I agree with the overall thrust of this, or should be easy to convince, but boy does this lack of self-awareness just shout “distance yourself and run, don’t walk!”
> 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.
Really?
Does an uber-wealthy capital allocator publishing a social manifesto seriously not see that this comment at least justifies a half-assed explanation as to why it doesn’t apply to the author?
Maybe something like, “my personal chef Instacarts my dog’s peanut butter from Whole Foods, just like everyone else, so I am not totally detached from reality!”
It's also a little hard to square that enemy with the earlier enemy of "...anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness." So we're opposed to credentialed experts in favor of "the real world" but also opposed to those who don't care about merit or achievement? Are credentials and expertise not a reasonable measure of merit and achievement and aren't excessive appeals to the wisdom of the average textbook anti-merit populist nonsense?
I'm actually a fan of the overall idea of techno optimism. But it's hard to get behind a version that starts out with the premise that we should exclude experts who've spent their lifetime focused on getting really good at knowing WTF they are talking about presumably in favor of billionaire VCs who can speak to the "real world". Don't get me wrong, if we're going to become a galaxy spanning civilization or whatever, we'll certainly need large and regular doses of reality. But we'll also need a lot of credentialed expertise.
> Are credentials and expertise not a reasonable measure of merit and achievement
I think the assumption behind their statement is that this in fact the case.
Media/politics use the words credentials and expertise interchangeably, and credentials invariably means those issued by universities. So a professor is assumed to always be an expert, even if they can't evidence that in reality. The result is a large number of ivory tower academics who call themselves experts in things, but who have no skin in the game and whose theories are never tested against reality. Hence the replication crisis, which Marc Andreessen is on the record as being very concerned/aware about.
Determining actual expertise is the Number 1 problem faced by both VCs and startup founders, and those are both communities who are famously rather indifferent to credentials.
I actually agree with the idea that we should judge people based on their popularity with customers rather than their peers. Credential are very often indicative of the former
Also: a leader and beneficiary of various enormous centrally-planned economic units that only made him rich by carefully and deliberately avoiding competitive market forces (this is practically the only way to get rich—hypothetical perfect markets drive profits toward zero, you make the big bucks by ensuring you experience as little competitive pressure as possible) claims without qualification that central planning can’t beat market signals.
It’d sure be interesting if he took his own idea seriously and tried to apply it to the companies he has a major stake in. If his stated hard-line position is correct, it should make his companies do much better. If he actually believes it, he’ll surely try. Right?
(f) play God with anyone else's life with total insulation from the consequences.
That seems to describe developers, and this VC was one, Silicon Valley VC and/or SBF-types. Who the heck even comes close to (f) except Big Tech.
With respect to (e), "unelected", does anyone know when the next ICANN, ARIN, or ISOC "elections" will be held. Even assuming hypothetically the web is not controlled by private companies, and "non-profits" are actually governing it, the internet is not and has never been a democracy.
It's a truly hilarious quote, even if taken out of context. It's like he is describing himself and his portfolio companies. Who is the enemy. Look in the mirror.
But maybe SillyCon Valley VC knows the best way to communicate with developers who will potentially work like dogs to make him money is to speak their language. Maybe he is a meme maker.
I think the idea is that VCs and private companies can't force their will onto people. They can indulge in abstract theories, but it never becomes legislation that others have to abide to (e.g. laws that curtail speech meant to "protect democracy")
They can socially engineer but voluntarily, or in other words propose social norms in form of ux and product. But things get out of hand very quickly in a market. For instance, no one designed the method people use for retweeting, it wasn't engineered. Some decisions were made but with limited desires effect.
Similarly the market connects you to the real world. You put a product out there and it loves and dies on its usefulness to others.
Same with the rest. Everything is voluntary, which is kind of the point as opposed to mandated from top down.
Even big tech like Google have trouble controlling their own inventions. Think of SEO spam and bots, which is a constant battle. That's an example of the worse, but there are good things like distributing unfiltered information.
We have seen how developers use the term "God-mode" in their software. (I will cite examples if requested.) From this end user's perspective such terminology suggests some strange if not comical delusions of grandeur.
Academic credentials in the US, especially at the 'prestige' institutions, have been hollowed out quite a lot by politics, groupthink, & logrolling.
Large government subsidies, & a self-replicating nearly-hereditary elite, have insulated much of their output from accountability to the broader society, and even from accountability to the truth.
Even an "uber-wealthy capital allocator" with a big personal-wealth buffer faces sharper feedback from today's concrete & changing reality – losses from mistakes, gains from smart choices – than tenured academics, or bureaucrats with lifelong sinecures.
In the text, he's not arguing from authority, or personal biography – so why would he need to waste any words about his personal particulars? (They're in the public record if you need them as part of your own heuristics.)
He's saying some ideas, & some systems, are better – not ranking people by class. Further, a "manifesto" like this is a resonant call to draw like minds, moreso than any sophisticated apologetic to try to convince doubters. (For that: read the other authors he name-checks.)
To obsess on the speaker's characteristic – their "self-awareness", their tone, their inability to "read the room", their station in life – rather than their words & ideas is a big part of the downbeat but in many places entrenched attitude he's criticizing.
Per Eleanor Roosevelt: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
Ah, I see. We’re supposed to engage these ideas in the “reality” in which interlocutors don’t have motivations, incentives, perspectives, personal histories, or attitudes toward topics that are revealed in their tone.
Which reality is that again?
In that reality, does this writing warrant more attention, or less?
Presumably we’re reading this to understand what Marc thinks, and to isolate the stated words from their context is naivety, not wisdom.
There are several “techno-optimist” (and adjacent) horses one can hitch their wagon to. My point is that everything about this screed — content, context, subtext, and omission — hints at this particular horse being pointed a bit askew.
The “wanting to distance oneself” is an extremely pragmatic reaction: if you believe similar arguments need to be made, you have a legitimate interest in putting forth good versions of those arguments. He has a big platform and this will be portrayed as “the case” for techno-optimism, not to mention the attitude and tone.
I’m not really sure what the purpose of publishing something like this is. It doesn’t really seem intended to convince anyone of anything? Is the controversy the point? Galvanizing some “base?”
Most plausibly, it’s for attracting other ultra-wealthy/ultra-powerful (and yes, unelected!) LPs, which would make the tone rather ominous in my opinion.
The manifesto comes from a guy whose business model for the past 3 years was grifting people into the NFT hype, so either he's just another conman selling a vision or a megalomaniac completely lacking self-awareness.
I gotta admit, I'm really impressed by Marc's ability to completely subvert so many historical facts and figures to "support" his self-contradictory line of thought. This is just on a whole other level - even Trump would be jealous.
The e/acc crowd is just _completely_ insane, at this point. I'd laugh hard if not for the fact that people like Marc have economic power over the rest of us.
I like how “we” prefer intrinsic motivation (near the end) but UBI is a bad idea (earlyish-middle, I think) because people need work to be happy (it’s for their own good, you see) and they won’t do any work if we don’t threaten them with poverty—the huge amounts of unpaid work ordinary people already perform, despite needing to also work for pay, is evidently invisible to our economic genius and Randian-Nietchien super-man, Mr Horowitz.
Clearly has a different sort of people in mind with these two ideas. Friggin’ elitist masquerading as some savior of humanity. Gross.
He's perfectly self aware that he has rejected his own class. It's weird that people think that's impossible or something and insist that he must be one in the same.
This isn't it, he was never part of the class in the first place and he does not share its insular self-serving worldview.
He didn't go to Harvard, he went to Illinois. He built his own tech firm when taking that path wasn't even a thing for people to do, he did not inherit banking interests.
The piece is a view from the know-it-all UN-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.
There’s a lot to unpack in the quoted passage, but it is not an ad hominem attack. That you think it is, and then turn around to make an ad hominem argument of your own explains your misinterpretation.
I think this clause makes it literally hard to parse the argument. That’s because of who he is, sure, but that’s not an ad hominem attack on it.
The peanut butter comment was snarky, I’ll admit that! The point is that it’d be a remarkable achievement if somehow he hasn’t lost touch with a huge portion of most people’s everyday reality.
This was strange and disappointing thing to read. Why such a conspiratorial tone ("we are being lied to", "we have enemies", etc.)?
Since this is written by Marc Andreessen, I did a search for "crypto" and "web 3", but no results came up. Isn't that strange coming from someone who was so prominent in promoting and advocating for a crypto-based future? I guess that one didn't pan out…
"Our enemy is the ivory tower" is a bit rich coming from a billionaire who lives in one of the most exclusive California communities (and vociferously opposes any development in that community, despite loudly proselytizing to others that "it's time to build").
Looking at the "Patron Saints", after skipping the meme-posting pseudonymous Twitter accounts, I am pretty sure university professor is the most common profession. The ivory tower is the enemy indeed. And it does seem distasteful to use the names of dead scientists and intellectuals like John Von Neumann and Richard Feynman to burnish the image of this polemic.
The Patron Saints section is where the truth is laid bare because it contains Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. He was quite in the business of writing Manifestos. Check which one he co-authored in 1919.
Politically, the Manifesto calls for:
* Universal suffrage with a lowered voting age to 18 years, and voting and electoral office eligibility for all ages 25 and up;
* Proportional representation on a regional basis;
* Voting for women;
* Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector;
* The abolition of the Italian Senate (at the time, the Senate, as the upper house of parliament, was by process elected by the wealthier citizens, but were in reality direct appointments by the king. It has been described as a sort of extended council of the crown);
* The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers.
In labor and social policy, the Manifesto calls for:
* The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers;
* A minimum wage;
* The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions;
* To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants;
* Reorganization of the railways and the public transport sector;
* Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance;
* Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.
In military affairs, the Manifesto advocates:
Creation of a short-service national militia with specifically defensive responsibilities;
Armaments factories are to be nationalized;
A peaceful but competitive foreign policy.
In finance, the Manifesto advocates:
* A strong extraordinary tax on capital of a progressive nature, which takes the form of true partial expropriation of all wealth;
* The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor;
* Revision of all contracts for military provisions;
* The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.
Marc has been meeting up with neoreactionaries, this is a normal viewpoint in SV VC circles. See how his article recommends the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto.
I used to have a similar worldview. I read about the consequences of technological advance in the past always with the present firmly in mind. Who cares if there were initially some unintended consequences and collateral damage? Things got better. Advances in technology have usually increased the size of the pie. It's easy to ignore the bumps in a trendline that's steadly headed skyward. However, when you look more closely, it's not just technological advances that keep things headed in the right direction. Social advances, critically those that help divide the pie more equally, are also responsible for the bounty we enjoy today.
e.g. The industrial revolution is typically credited with a great leap forward in quality of life for the average citizen, but it actually did the opposite at first. Workers crowded into dirty, unhealthy cities and started to live shorter, nastier, more brutish lives. Initially, many English workers were legally barred from seeking employment elsewhere. If you didn't like the wages you were getting at one job and tried to take another, you could be sent to jail. It's hard to ask for a raise or even safety equipment when the alternative is jail! It was the concentration of workers in cities that allowed labor movements to form and demand changes that granted more people a fairer share of the pie, such as the right to change jobs.
Technological advance is generally a good thing, but it's social advances that harness it for all. Be wary of philosophies that ignore part of the equation. If we want to avoid bumpy periods where life gets worse for the majority of us before getting better again, we can make conscious choices about how to use new technologies.
Absolutely. People act like we can't or shouldn't seek both technological and social advancement. Social advancement is the key difference between a dystopian and a utopian technologically advanced future.
I wouldn't say I "used to" have a similar worldview. In fact I find myself agreeing with most every passage in the manifesto. Agreeing with "yes, but..." - because while we can assert our "belief" in things, when those beliefs are taken for granted while not lining up with actual reality, they form their own oppressive dogma! For example it's quite rich for a VC to make assertions about free markets while simultaneously having drastically altered their investment strategy due to government ending the decade long feeding trough of near-zero interest rates. Hence the general criticism of being out of touch.
Your comment is a good synthesis point. In fact one might say the amount of criticism and nay-saying is directly related to the inequality, either economic or social (dis)enfranchisement of lacking purpose. So pushing in the opposite direction isn't really helping the cause of growth, but rather causing that gulf to widen and the criticism of "techno optimism" to grow.
The fundamental problem I see is making sure governments pass productive laws that encourage computational wealth to remain distributed, as opposed to authoritarian laws that actually cement routine corporate control while reserving ultimate control to the state. The latter approach basically only works with quantifiable monetary wealth, in that the state can collect taxes and then convert them into material welfare. But this approach doesn't work with non-fungible liberty, where the distributed structure must be preserved rather than ever being centralized to begin with. eg GDPR vs TikTok hysteria. Or antitrust enforcement to end this anticompetitive bundling of software, services, and hosting, versus "eliminate sec 230".
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 first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive. Those were definitely noble goals. Compare that to the past 200 or so years and much of the progress has been about the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few extraordinarily rich people. The technological gains have been spread widely, sure, but they've come at a high cost. That's different to the past where the gains have come with very little cost.
We could transform society to benefit everyone using technology if we wanted to. I suspect we won't though. We'll sell a few AI powered gadgets to the masses, and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people. That's not really much of a win.
The Luddites were not anti-technology per se. Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1]. Given the rest of your comment, it seems the Luddites are your natural allies.
Related HN discussion on [1] from 3 weeks ago: [2]
> Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1]
I find discussions about the Luddites online to be deeply illustrative not of the Luddites themselves but of a person's political beliefs. The Luddites did indeed fight for their community and livelihood, but theirs came by dismantling another one. For hundreds of years prior the textiles trade was dominated by the Mughal Empire. British colonization in South Asia, fed by a multitude of factors including industrialization, dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market and eventually catapulted British textile production to the world stage. This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. The Luddites then did not want to turn back the textile market fully back to a world dominated by South Asia but into the middle where they owned the means of production.
Accelerationists view Luddites as obstructionists. Labor sympanthizers view Luddites as a movement for labor protections. The wider view of history paints a more subtle picture.
> the driving force behind technology for the first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive
This seems naive to me (setting aside the issue of even defining or identifying "the driving force behind technology"). The Romans were famously engineering-minded and they certainly weren't doing it just for the improvement of the human condition; it had material and political consequences which they wanted to see realized. From my understanding of history this is true in pretty much any era and any location throughout history. Certainly there have always been people inventing new tools for the fun of it, or to improve their and others' lives, but it's not at all clear to me how you could show that the balance between these motivations has shifted so dramatically only in the last ~200 years. It seems far more plausible (to me) that technological development has always been a fulcrum for accumulation of wealth and power, and that our current moment is better explained as a shift in whose wealth and power is benefited (kings and emperors replaced by multinational corps and capital owners), rather than a complete reorientation of the nature of technology itself.
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. This thing works, and works dramatically well. We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. My wife and I noticed this the other day. They fought wars back in the day for a fraction of the spices that I buy ethically today.
We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s.
Some of us do. If you're at the poorer end of society things are still pretty damn bleak. People live with long term treatable illness. People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. Sure, those of us who can afford them have lots of shiny gadgets that save us from a bit of manual labor, but that's not really worth much if stepping outside of your front door means you're scared of being mugged.
I'm not saying I'd give any of it up. Hell no. I'm saying that a few less rockets and a few more homeless shelters might go some way to helping balance things out a little.
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.
He literally cites not-recent examples (and his list is far from exhaustive) of technological skepticism in the paragraph right before. You can rebut that silly claim with his own text, you don’t even need to reach beyond it.
In a world where abundance reigns, the old structures and the leaders who champion them fade into obsolescence. The energy that once went into seeking more begins to flow into sharing, nurturing, and sustaining. In this transformed landscape, resource hoarding and centralized control are not just out of place; they become barriers to the collective human journey toward wisdom and spiritual fulfillment.
When everyone's basic needs are met effortlessly, the focus of life shifts from surviving to thriving, from acquiring to becoming. In such a world, market mechanisms and venture capital don't just lose relevance; they begin to feel like vestiges of an era defined by limitations that no longer exist. The skills once lauded for amassing resources lose their sheen when the quest becomes one of meaning, connection, and collective wellbeing.
The hearts and minds of people turn toward unlocking human potential, fostering creativity, and deepening relationships. In this new reality, leaders who can guide us toward spiritual and emotional enrichment will supersede those who have mastered the art of material accumulation.
In this context, the prominence of individuals like Andreessen, along with constructs such as markets and money, would naturally diminish into insignificance. The irony lies in the fact that such a manifesto would even be conceived, indicating a profound disconnect from the emergent realities of a post-scarcity world.
Every day people get up, enforce the laws, execute the national defense, bury themselves up to their elbows in humans’ abdomens to heal their broken bodies, and pick your turnips.
The world is not self-executing.
Market mechanisms coordinate that activity by transmitting information through the price signal. In their absence, the material abundance you mistake for post-scarcity would quickly collapse.
Why use a throwaway to say that? It’s just truth in the current system, and the current system is the most abundant we’ve had for any significant duration.
It seems that you are describing a utopia, where there are no more problems to solve, other than the purpose of our own existence, and the reconciliation of our mortality in our minds. Although I do think that we can get to a point where things are pretty damn good, perhaps even as good as you describe, I don't think that humans' desire for growth and appetite for problem solving will be quenched. Even if all of our basic and supra-basic needs were met, we would become preoccupied with preserving ourselves from extraterrestrial threats - asteroids, our sun burning out, our earth not being able to permanently sustain us in one way or another, etc. If that's the case, then the desire for planetary defense and intergalactic travel will ensure that techno-capatalist forces are alive and well.
If you are talking about a society that has gotten past that point already, then all bets are off as to what their lives are like.
While the term 'utopia' might imply a final state of perfection, what I describe is more akin to an inevitable transformation, one that you can almost sense unfolding around us. Machine intelligence is advancing at an unprecedented pace, economic landscapes are shifting, and sociopolitical tensions are reaching critical points. This is not the end of a journey but a metamorphosis toward a different way of life.
Unlike a utopia, which suggests a static state where all problems are solved, this new paradigm acknowledges the insatiable human drive for growth and problem-solving. It doesn't eliminate challenges; it redefines them. In a world where our basic and even our complex needs are met, our focus would naturally shift to grander scales—planetary defense, interstellar travel, and even the quest for existential understanding. However, the metrics of value and systems of exchange that govern this new reality would be fundamentally different, rendering current techno-capitalist forces obsolete in their traditional forms.
One could call liberal democracy a utopia, when compared to feudalism that preceded it. There will always be problems to solve, what the OP is describing is not the absence of problems, but the evolution of social and economic relations in the same way capitalism was the evolution of social and economic relations from feudalism.
really well written reply, much I agree with. Except one part about markets. I think even in the Age of Abundance, market forces will still be present. But I think they will be more like how trees grow to the light, or roots to the water. We will still need signals for efficiency and regrowth.
Hard to say the same about money. I can't see a world without value, and I can't comprehend a system with value but no means to exchange value (money).
In envisioning a future landscape, I see energy—both its generation and consumption—as well as human attention serving as the core currencies of value. These measures transcend the limitations of material wealth, opening avenues for a more holistic understanding of worth. The question of whether this will manifest as a 'market' is less clear, but what is certain is that it would be fundamentally distinct from the systems we navigate today. The incentives driving such an ecosystem would be radically different, to the extent that calling it a market or associating it with money, as we currently understand them, would likely be a misnomer.
In this envisioned system, the nature of transactions could also change fundamentally. Currently, transactions are exchanges that often end relationships; you pay for a good, receive it, and both parties move on. In a framework centered on energy and attention, transactions could become cyclical or ongoing, fostering long-term relationships and community engagement. This extends the concept of "value" beyond one-off exchanges into a more interconnected, perhaps even symbiotic, system.
Just some thoughts from a nobody on a tiny glowing screen.
I don't understand why people find this idea compelling. I find it without any supporting evidence that this is how it would turn out. They hypothesis is unproven and doesn't match my own observed anecdata around how people function. Yet it seems like everytime it comes up everyone thinks it's obvious.
I just fundamentally don't think a post scarcity society functions even remotely the way everyone else seems to think it would.
We are already at a point where no human needs to be starving on this earth. Most jobs are useless and unemployment is a constant necessity of the system we live under that benefits elites yet we have all been brainwashed to view unemployed people as the scourge of society rather than the necessary victims of an unequal system. Social change is what creates better living standards, not technological change. Both help, but you can have technological advancement without significant social advancement and that's bad.
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.
It's the very definition of sophomoric. A lot of half-baked intellectualism from someone who doesn't actually understand (or pretends not to) any of the actual principles. Surely any Econ 101 student could tell you that Economics isn't the study of capital markets. Things like a clean environment, a vote or personal safety follows the laws of scarcity economics. Addressing the environmental costs of industrialization is absolutely part and parcel of free market economics and the agitators for a clean environment are just trying to get those costs priced in. Declaring them as being opposed to growth because they oppose technological advancement is facile at best and a deliberate straw man at worst.
What worries me most is that this guy is supposed to be the inspirational leader of many startup founders and technologists, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Reading this made me really sad.
It's actually hard for me to conjure the strength to write and share an appropriate response, and explain why.
Let me just mention one of many thoughts. Mark Andreessen cites a number of Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism, "In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist."
One of them is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
This is what FTM writes in his Manifesto of Futurism [0]. (original Italian first, then English translation).
""Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra - sola igiene del mondo - il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei liberatori, le belle idee per cui si muore e il disprezzo della donna."
"We will glorify war - the only true hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman"
In 2023, reading about the "glory of war", and the "scorn of woman", should be enough to know what's needed to judge this guy.
Mark, you are really smart and successful and most people would envy your fame and wealth and intelligence, but you need to grow up for once and realize how sick some of your ideas are.
The idea of someone unironicly promoting Marinetti (a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto) in 2023 is mind-blowing. I get the idea of wanting to be optimistic about technology, but Marinetti is a cautionary tale of how optimism about technology can morph into disdain for humanity. He’s an anti-role model, the thing we need to be careful not to become.
See the deafening silence of the media on Nazis in Ukraine, and the recent mind-blowing case of the heads of state of Canada, Ukraine, and the entire Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation to a literal SS officer, which has triggered discussions (even here on HN) in the vein of “actually some Nazis were good guys”, which would also be unthinkable just a few years ago.
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's frequent and regular push toward monopoly power.
I really want to love this manifesto. This is my one sticking point. Regulatory capture, monopolies, and cartels are the fatal flaw in this techno-optimism, and they break everything. Let's say I subscribe to this wonderful story Marc tells. Please tell me the purpose of government if it is not to destroy cartels and monopolies. They are every bit as bad as the government, which is a type of monopoly itself.
Isn't that them speaking from multiple sides of the mouth? It's a manifesto by... venture capitalists. They have a very specific and diverse audience that they want to read this.
I mean, there is not going to be any low-interest capital flowing in to fuel all these techno-optimist ideals if the start-ups can't later be acquired by the existing monopolies.
Point me to a resistant monopoly or cartel and I will show you a government granted/supported one. Free markets are naturally resistant through free competition (startups!) and, you know, laws.
Right. Land and air telecommunications are almost totally controlled by Verizon and AT&T. They are also some of the largest cable companies, although Comcast is a competitor. Although Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and we can start getting into the media monopoly.
We can go through business by business and see the rise of monopolies and oligopolies. Universal owns half of the US music market - Universal, Sony and Warner own over 80% of the US music market. Accounting is done by the Big Four, advertising by its own Big Four.
Just down the line - consolidation, oligopoly, monopoly. That is what markets produce. Standard Oil reversed its breakup into ExxonMobil, as did the Baby Bells into Verizon and AT&T. Even the government intervention into the monopolies gets reversed.
What organization has a media monopoly? You have access to the internet, with which you can access media from individuals all the way up to multiple large corporations.
On the national level, there are multiple sources of news (NYT/News Corp/Disney/Comcast/Paramount/WaPo/LATimes/etc). There are lots of sources of professionally and amateur produced entertainment. Apple/Amazon/Comcast/Disney/Sony/WarnerBrosDiscovery/Paramount/etc.
If anything, the monopoly exists on wired broadband to peoples homes, which is usually only available from one seller.
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
> I mean, the first person on their "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism" is Jeff Bezos
No, it's an anonymous Twitter account, you read the name wrong, "Beff Jezos" (sic), not "Jeff Bezos".
Also if you look at the purest form of markets, which is probably high frequency trading, there are no monopolies and no cartels. It's an intensely competitive industry with relatively small profits given their transaction volume.
I don't think that's correct. Access to the fiber links or colocation in a facility is not only ridiculously expensive you have to know the right people (the cartel) to get it done.
I can't just offer a crazy amount of money and get access, the other major players have to let me play.
If that's "the purest form" of something, give me the dirty version any day.
An utterly useless human activity, that does nothing for actual humanity but simply serves as a wealth redistribution technique shared among a tiny number of highly-self-interested individuals ... it might be "pure" but it's not "pure" in any way.
HFT is a dance in the shadows of the most highly-regulated practices in history (securities exchanges), I don't think it's a good example of "pure" markets being immune to monopolies.
Each of those regulations is a tombstone for the monopolies and cartels that came before, and there will absolutely be more tombstones to come. The history of the stock market is rife with corruption, stock manipulation, and short-thrifting the general public. The great fortunes of the 20th century were made on the backs of practices that are all kinds of illegal today, and with good reason.
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.
Yeah. If anything, monopolies and cartels spring into being within a free market. Over and over and over again.
They're so dangerous to free markets because they hack the core freedoms into a positive feedback loop. Collusion beats naked competition; it's why our ancestors evolved to form societies instead of eating each other.
Even absent contracts (which exist to enable collusion) the iterated prisoner's dilemma and its generalizations seem to be solvable by tacit agreement (in the two party case, by tit for tat).
The only people who maintain that markets have the perfect competition property are those who define markets this way. Their existence is left as an exercise.
Free markets allow for and even encourage monopolies and cartels in the short term because those drive up profit margins. But over a longer time scale most are eventually destroyed by missing a disruptive innovation.
Readit News
> 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.
Really?
Does an uber-wealthy capital allocator publishing a social manifesto seriously not see that this comment at least justifies a half-assed explanation as to why it doesn’t apply to the author?
Maybe something like, “my personal chef Instacarts my dog’s peanut butter from Whole Foods, just like everyone else, so I am not totally detached from reality!”
I'm actually a fan of the overall idea of techno optimism. But it's hard to get behind a version that starts out with the premise that we should exclude experts who've spent their lifetime focused on getting really good at knowing WTF they are talking about presumably in favor of billionaire VCs who can speak to the "real world". Don't get me wrong, if we're going to become a galaxy spanning civilization or whatever, we'll certainly need large and regular doses of reality. But we'll also need a lot of credentialed expertise.
I think the assumption behind their statement is that this in fact the case.
Media/politics use the words credentials and expertise interchangeably, and credentials invariably means those issued by universities. So a professor is assumed to always be an expert, even if they can't evidence that in reality. The result is a large number of ivory tower academics who call themselves experts in things, but who have no skin in the game and whose theories are never tested against reality. Hence the replication crisis, which Marc Andreessen is on the record as being very concerned/aware about.
Determining actual expertise is the Number 1 problem faced by both VCs and startup founders, and those are both communities who are famously rather indifferent to credentials.
It’d sure be interesting if he took his own idea seriously and tried to apply it to the companies he has a major stake in. If his stated hard-line position is correct, it should make his companies do much better. If he actually believes it, he’ll surely try. Right?
(b) engage in social engineering
(c) disconnect from the real world
(d) delude themselves
(e) appoint themselves
(f) play God with anyone else's life with total insulation from the consequences.
That seems to describe developers, and this VC was one, Silicon Valley VC and/or SBF-types. Who the heck even comes close to (f) except Big Tech.
With respect to (e), "unelected", does anyone know when the next ICANN, ARIN, or ISOC "elections" will be held. Even assuming hypothetically the web is not controlled by private companies, and "non-profits" are actually governing it, the internet is not and has never been a democracy.
It's a truly hilarious quote, even if taken out of context. It's like he is describing himself and his portfolio companies. Who is the enemy. Look in the mirror.
But maybe SillyCon Valley VC knows the best way to communicate with developers who will potentially work like dogs to make him money is to speak their language. Maybe he is a meme maker.
Monsanto. Nestle. Enron, Goldman Sachs, the Pinkertons. BP, Chevron, Woodside, Rio Tinto, BHP.
They can socially engineer but voluntarily, or in other words propose social norms in form of ux and product. But things get out of hand very quickly in a market. For instance, no one designed the method people use for retweeting, it wasn't engineered. Some decisions were made but with limited desires effect.
Similarly the market connects you to the real world. You put a product out there and it loves and dies on its usefulness to others.
Same with the rest. Everything is voluntary, which is kind of the point as opposed to mandated from top down.
Even big tech like Google have trouble controlling their own inventions. Think of SEO spam and bots, which is a constant battle. That's an example of the worse, but there are good things like distributing unfiltered information.
(g) exhibit uncredentialed university dropout know-it-all worldview
Large government subsidies, & a self-replicating nearly-hereditary elite, have insulated much of their output from accountability to the broader society, and even from accountability to the truth.
Even an "uber-wealthy capital allocator" with a big personal-wealth buffer faces sharper feedback from today's concrete & changing reality – losses from mistakes, gains from smart choices – than tenured academics, or bureaucrats with lifelong sinecures.
In the text, he's not arguing from authority, or personal biography – so why would he need to waste any words about his personal particulars? (They're in the public record if you need them as part of your own heuristics.)
He's saying some ideas, & some systems, are better – not ranking people by class. Further, a "manifesto" like this is a resonant call to draw like minds, moreso than any sophisticated apologetic to try to convince doubters. (For that: read the other authors he name-checks.)
To obsess on the speaker's characteristic – their "self-awareness", their tone, their inability to "read the room", their station in life – rather than their words & ideas is a big part of the downbeat but in many places entrenched attitude he's criticizing.
Per Eleanor Roosevelt: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
Which reality is that again?
In that reality, does this writing warrant more attention, or less?
Presumably we’re reading this to understand what Marc thinks, and to isolate the stated words from their context is naivety, not wisdom.
There are several “techno-optimist” (and adjacent) horses one can hitch their wagon to. My point is that everything about this screed — content, context, subtext, and omission — hints at this particular horse being pointed a bit askew.
This feels a bit of an extreme reaction to me, I don't try and read into gotchas in writing and use them to "run away". Instead it makes me:
1. View the writing with skepticism
2. Try to understand what Andreessen thinks makes him not one of those ivory tower figures, because I certainly think of him as one.
2 seems the more insightful one to me, but certainly 1 qualifies how I view his writing.
I’m not really sure what the purpose of publishing something like this is. It doesn’t really seem intended to convince anyone of anything? Is the controversy the point? Galvanizing some “base?”
Most plausibly, it’s for attracting other ultra-wealthy/ultra-powerful (and yes, unelected!) LPs, which would make the tone rather ominous in my opinion.
The e/acc crowd is just _completely_ insane, at this point. I'd laugh hard if not for the fact that people like Marc have economic power over the rest of us.
Clearly has a different sort of people in mind with these two ideas. Friggin’ elitist masquerading as some savior of humanity. Gross.
He didn't go to Harvard, he went to Illinois. He built his own tech firm when taking that path wasn't even a thing for people to do, he did not inherit banking interests.
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The peanut butter comment was snarky, I’ll admit that! The point is that it’d be a remarkable achievement if somehow he hasn’t lost touch with a huge portion of most people’s everyday reality.
Since this is written by Marc Andreessen, I did a search for "crypto" and "web 3", but no results came up. Isn't that strange coming from someone who was so prominent in promoting and advocating for a crypto-based future? I guess that one didn't pan out…
"Our enemy is the ivory tower" is a bit rich coming from a billionaire who lives in one of the most exclusive California communities (and vociferously opposes any development in that community, despite loudly proselytizing to others that "it's time to build").
Looking at the "Patron Saints", after skipping the meme-posting pseudonymous Twitter accounts, I am pretty sure university professor is the most common profession. The ivory tower is the enemy indeed. And it does seem distasteful to use the names of dead scientists and intellectuals like John Von Neumann and Richard Feynman to burnish the image of this polemic.
Politically, the Manifesto calls for: * Universal suffrage with a lowered voting age to 18 years, and voting and electoral office eligibility for all ages 25 and up; * Proportional representation on a regional basis; * Voting for women; * Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector; * The abolition of the Italian Senate (at the time, the Senate, as the upper house of parliament, was by process elected by the wealthier citizens, but were in reality direct appointments by the king. It has been described as a sort of extended council of the crown); * The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers.
In labor and social policy, the Manifesto calls for: * The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers; * A minimum wage; * The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions; * To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants; * Reorganization of the railways and the public transport sector; * Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance; * Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.
In military affairs, the Manifesto advocates:
Creation of a short-service national militia with specifically defensive responsibilities; Armaments factories are to be nationalized; A peaceful but competitive foreign policy.
In finance, the Manifesto advocates:
* A strong extraordinary tax on capital of a progressive nature, which takes the form of true partial expropriation of all wealth; * The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor; * Revision of all contracts for military provisions; * The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.
Marc has been meeting up with neoreactionaries, this is a normal viewpoint in SV VC circles. See how his article recommends the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto.
e.g. The industrial revolution is typically credited with a great leap forward in quality of life for the average citizen, but it actually did the opposite at first. Workers crowded into dirty, unhealthy cities and started to live shorter, nastier, more brutish lives. Initially, many English workers were legally barred from seeking employment elsewhere. If you didn't like the wages you were getting at one job and tried to take another, you could be sent to jail. It's hard to ask for a raise or even safety equipment when the alternative is jail! It was the concentration of workers in cities that allowed labor movements to form and demand changes that granted more people a fairer share of the pie, such as the right to change jobs.
Technological advance is generally a good thing, but it's social advances that harness it for all. Be wary of philosophies that ignore part of the equation. If we want to avoid bumpy periods where life gets worse for the majority of us before getting better again, we can make conscious choices about how to use new technologies.
Your comment is a good synthesis point. In fact one might say the amount of criticism and nay-saying is directly related to the inequality, either economic or social (dis)enfranchisement of lacking purpose. So pushing in the opposite direction isn't really helping the cause of growth, but rather causing that gulf to widen and the criticism of "techno optimism" to grow.
The fundamental problem I see is making sure governments pass productive laws that encourage computational wealth to remain distributed, as opposed to authoritarian laws that actually cement routine corporate control while reserving ultimate control to the state. The latter approach basically only works with quantifiable monetary wealth, in that the state can collect taxes and then convert them into material welfare. But this approach doesn't work with non-fungible liberty, where the distributed structure must be preserved rather than ever being centralized to begin with. eg GDPR vs TikTok hysteria. Or antitrust enforcement to end this anticompetitive bundling of software, services, and hosting, versus "eliminate sec 230".
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 first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive. Those were definitely noble goals. Compare that to the past 200 or so years and much of the progress has been about the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few extraordinarily rich people. The technological gains have been spread widely, sure, but they've come at a high cost. That's different to the past where the gains have come with very little cost.
We could transform society to benefit everyone using technology if we wanted to. I suspect we won't though. We'll sell a few AI powered gadgets to the masses, and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people. That's not really much of a win.
Related HN discussion on [1] from 3 weeks ago: [2]
[1]: https://archive.ph/ZUiC7 ("Rethinking the Luddites," The New Yorker)
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37664682
I find discussions about the Luddites online to be deeply illustrative not of the Luddites themselves but of a person's political beliefs. The Luddites did indeed fight for their community and livelihood, but theirs came by dismantling another one. For hundreds of years prior the textiles trade was dominated by the Mughal Empire. British colonization in South Asia, fed by a multitude of factors including industrialization, dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market and eventually catapulted British textile production to the world stage. This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. The Luddites then did not want to turn back the textile market fully back to a world dominated by South Asia but into the middle where they owned the means of production.
Accelerationists view Luddites as obstructionists. Labor sympanthizers view Luddites as a movement for labor protections. The wider view of history paints a more subtle picture.
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This seems naive to me (setting aside the issue of even defining or identifying "the driving force behind technology"). The Romans were famously engineering-minded and they certainly weren't doing it just for the improvement of the human condition; it had material and political consequences which they wanted to see realized. From my understanding of history this is true in pretty much any era and any location throughout history. Certainly there have always been people inventing new tools for the fun of it, or to improve their and others' lives, but it's not at all clear to me how you could show that the balance between these motivations has shifted so dramatically only in the last ~200 years. It seems far more plausible (to me) that technological development has always been a fulcrum for accumulation of wealth and power, and that our current moment is better explained as a shift in whose wealth and power is benefited (kings and emperors replaced by multinational corps and capital owners), rather than a complete reorientation of the nature of technology itself.
All that wondrous science has come from this system. No. Evidence is evidence. This thing works, and works dramatically well. We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. My wife and I noticed this the other day. They fought wars back in the day for a fraction of the spices that I buy ethically today.
No retvrn. Forward only.
Some of us do. If you're at the poorer end of society things are still pretty damn bleak. People live with long term treatable illness. People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. Sure, those of us who can afford them have lots of shiny gadgets that save us from a bit of manual labor, but that's not really worth much if stepping outside of your front door means you're scared of being mugged.
I'm not saying I'd give any of it up. Hell no. I'm saying that a few less rockets and a few more homeless shelters might go some way to helping balance things out a little.
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.
Really? It has produced a climate destabilization that may well destroy civilization within the next decade or two.
"Alwsys has been Moon guy gets shot in the back" meme ...
seriously this has been documented over and over most prominently and especially in Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
When everyone's basic needs are met effortlessly, the focus of life shifts from surviving to thriving, from acquiring to becoming. In such a world, market mechanisms and venture capital don't just lose relevance; they begin to feel like vestiges of an era defined by limitations that no longer exist. The skills once lauded for amassing resources lose their sheen when the quest becomes one of meaning, connection, and collective wellbeing.
The hearts and minds of people turn toward unlocking human potential, fostering creativity, and deepening relationships. In this new reality, leaders who can guide us toward spiritual and emotional enrichment will supersede those who have mastered the art of material accumulation.
In this context, the prominence of individuals like Andreessen, along with constructs such as markets and money, would naturally diminish into insignificance. The irony lies in the fact that such a manifesto would even be conceived, indicating a profound disconnect from the emergent realities of a post-scarcity world.
Every day people get up, enforce the laws, execute the national defense, bury themselves up to their elbows in humans’ abdomens to heal their broken bodies, and pick your turnips.
The world is not self-executing.
Market mechanisms coordinate that activity by transmitting information through the price signal. In their absence, the material abundance you mistake for post-scarcity would quickly collapse.
There are turnip harvesting machines in wide use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyAOQtnOJh4
If you are talking about a society that has gotten past that point already, then all bets are off as to what their lives are like.
Unlike a utopia, which suggests a static state where all problems are solved, this new paradigm acknowledges the insatiable human drive for growth and problem-solving. It doesn't eliminate challenges; it redefines them. In a world where our basic and even our complex needs are met, our focus would naturally shift to grander scales—planetary defense, interstellar travel, and even the quest for existential understanding. However, the metrics of value and systems of exchange that govern this new reality would be fundamentally different, rendering current techno-capitalist forces obsolete in their traditional forms.
In this envisioned system, the nature of transactions could also change fundamentally. Currently, transactions are exchanges that often end relationships; you pay for a good, receive it, and both parties move on. In a framework centered on energy and attention, transactions could become cyclical or ongoing, fostering long-term relationships and community engagement. This extends the concept of "value" beyond one-off exchanges into a more interconnected, perhaps even symbiotic, system.
Just some thoughts from a nobody on a tiny glowing screen.
I just fundamentally don't think a post scarcity society functions even remotely the way everyone else seems to think it would.
That’s why we got Facebook over jet packs. That’s what we are. We need to accept it
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.
Reading this made me really sad.
It's actually hard for me to conjure the strength to write and share an appropriate response, and explain why.
Let me just mention one of many thoughts. Mark Andreessen cites a number of Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism, "In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist."
One of them is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
This is what FTM writes in his Manifesto of Futurism [0]. (original Italian first, then English translation).
""Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra - sola igiene del mondo - il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei liberatori, le belle idee per cui si muore e il disprezzo della donna."
"We will glorify war - the only true hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman"
In 2023, reading about the "glory of war", and the "scorn of woman", should be enough to know what's needed to judge this guy.
Mark, you are really smart and successful and most people would envy your fame and wealth and intelligence, but you need to grow up for once and realize how sick some of your ideas are.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism
See the deafening silence of the media on Nazis in Ukraine, and the recent mind-blowing case of the heads of state of Canada, Ukraine, and the entire Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation to a literal SS officer, which has triggered discussions (even here on HN) in the vein of “actually some Nazis were good guys”, which would also be unthinkable just a few years ago.
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's frequent and regular push toward monopoly power.
I mean, there is not going to be any low-interest capital flowing in to fuel all these techno-optimist ideals if the start-ups can't later be acquired by the existing monopolies.
We can go through business by business and see the rise of monopolies and oligopolies. Universal owns half of the US music market - Universal, Sony and Warner own over 80% of the US music market. Accounting is done by the Big Four, advertising by its own Big Four.
Just down the line - consolidation, oligopoly, monopoly. That is what markets produce. Standard Oil reversed its breakup into ExxonMobil, as did the Baby Bells into Verizon and AT&T. Even the government intervention into the monopolies gets reversed.
On the national level, there are multiple sources of news (NYT/News Corp/Disney/Comcast/Paramount/WaPo/LATimes/etc). There are lots of sources of professionally and amateur produced entertainment. Apple/Amazon/Comcast/Disney/Sony/WarnerBrosDiscovery/Paramount/etc.
If anything, the monopoly exists on wired broadband to peoples homes, which is usually only available from one seller.
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
No, it's an anonymous Twitter account, you read the name wrong, "Beff Jezos" (sic), not "Jeff Bezos".
Also if you look at the purest form of markets, which is probably high frequency trading, there are no monopolies and no cartels. It's an intensely competitive industry with relatively small profits given their transaction volume.
I can't just offer a crazy amount of money and get access, the other major players have to let me play.
An utterly useless human activity, that does nothing for actual humanity but simply serves as a wealth redistribution technique shared among a tiny number of highly-self-interested individuals ... it might be "pure" but it's not "pure" in any way.
Each of those regulations is a tombstone for the monopolies and cartels that came before, and there will absolutely be more tombstones to come. The history of the stock market is rife with corruption, stock manipulation, and short-thrifting the general public. The great fortunes of the 20th century were made on the backs of practices that are all kinds of illegal today, and with good reason.
That's an anonymous Twitter/X account @BasedBeffJezos not the actual head Jeff himself.
Founder(?) of the e/acc philosophy
They're so dangerous to free markets because they hack the core freedoms into a positive feedback loop. Collusion beats naked competition; it's why our ancestors evolved to form societies instead of eating each other.
The only people who maintain that markets have the perfect competition property are those who define markets this way. Their existence is left as an exercise.
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