Marc Andreessen wanted to make people angry

You too can a techno-optimist be. But first subscribe to these beliefs 113.

There have been a lot of unhappy responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” They’ve complained among other things about the incoherence, bad writing, fundamental misreadings, snuggling up to proto-fascists like Marinetti, and Nick Land fanboying. I’m not going to even try to summarize. I haven’t seen any enthusiastic responses - perhaps I don’t frequent the right parts of the Internet - but I’ve no doubt that he’s gotten plenty of ‘you go, bro’ side-messages from some of his fellow Silicon Valley funders and entrepreneurs. What I haven’t seen is any analysis of the politics of the manifesto. It’s a political statement. Why did he publish it, and what did he want it to do?

The usual reason why you publish a political-intellectual manifesto is to try to build a coalition around a cause. Certainly, Andreessen’s manifesto suggests an open invitation: “We invite everyone to join us in Techno-Optimism. The water is warm. Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.”

However, its actual form isn’t that of an invitation. It’s a creed, in the technical sense of the word, an exhaustive list of the beliefs that you are supposed to hold if you want to belong to a particular faith “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” becomes “We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being” and so on, and so on, and so on. The words “We believe” occur 113 times in the text. If it is indeed an invite, it is a Comics Book Guy invite: “You too can a techno-optimist be. But first subscribe to these beliefs 113.”

Andreessen is saying that you need to subscribe to these articles of faith if you want to describe yourself as a technological optimist, as someone who believes in the promise of abundance. Like most such statements, the purpose of Andreessen’s manifesto is less to persuade than to divide - to create a listicle (or in this case, a listemoth) of characteristics which distinguish the elect who hold to the One True Faith, from the wicked heretics doomed to suffer eternally down below, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.

Andreessen’s creed, then, draws a sharp distinction between those who hold the faith and those who ought be cast into the outer darkness. It’s worth comparing the new manifesto to his earlier “It’s Time to Build,” which actually does try to speak, albeit impatiently, to people who don’t agree with him:

The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model! Demonstrate that the public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, better transportation, better cities, better housing. Stop trying to protect the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future.

There’s none of that in the new document. The words “public” and “government” don’t appear once. The word “state” only appears in a contemptuous aside: “We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” Andreessen claims that techno-optimists span the left and the right. He also claims that techno-optimists have to enthusiastically embrace Hayek’s celebration of the market, and dictums on the evils of central planning. Even the tiny number of people who could be described as sort-of-left-Hayekians (the late Gerald Gaus e.g.) would likely have regarded Andreessen’s creed in horror. Brad DeLong - the one person in the broad left who Andreessen mentions favorably in the piece - has politely but decidedly indicated his disinclination to be included.

So I think it is fair to say that the techno-optimist manifesto is less aimed at building a coalition than at splitting one. More pointedly - I strongly suspect it is aimed at splitting the kind of coalition that he called for in his earlier call to arms. In 2022, Ezra Klein wrote about the need for a “liberalism that builds.”

We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper. At the national level, much can be blamed on Republican obstruction and the filibuster. But that’s not always true in New York or California or Oregon. It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak.

I don’t know whether this article was a response to Andreessen himself, but it was surely a response to the general diagnosis that his article represented. Ezra’s piece reflected the beliefs of an informal grouping, stretching from moderate libertarians like Brink Lindsey, through moderate leftwingers, all of whom believe that many of the pathologies of the modern US stem from a lack of state capacity to do the things that need to be done in the public interest, thanks to a thicket of regulation and local special interests.

This perspective - call it a “liberalism that builds,” or the “abundance agenda,” or really, whatever you like - has a lot of fans in Silicon Valley. It’s closely related to the belief that we need to take big steps urgently to address climate change. Personally, I’m sympathetic to the broad argument but start from a quite different space (I don’t see nearly enough attention paid to the need for democratic feedback in the current versions of the abundance argument).

Whatever. The point is that the techno-optimist articles of faith seem specifically and pointedly designed to marginalize the left abundance perspective. Andreessen’s creed demands that you focus on freeing up market awesome rather than building state capacity. There’s nothing much about climate change. He discusses energy technology as a response to “environmental degradation,” but the only forms of technology that are mentioned are nuclear - i.e. the technologies that predictably divide the left. ESG is one of the “enemies,” one element of a “mass demoralization campaign” of “zombie ideas, many of them derived from Communism” (there’s an interesting parallel to Peter Thiel’s “what’s the difference between ESG and the Chinese Communist Party” rant at the 2022 Bitcoin conference).

So I think that the manifesto does have a particular political purpose. It’s intended to split and divide - to drive out the heretics - rather than to unite people under a single banner. Very likely, from Andreessen’s perspective, the angry response is a feature, not a bug, creating a line of division that he wants to use to drive his own political agenda in internecine disputes within Silicon Valley.