Timely to see this today on techno-optimism. The New York Times this morning features at the top of the Opinion session a transcript of an interview with Marc Andreessen, one of the original tech-optimist billionaires (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html). His story is that he was a good liberal, as were most of his Silicon Valley peers, until the most recent decade, where some of them found the young hires to their corporations out of elite universities were -- yes he uses this word -- "communists." Now, this is absolutely bonkers.
I have a son at an elite university, who went to a progressive private high school. While his peers, like every younger generation, have aspirations for a better society which go beyond those of my own youth (I'm years older than Andreessen), none are remotely communist by any reasonable definition of the term, unless you favor Joe McCarthy's Red Scare usage.
Andreessen, who used to be friends with Al Gore after Gore funded the computer systems at the university where Andreessen managed to attach himself to the nerds creating the first good web browser as a kid -- grateful for a huge government handout -- is helping staff Trump's administration with anti-"communists" -- "communist" being in his mind anyone skeptical about dangers inherent in crypto and AI, or favoring the sort of Scandinavian-model socialism of Bernie Sanders (whom I've met several times, and is definitely a capitalist).
So that's at the core of the techno-optimist aspiration to oligarchy, which per Andreessen's friend Peter Thiel requires ending democracy, because if the people get what we want, too many aspire to a transformation of society to one more sustainable and, yes, more socially just with a broader distribution of wealth, funding such social necessities as good health care for all. In issue after issue, most Americans favor progressive positions. But the social media empires of Meta and X push voters towards fear, and voting for precisely the political leaders aligned against transformational progress in any sphere.
That article is unreal. He's claiming how hard done by the tech sector has been for the last decade, when they're been making buckets and buckets of money, nonstop. The entitlement! Claiming the the No.1 priority of being a CEO is "am I a good person?" while not acknowledging at all the income and wealth gaps, the bonuses etc etc.
But their project is ultimately doomed, because there's no acknowledgement at all of any sort of ecological or environmental crisis. It's a giant gaping blind spot. He wants Trump to 'open up energy' without seeing where that's all going to go. He doesn't see falling living standards, failing social services, poverty, deaths of despair. He simply doesn't see these massive factors, so his analysis is clearly going to be way, way off.
Actually watched the whole thing! Thank you. The Flip is an accessible exercise that has nice parallels to many spiritual or developmental pointing out instructions; the sequence of objects occurring To awareness, then In awareness, then As awareness.
I watched the original video last night and woke up this morning with this very clip weighing heavy on my heart. In fact, I was going to pin it in my Notes, so thank you, Jonathan (and your colleagues at Perspective) - thank you for all the work you do on behalf of all of us and the natural world. 🙏
I haven’t watched the whole original video yet but I did watch this particular question and thought Jonathan‘s answer was very impressive. This techno optimism stuff is what you hear from Jordan Peterson and Michael Shellenberger. Jonathan‘s answer was excellent, measured, reasonable and also respectful. In my opinion, any solution we come up with is going to be confronted with the problem of human error, fallibility. Moreover, if tech can’t even solve the problem with AutoCorrect, how the hell are they going to solve the problems that are much bigger, that are in fact planetary in nature? Not buying the bullshit. I think the people who espouse this optimistic garbage are just simply not knowledgeable about what is happening on a planetary scale to life on Earth and to its ecosystems.
Timely to see this today on techno-optimism. The New York Times this morning features at the top of the Opinion session a transcript of an interview with Marc Andreessen, one of the original tech-optimist billionaires (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html). His story is that he was a good liberal, as were most of his Silicon Valley peers, until the most recent decade, where some of them found the young hires to their corporations out of elite universities were -- yes he uses this word -- "communists." Now, this is absolutely bonkers.
I have a son at an elite university, who went to a progressive private high school. While his peers, like every younger generation, have aspirations for a better society which go beyond those of my own youth (I'm years older than Andreessen), none are remotely communist by any reasonable definition of the term, unless you favor Joe McCarthy's Red Scare usage.
Andreessen, who used to be friends with Al Gore after Gore funded the computer systems at the university where Andreessen managed to attach himself to the nerds creating the first good web browser as a kid -- grateful for a huge government handout -- is helping staff Trump's administration with anti-"communists" -- "communist" being in his mind anyone skeptical about dangers inherent in crypto and AI, or favoring the sort of Scandinavian-model socialism of Bernie Sanders (whom I've met several times, and is definitely a capitalist).
So that's at the core of the techno-optimist aspiration to oligarchy, which per Andreessen's friend Peter Thiel requires ending democracy, because if the people get what we want, too many aspire to a transformation of society to one more sustainable and, yes, more socially just with a broader distribution of wealth, funding such social necessities as good health care for all. In issue after issue, most Americans favor progressive positions. But the social media empires of Meta and X push voters towards fear, and voting for precisely the political leaders aligned against transformational progress in any sphere.
That article is unreal. He's claiming how hard done by the tech sector has been for the last decade, when they're been making buckets and buckets of money, nonstop. The entitlement! Claiming the the No.1 priority of being a CEO is "am I a good person?" while not acknowledging at all the income and wealth gaps, the bonuses etc etc.
But their project is ultimately doomed, because there's no acknowledgement at all of any sort of ecological or environmental crisis. It's a giant gaping blind spot. He wants Trump to 'open up energy' without seeing where that's all going to go. He doesn't see falling living standards, failing social services, poverty, deaths of despair. He simply doesn't see these massive factors, so his analysis is clearly going to be way, way off.
Actually watched the whole thing! Thank you. The Flip is an accessible exercise that has nice parallels to many spiritual or developmental pointing out instructions; the sequence of objects occurring To awareness, then In awareness, then As awareness.
I watched the original video last night and woke up this morning with this very clip weighing heavy on my heart. In fact, I was going to pin it in my Notes, so thank you, Jonathan (and your colleagues at Perspective) - thank you for all the work you do on behalf of all of us and the natural world. 🙏
I haven’t watched the whole original video yet but I did watch this particular question and thought Jonathan‘s answer was very impressive. This techno optimism stuff is what you hear from Jordan Peterson and Michael Shellenberger. Jonathan‘s answer was excellent, measured, reasonable and also respectful. In my opinion, any solution we come up with is going to be confronted with the problem of human error, fallibility. Moreover, if tech can’t even solve the problem with AutoCorrect, how the hell are they going to solve the problems that are much bigger, that are in fact planetary in nature? Not buying the bullshit. I think the people who espouse this optimistic garbage are just simply not knowledgeable about what is happening on a planetary scale to life on Earth and to its ecosystems.