoner’s dilemmas. The prisoner’s dilemma exists, remember, because the prisoners cannot trust each other. When you presume that others will do things that take something from you without compensation or consideration, the fabric of social cooperation on which markets are embroidered, starts to unravel. But Andreessen, failing to recognize the role that social cohesion plays in free markets, likewise fails to understand that the improper management of these tradeoffs has begun to threaten the consensus he must rely on for markets and technology to thrive.
There is a point in Andreessen’s essay where this mistake becomes explicit. He writes,
But families, social cooperation, civics, love of country–these are precisely love operating at scale. And frankly, this “love at scale” is probably more fundamentally important to growth and overall well being than any of the other factors Andreessen mentions, not least because it is logically prior. We can grow population because we scale our love in the act of having children. We scale it further when we value not just our own children, but all of our community’s children. Even further, we care about public health and education, and the list goes on. Free-market advocates like to say that self-interest drives market behavior. Yes, but it is equally true that trade is a phase shift from warlordism, which is a purer form of self-interest. Trade requires some glimmer of inter-subjectivity: you see the counterparty as someone like yourself, who has needs that must be satisfied. Trade requires reciprocity: You follow market rules because you see all the other participants as worthy of some modicum of respect. These nascent moral orientations are, again, examples of love achieving scale. In fact, it requires little exaggeration to say that all of human history–its civilizational progress and setbacks–is a story of love scaling or failing to do so.
Andreessen again compounds his sin of omission with one of commission when he writes that a side benefit of technology is distracting us from doing bad things like “raising armies and starting religions.” Of course, it’s trivially easy to list out the depredations of founders of religions and raisers of armies (especially when the two coincide) but we must also accept that religions are very often explicit attempts to scale love. They demand that one attend to the needs of others with the same diligence one puts into one’s own care. We scale love when we want our neighbors’ businesses to succeed because we care about them as human beings. It’s a fiction that we merely want the local butcher’s business to survive because it has cheap beef. That may be true when business becomes subsumed by national brands, but it’s not true at the level of a community. We feel bad for him if his business fails because we see his humanity and his flourishing is part of our vision of the good. And so the local butcher losing out to the big box store is yet another tradeoff in this history–another implicit part of the technological bargain–that we made when national/global production of everything became technologically possible. We no longer love our merchants. They are no longer neighbors as well as vendors. Again, this transition brought us real advances in prosperity, but it also came at the cost of altering the nature of communities, precisely in ways that retard the scaling of love that made all of this possible in the first place.
Perhaps the most remarkable case of a widely loved technology tearing at the social fabric that enables it lies right in the heart of Andreessen’s manifesto, in the litany he sings to praise technology’s seeming omnipotence at problem solving. “We had a problem of isolation,” he writes, “so we invented the internet.” But this isn’t really what happened, is it? We had a problem of getting command and control systems to survive a nuclear war, and we invented the internet. Entrepreneurs, including Andreessen himself, later saw that information and services could be provided over that network and stepped in to build them. An implicit consequence of that process was, in fact, greater isolation. Yes, it’s true, it’s easy to be in contact, by some definition, via social networks and communication apps. But the nature of those contacts has left people more bereft than ever of deep friendships and physical presence. You can certainly argue about whether the extensiveness and immediacy of teenagers’ group chat relationships makes up for the loss of real world fun and hijinks of prior generations, but it is a vastly different world at a minimum, and the decision, like the shift from the local butcher to the big box store, was never made. It was a consequence that befell all of us. And at a minimum, we all know how immediately dehumanizing the world of virtual communications is. No one seems to feel any obligation to treat people with respect online. Almost everyone succumbs to the temptation to become the most boorish, shouty pontificator when introduced to Twitter. If people walked into a bar and acted the way they do online, they would, charitably, be perceived as mentally ill or, less so, beaten to a pulp. But to be clear, it’s not primarily fear of an ass-whooping that makes people behave in the real world. In the real world, you have all kinds of skin in the game–your desire for social belonging, the demands of conscience, aversion to embarrassing your family–that compel you to try to get along with people physically near you. In the real world, love scales. If you lose this, you lose the enabling factor of all other progress, and technology is powerless to help. In fact, q.e.d., it has significant potential to hurt.
In order to ensure that technology serves us well, rather than the other way around, we have to think about how our adoption of it helps scale love or impede it. Doing the latter will take a wrecking ball to the foundations that technology and markets rest on. In a sense, Andreessen’s techno-optimism shares a common problem with classical Liberalism. It relies on a thing that it is trying to replace. That is, both suggest that the government should refrain from having a point of view about the nature of the good, in favor of giving individuals maximal liberty to pursue and offer competing ideas of the good; yet both require a broad consensus about the good in order for them to be accepted as a basis for social order. If that broad consensus starts to unravel, neither techno-optimism nor liberalism has the tools to argue their own defense well. No piece of technology constitutes an argument that the benefits of technology matter or, more generally, which goods are important to pursue and which are not.
Moreover, it is predictable that the social consensus around these things will unravel at some point, that in the manner of a Gödel incompleteness problem, technology and markets will be unable to answer the question “why technology and markets?” and Andreessen will have his face pressed up against his own odd assertion that love does not scale. Well if that’s true, Mr. Andreessen, then you have two problems: 1) there will be insufficient social cohesion to build the future you want; and 2) it won’t matter anyway, because the whole point of history is to scale love. Going to Mars, without that clear mission, is stupid and boring. It’s a cold rock in space.
I recognize that this is exactly the kind of evangelism that makes techno-optimists queasy, and I have no expectation that anyone will simply accept my assertion that scaling love is the purpose and end of existence. But hopefully you will recognize the pragmatic reality that there is no advance without scaled love, and that it holds back a bloody ocean of chaos and disorder. And for those reasons, the scaling of love is manifestly worth the effort. The pace at which we get to Mars, or if we ever get to Mars, on the other hand, well, there will be wide divergence in view as to whether this matters at all.
Again, I don’t disagree with most of the practical points Andreessen makes and am not trying to shout him down (as if that were possible!). I think, rather, that he needs to get busy–not with flying cars and AI, but with constructing a theory of the good that makes sense, that doesn’t founder on an unreflective and question-begging “Duh!”, that can help us confront the real tradeoffs and potential for harm that comes with new technology, even attractive technologies, and develop a thesis for how we might distinguish those that support the scaling of love from those that diminish it. To fail to do this renders his advocacy for markets and technology moot. These things have extraordinary power to change the world, but demanding blind faith in the random walk of innovation towards some unknown and possibly catastrophic end is no form of optimism, but rather presents a stunted and grotesque vision of human destiny. Like all gestating nihilisms, it will prove unviable in the end.
