Opinion | The Reactionary Futurism of Marc Andreessen - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ssen-reactionary-futurism.html
futurism accelerations trust silicon valley polarization AI market fundamentalism energy effective hero entrepreneur growth technology technocracy reactionary reaction aggression
shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 23
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“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.
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Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”
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what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind
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This is what connects figures as disparate as Jordan Peterson and J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. These are the ideas that unite both the mainstream and the weirder figures of the so-called postliberal right, from Patrick Deneen to the writer Bronze Age Pervert.
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I think the Republican Party’s collapse into incoherence reflects the fact that much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative
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As Paul Valéry, the French poet, once said, “Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern age.” To treat Andreessen’s essay as an argument misses the point. It’s a vibe. And the vibe is reactionary.
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It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.
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The story of the reactionary follows a template across time and place. It “begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God,” Mark Lilla writes in his 2016 book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.”
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He continues:Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals — writers, journalists, professors — challenge this harmony, and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story.) A false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance.
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The Silicon Valley cohort Andreessen belongs to has added a bit to this formula. In their story, the old way that is being lost is the appetite for risk and inequality and dominance that drives technology forward and betters human life. What the muscled ancients knew and what today’s flabby whingers have forgotten is that man must cultivate the strength and will to master nature, and other men, for the technological frontier to give way
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Now Andreessen has distilled the whole ideology to a procession of stark bullet points in his latest missive, the buzzy, bizarre “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
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it’s the pairing of the reactionary’s sodden take on modern society with the futurist’s starry imagining of the bright tomorrow. So call it what it is: reactionary futurism
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“The Enemy.” The list is long, ranging from “anti-greatness” to “statism” to “corruption” to “the ivory tower” to “cartels” to “bureaucracy” to “socialism” to “abstract theories” to anyone “disconnected from the real world … playing God with everyone else’s lives”
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Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life — under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “E.S.G.,” “sustainable development goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “precautionary principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “degrowth,” “the limits of growth.”
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The enemy, in other words, is anything or anyone who might seek to yoke technology to social goals or structures
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For years, I’ve been arguing for politics to take technology more seriously, to see new inventions as no less necessary than social insurance and tax policy in bringing about a worthier world. Too often, we debate only how to divvy up what we already have. We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society
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I’ve been digging into the history of where and when we lost faith in technology and, more broadly, growth. At the core of that story is an inability to manage, admit or even see when technologies or policies go awry
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The turn toward a less-is-more politics came in the 1970s, when the consequences of reckless growth became unignorable
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Did we, in some cases, overcorrect? Absolutely. But the only reason we can even debate whether we overcorrected is because we corrected: The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and a slew of other bills and regulations did exactly what they promised.
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It is telling that Andreessen groups sustainability and degrowth into the same bucket of antagonists
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But the politics of sustainability — as evidenced in legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act — have settled into another place entirely: a commitment to solving our hardest environmental problems by driving technology forward, by investing and deploying clean energy infrastructure at a scale unlike anything the government has done since the 1950s.
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but curiously ignores the stunning advances in solar and wind and battery power that public policy has delivered.
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He yearns for a kind of person, not just a kind of technology. “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength,” he writes, italics included. “We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.”
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There are ways in which these virtues have become undervalued, in which the left, in particular, has a dysfunctional relationship with individual achievement and entrepreneurial élan.
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Andreessen’s ideas trace an odd, meme-based philosophy that has flourished in some corners of the internet known as effective accelerationism
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“Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe,”
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“E/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism.” OK!
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That, in a way, is my core disagreement with Andreessen. Reactionary futurism is accelerationist in affect but deccelerationist in practice
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How has that worked out? A new analysis by Similarweb found that traffic to twitter.com fell in the United States by 19 percent from September 2022 to September 2023 and traffic on mobile devices fell by almost 18 percent. Indications are that advertising revenue on the platform is collapsing.
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Andreessen spends much of his manifesto venerating the version of markets that you hear in the first few weeks of Econ 101, before the professor begins complicating the picture with all those annoying market failures
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Throughout his essay, Andreessen is at pains to attack those who might slow the development of artificial intelligence in the name of safety, but nothing would do more to freeze progress in A.I. than a disaster caused by its reckless deployment
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It is hard to read Andreessen’s manifesto, with its chopped-up paragraphs and its blunt jabs of thought delivered for maximum engagement and polarization, and not feel that Andreessen now reflects the medium in which he has made his home: X. He doesn’t just write in the way the medium rewards. He increasingly seems to think in its house style, too.
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One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the like-minded but cuts you from those with whom you have even modest disagreements
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There is a reason that Twitter’s rise was conducive to politics of revolution and reaction rather than of liberalism and conservatism. If you are there too often, seeing the side of humanity it serves up, it is easy to come to think that everything must be burned down.
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Musk purchased Twitter (in an acquisition that Andreessen Horowitz helped finance) and gutted its trust and safety teams. The result has been a profusion of chaos, disinformation and division on his platform
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Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth, just as it did before. Trust is the most essential technology of all.