On Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto”
It has been thirty years. The Internet isn’t just the realm of the future anymore. It is also our present and has a substantial past. It is worth examining how the past promises of those 90s techno-optimists worked out.
They promised that technology would solve our environmental problems. And there has, just recently, been some real progress in clean tech. But the trend lines are somewhere between bad and cataclysmic. We do not inhabit the future they insisted they were building. For Andreessen, in 2023, to declare that “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology” is an act of willful self-deception. Just how long are we supposed to clap-and-wait while Andreessen’s investment portfolio tries to science the shit out of the climate crisis?
Short answer :
money.
Long answer :
Their wealth affects them in many indirect ways that reinforces abject ignorance.
Those who orbit billionaires are incredibly likely to tell them what they want to hear to a degree that said billionaires probably encounter very few people who ever will correct them or offer meaningful critique for fear of being taken out of that orbit or replaced by someone else trying to get to the position that they have achieved which gives them influence and runoff power / wealth from said billionaire.
It is a cycle which in a self-fulfilling way repeats and reinforces into itself.
They are stupid because they do not learn - as no one ever dares correct them.