Only Mrs. Brown Can Save Us: Musk, Bezos, and the Failures of the Techno-Utopians
I used to believe, like Matt Damon in The Martian, that we could “science the shit” out of our problems. I was a “Techno-Utopian,” I now realize, and I was wrong.
It is a seductive world-view, this Techno-Utopianism. It is optimistic and positive. It is about solving problems and creating progress. And it is deeply mistaken.
Much techno-utopian thinking comes out of Silicon Valley and the wider tech community. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and their pals envision a world where technology solves all our problems and then solves all the problems that we create with technology, and so on, into infinity. In this view, global warming is simply one of those collateral issues that technology will solve and all will be well.
Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, chalks it up to a misreading of great works of science fiction from Azimov, Adams, Banks, and others. “Muskism,” as Lepore calls it, “is a capitalism in which companies worry…. about all manner of world-ending disasters…from which only techno-billionaires, apparently, can save us.” Lepore concludes, citing Virginia Woolf and Ursula Le Guin, that these marvelous proposed new universes leave no room for “Mrs. Brown” — a stand-in for all the rest of us — the ordinary, non-Musk, non-Bezos branch of humanity.
Lepore’s conclusion, while deeply true, is far too poetic for my overly linear, science-soaked, previously techno-utopian brain to grasp, so let me break it down.
The infinite techno-possibilities for human problem solving have their roots in a philosophy of science advanced by Karl Popper and turbo-charged by David Deutsch, the “father of quantum computing,” — some very smart dudes. In brief, it posits that humans, possibly uniquely in the universe, deploy our imagination and critical thinking to create better and better explanations of the world and our place in it. An excellent guide to this very rich view of human potential can be found in Naval Ravikant’s podcast (also notable for its 3 minute segments, for you fellow worshipers of brevity!).
Anyway, this view of human technical progress seems well thought out and very probably true, as far as it goes. And it goes very far — to infinity, in fact. But astute readers will recognize that, in its infinitude, something is necessarily left out. Since this process of ever improving explanations is infinite, there is always more to learn. Our explanations are always approximate. Wrong, but useful, in a phrase.
And here we find the flaw in techno-utopian thinking. For despite their success in amassing billions of dollars and their deep conviction that they can “science the shit” out of every problem, they are, in terms of their own philosophy, leaving stuff out. Lepore’s Mrs. Brown is just one of the important omissions.
Seriously, if creating explanations to solve problems is the whole game, then anything that gets in the way of faster problem solving is bad. That means government regulation is bad. Saving the environment is bad. Lifting up the down-trodden is bad. All can be tossed aside in our race to achieve our infinite potential. Now, not all techno-utopians believe this. Ravikant, in particular, seems a thoughtful and ethical guy. But it is all too easy to get there, as was uncovered by the dust-up last year around the Slate Star Codex, a gathering place for Silicon Valley bro culture that, in its darker corners, flirted with Neo-fascism and other ugliness.
Mrs. Brown is the only way I see out of this rabbit-hole. Remember? The ordinary rest of us? The one absolute thing that our error-filled and approximate history of progress seems to show us it is that we suck at drawing lines between humans. Every time we try, using color, or class, or religion, or nation, or techno-bro-ism — EVERY time — it ends very, very badly. In war, in oppression, in moral turpitude and in — to quote Nietzsche — “forgetting what we are trying to do.”
What we are trying to do is to keep the human experiment going, forever, so we can reach our infinite potential. Together. Sustainably. Technology will not save us. Only we can save us.
