Somehow this reminds me of pre-y2k Nick Land (Meltdown [0] etc.) (Hope that doesn't correlate with the emergence of a 'post-y2k-Landian' Andreesen-Horowitz!)
Yeah, I have a soft spot for this kind of thinking but it always goes off the rails. It either gets unhinged and culty or flips and goes hard-reactionary or even luddite.
I think the fallacy might be a little too much "magic happens here." Yes you can be optimistic about the future, but a good future is not automatically guaranteed. It requires very hard work and constant vigilance. It's not just a matter of having faith and waiting for the messiah.
Both blind optimism and blind pessimism are easy when you're not the one doing the work. Those doing the work tend toward realism.
It’s romanticism that’s afraid to admit it and dresses itself up in dubious “reason” and “rationality”, which is why it always ends up seeming confused and self-contradictory and to be relying on a lot of magic to fill in the gaps.
This piece is better than some in that it at least makes the romanticism explicit near the end, but it’s burdened with the same self-conscious need to try to “prove” it’ll also make everything better in any terms one might choose, which is why these are all silly: they want to make believe that there aren’t meaningful costs or trade-offs for their romantic ideal. Nuance and shades of truth can’t be allowed, because they threaten the fake-reasoned rationalization for the romanticism, which romanticism is the point of the whole exercise, so cannot be threatened or alloyed, else they’d lose interest in it.
I'd love to be free to hack on interesting things. If I didn't have to spend so much on housing, I'd have more freedom. Of course, there are also tradeoffs in that, in the sense that I do not want to live in Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma just to have cheap housing...
It seems like there is a tendency to become occupied with obligations as you age, regardless of exactly how the discretionary time / money is eaten up.
I am all for reducing rent seeking, including in this case literally. However, my point is that the hippies became squares in the same way the hackers became squares. It's not clear that housing costs are causal; they might just be incidental.
I think it's one of those things where you'd want to look at it statistically, or 'at the margin'. Many - most - people will grow up and settle down some. But high housing costs kind of force the issue even more, and leave less room for people to have some more freedom to explore.
If we are thinking about this as a dynamic system, then: many people who moved to the valley before 2010 got some sort of windfall, whether through home equity or participating in a notable period of wealth creation. Why didn’t that mint a bunch of hackers on the margin, if disposable income is so explanatory?
I've seen enough bad/tone deaf takes/perspectives from him over the years to know that, unless he's had some kind of wild change of heart, this isn't going to be any different and likely won't hit home for me. I don't hate Andreesen, but I do hate bad ideas, and he's full of 'em.
Judging from the bulk of the comments in here, it doesn't look like I'm wrong.
It's a twitter thing, that was picked up by the more twitter brained VCs.
Mostly an AI thing originally I think? (I'm addicted to the site, but don't follow the d list celeb drama lol.)
Stands for effective accelerationism, more or less what you read in this Manifesto (Marc Andresson said he identified it a while ago too so makes sense.)
Effective Altruism is a charity / social club / networking opportunity for young STEM types based on pretty extreme beliefs about Utilitarianism and recently AI. The most famous EA right now is probably SBF.
Accelerationism is the belief that we should race towards catastrophe so that we can rebuild society in a better way.
E / Acc is a (sometimes ironic) amalgam of the two.
You won't be surprised to learn that not many in these groups have studied history.
Lenin, more like. Marx reckoned it’d all happen more-or-less naturally, others decided it needed a push.
[edit] ok, nuance, yes he advocated movements to replace capitalism with communism, but he’s not the one mainly associated with attempts to bring communism “too early” (too early by Marx’s reckoning of the timeline of capitalism, that is)
Kind of, yes. All politics is arbitrary line-drawing. There's a bit more to it in that the lines are contextually dependent on what exactly is being politicked about and usually not static.
Only someone in league with or benefiting from the centralization of power, mass surveillance, wealth, and the use of technology to further the rapid concentration and centralization of such could write such a one-sided piece.
Unless they're somehow unaware that, in its current manifestation, technology is a tool that converts knowledge into power.
An improved and expanded strategy for -- with articulated tactics to achieve -- the decentralization of power and wealth, a dismantling of hierarchy, and increasing personal agency, privacy and freedom must not be sacrificed in favor of technology for technology's sake.
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.
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.
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
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.
Disney/Comcast/Paramount represent the consolidation of an industry that used to be hundreds of independent newsrooms into a dozen or so corporations. The murdoch family's New Corp is regularly analyzed as a political force on par with individual elected leaders, if not more so.
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.
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.
Countless ways. From sheer governmental incompetence like when regulating the competition out of markets. To simply not understanding second order effects when “helping markets” with patents and humongous copyright terms. To not understanding supply and demand when pressed to fulfill voter promises like when attempting to control and fix prices. To being captive to interest groups that end up controlling a huge chunk of economy like in heath care.
But most of all through sheer, pure corruption. Because why else would someone become a politician - a relatively low paid position - if not to be in a position to transform all that power and influence into money, for the highest bidder?
Corporations, in America, where the travesty known as Citizens United exists.
(I'm not claiming that other countries don't have money in politics; but America is the one where it is most clearly enshrined with an actual name to the philosophy)
Incumbents, of course. The ones holding the largest interest in preserving the status-quo and freezing competition. Professional organizations needing power to preserve the barrier of entry. Huge, trans-national Unions.
But other power brokers as well. Other politicians with more money. Their own stock holdings. Foreign powers. Well moneyed interest groups. Ideological organizations siphoning old money.
Occasionally even the scrappy start-up trying to game the system. These usually fail, see SBF - but they are not saints either.
There is no shortage in interests vying to corrupt politicians. Somehow they never mind and always succumb.
> Reducing profits defeats the purpose of becoming a monopoly, while any sliver of profit is the startup's opportunity.
Only if you ignore the concept of loss leaders, or the very act of competing in the market itself by undercutting competitors' prices. Companies are very happy to receive less money in the short term in exchange for guaranteed recurring revenue in the long term, it's only rational after all, and applies as much to a yearly subscription being cheaper than 12 individual monthly subscriptions as it does to established companies accepting reduced revenue in the short term to guarantee their share of the market in the long term.
This is all pretty obvious from a basic understanding of how companies work TBH.
Loss leaders, price dumping and price wars are as old as the world and free markets are perfectly capable to deal with them. Here's how how Dow Chemical fought the German bromine cartel's price dumping at the beginning of the last century:
> Free markets are naturally resistant through free competition
That's circular logic. Free markets are defined as those in which competition happens. Unregulated markets often tend towards cartelization and monopoly.
> and, you know, laws.
Which need to be enforced by governments.
> Point me to a resistant monopoly or cartel and I will show you a government granted/supported one.
The whole robber baron era is a counterexample - the likes of Standard Oil getting broken up by the goverment. Market competition is powerful but it only works when the government is actively enforcing a competitive market, which there is sadly little enthusiasm for lately.
Nobody said anything about not having governments. Rule of Law is required for societies to even exist.
Read some more on the robber baron era - you'll find out Standard Oil was already losing to competition before government action. For another great example how the free market broke a cartel, read up on how Dow Chemical fought the German bromine cartel:
Please don't put words in my mouth. Government's role in a free market economy is quite essential: upholding rule of law (specifically contract law) and taxing externalities. Overreach is the problem though (like regulating the charging port on my damn phone).
Were those government supported monopolistic behaviors? Does the "free market" mean that a competitor could have simply made one company that produced an entire laptop, OS, and CPU from scratch to provide the consumer a cheaper choice?
Why would the "free market" lead to vibrant competition, rather than monopolistic hoarding of power?
Government's action did had zero effect against Microsoft. Slap on the wrist. Their monopoly was naturally made irrelevant by the market moving onto the next tech frontier: mobile & cloud.
The free market lead to that. Countless startups trying everything under the sun made sure incumbents like Apple or Google had to innovate, acquire and evolve to avoid Microsoft's fate. In a free market there is always a chance a new startup will spring up and upend the order. Tons of VC money are continuously trying exactly that.
Apple survived thanks to Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs alone. He could've built his vision in any company or startup though, when he took over Apple was a few weeks away from bankruptcy.
Without Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, the Mac would have been dead. Gil Amelio negotiated their continuation (as settlement for the old Look & Feel and QuickTime lawsuits) with Microsoft and Jobs closed the deal by letting up on some of Amelio's demands. Microsoft could have just said no and the Mac would have been useless to both education and business and they would have been dead in weeks as you said.
NeXT would never have built the iPhone, they had given up on hardware.
It’s not possible to know what other factors would’ve or wouldn’t have come into play, who would’ve done what else in this alternate history of yours. It’s just speculation.
Indeed, maybe Microsoft would’ve created an even better smartphone, putting us today in a position with 3 major competing mobile platforms! And just imagine what else after that…
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.
> 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.
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.
Instead of reaching for this horribly irritating snark (I'm sure GP understands market making enough to understand why HFT exists), why not be charitable and consider the opportunity cost of the smartest people spending their mental energy to create a slightly more efficient market? Is this really a responsible use of this resource?
Consider a similar irritation when seeing those with a superficial grasp of a complex topic oversimplify and make unwarranted conclusions.
And it's precisely the GPs unwavering certainty that HFTs are net negative that accurately informs they do not understand the full implications of what HFTs offer.
Because when you're aware of the full picture, it is not at all obvious society will be better off without it.
I don't know if you have been on the other side of what market makers do, but its not exactly a day at the beach. Once you gain enough insight to see whats going on the charts you just see it as a graveyard of traders positions, stop losses and their capital. This happens every minute the market is open at every timeframe.
Have you ever wonder why the markets appear so irrational? Great economic data and the worse drop in months or vice versa. These are the expectations, emotions and psychology of the masses that are liquidated by market makers. Have you also just had a gut instinct to buy or sell and market moves completely opposite beyond your psychological limit. Only for it to start moving into profit once you have closed at a huge loss. This is all market makers do all day.
In principle there is nothing immoral here. Participants are all taking risks voluntarily, no one is forcing you risk trading the stock market. But in practice market makers take positions at the stop losses 90% of market participants giving them significantly overwhelming supply of assets at the best prices, while everyone else sees consistent intractable losses.
This is a Darwinian environment where only the biggest, fiercest and most aggressive players will win by killing weaker, smaller and less knowledgeable players. The only way for a small fish to win is to understand the rules the market makers play by. Their strengths, desires, weaknesses, limitations and once you do you realize that this was someone's capital, but it's also capital not going to the market makers.
I think you intended to reply to me (GP), not the parent.
You're ignoring my objection to this stuff, which has nothing to do with immorality and everything to do with with the waste and misdirection of resources. Why do people participate in this stuff? Because someone might get rich. From my POV, that's a waste and misdirection of resources. People getting rich is not the right motivation for pareto or utilitarian optimal allocations.
Capitalism and people getting rich is for better or worse exactly the stabilizing factor that has lead to the success of the modern world we take for granted. Capitalism is the worst except for all the others.
I empathize that it appears the case it's not an optimal allocation, but to say you know it's a misallocation leans overly simplistic.
What you see as misdirection of resources is the product of competitive market forces that drive innovation and efficiency. And the market often finds value in ways not immediately apparent.
Is less efficient resource arbitration (futures, forex) worth the trade-off? Producers can make their own market and set their own prices. But do that in an information vacuum and there will be increased deadweight loss in the form of higher bid-ask spreads, increasing costs, reducing economic activity.
There are more benefits in the form of reducing volatility and increasing liquidity.
It is not at all as obvious as you make it that society would be better off had HFTs and similarly received sorts of "financialization" not exist.
> I empathize that it appears the case it's not an optimal allocation, but to say you know it's a misallocation leans overly simplistic.
I empathize that it appears the case that the market has some emergent properties that allow it to optimize allocation, but to say you know its an optimal allocation leans overly simplistic.
"I think investing in a venture that will do <X> seems like a good idea" may, indeed, have some connection to an at least pareto optimal resource allocation.
"I will offer your $X in N months for <X>" might also play a useful role in resource allocation.
"I will buy this 3rd derivative instrument that reflects guesswork about guesswork about preferences and hold it for 3 hours" is just the financial service industry fucking us over.
I'm pointing out The Economy/Market and its mechanisms is a complex system. I urged caution making conclusions from facile knee jerk first order observables when it's the unknown nth order effects we should probably try to identify and characterize first.
> just the financial service industry fucking us over.
Maybe. But why think you know this? I haven't even tried to quantify the pros/cons, and I'm unwilling to stake a position until I do.
I don't know it in the way that I know about gravity or garbage collection. But I know it in the sense that the end results of this complex system are at best subject to debate as a net win given metrics that include the environment and equitability. A system with the set of pros and cons that the current one demonstrates on a daily basis seems incredibly unlikely to me to be remotely close to optimal.
Now, what does seem true is that it is easy to tell stories about this system that focus on its pros, of which there are many, and thus to construct the overall impression that we should be cautious about changing or discarding it.
In and of itself, that's not a problem. However, combined with the fact stories about the cons are routinely marginalized, discarded as not serious, simply ignored and forth, this is a problem. It leads to a strong bias in favor of the status quo - look at the all the good things we get! we must careful not to lose them! - and an equally strong bias against change attempting to target the much, much less culturally visible cons.
When I see a system that combines externalities, wild inequality of outcome and this sort of builtin restistance to tackling the cons, my facile knee jerk reaction is to assume that it is rigged. More pertinently, even if the alternatives do present various risks, we should be exploring "the neighborhood" with an awareness that we may not even be in a local optimum, let alone a global one.
> When I see a system that combines externalities, wild inequality of outcome and this sort of builtin restistance to tackling the cons, my facile knee jerk reaction is to assume that it is rigged.
But that's just the brain's bias towards simple explanations and well-defined actors - the Ockham's Razor heuristic you could call it. Truth is we're still in the early stages of capitalism where most (all?) nations aren't stably resourced and as such geopolitical strategy and internal unrest can and will undo capital expansion with a stroke of the pen or a bullet from a gun. The need for monopolisable extractative resources such as fossil fuels ensures that capital will trend towards monopolistic behemoths with deep connections to their governments, and that permeates down into capital as a whole.
Moving to a more decentralised model of resourcing means less need for national security to favour and support massive quasi-governmental corporations that are "too vital to fail" and which leads to an environment where the inevitable endpoint of every market sector is consolidation into their own behemoth conglomerates. The more dispersed your resource acquisition is, the less dependent on massive corporations governments will be.
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.
You actually can just offer a (not very large) amount of money and get access. The fees aren't even that large and they are public see [1] for example. The startup costs for an HFT would be comparable to a restaurant buildout, it's really not a capital intensive business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More like a Techno-Capitalist Fantasy. This part had me laughing out loud:
> Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.
No, markets naturally culminate into monopolies and cartels. That's just human nature.
History has shown over and over again that monopolies and cartels are naturally occurring and that the only successful way to deal with them is to break them up via government intervention. Sure, some monopolies may eventually dissolve due to things like technical obsolescence but that's the type of thing that takes so long that entire generations can come and go, suffering the effects the entire time, before they break up.
This manifesto also doesn't seem to have a solution to "natural monopolies" like ISPs or utilities (water, sewer, electricity). It just pretends such things don't exist.
It also doesn't have anything at all to say about economic externalities (e.g. pollution/downstream impacts), policing of bad behavior, or "tragedy of the commons" sorts of problems.
If you had a technology-oriented country that sends all of its pollution to another country it could be the perfect world envisioned by this "Techno-Optimist Manifesto".
Yeah I'm equally annoyed by people who can see absolutely nothing of value in competitive capitalist markets and people who can see absolutely nothing of value in regulation of those markets by society. Both things are good, and both things are bad. The goal is to seek the best balance that maximizes the good parts of each while minimizing the bad parts of each.
Every monopoly that exists (and has ever existed) does so because of some combination of government granted monopoly rights. Mineral rights, patents, intellectual property, and all other regulatory barriers to entry.
There is no "natural" culmination into monopoly, monopoly is THE ANTITHETICAL END of the market. Where monopoly exists there is no longer a competitive market floating prices. The state itself in then in control of all production or in affiliation with a stagnant racket that controls all production. There is no market anymore, because the state (a monopoly of its own) has ceased to enforce a market. It is a choice for the state to make. The contrast between the choice between a market and monopoly is as stark as the contrast between South Korea vs North Korea, or Norway vs Venezuela.
That’s one explanation. Another might be that for non-tech insiders (ie the majority of the world’s population), the formulation of privacy and its claimed harms that is so often championed(desired state)/decried (current state) here on HN is just a total non-issue. And thus, it goes unmentioned.
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.
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.
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.
It is possible, in this world, for you to move to a less civilized part of the world and emulate the life of 200 years ago. We can have both if we so desire. But your children will almost all die before they see 5 winters. Behave in line with your convictions if you so desire.
You do understand that the countries "stuck in the life of 200 years ago" aren't stuck there just because they don't want to go on, right? Right? Colonization and resource extraction were a thing.
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.
> People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water.
In relative terms, almost none. I'm not sure how they compare in absolute terms, but just the answer not being obvious while the population increased by an order of magnitude already makes your claim quite bad.
> People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery.
And nobody had no prospect back them.
You can complain that there are some people living almost as badly as people lived in the 1800s. But it's not the majority by far, and you can't claim they are currently living worse.
And, of course, none of that is reason to not demand better things.
As many have pointed out, technological advancement is pointless without social advancement. We have learnt how to treat diseases 10 times over at this point, and yet people still live with them. That is a failure at engineering our social system. Social change is the decisive factor. Technological change without social change is just giving the rich new ways to subjugate or ignore the poor.
This is total bullshit. Rich or poor, infant mortality rate and maternal mortality rate have plunged. The rich do better than the poor, but you're not losing your firstborn to cholera and shit. We have antibiotics and post-natal care. Shit is good now. Forget 200 years ago like the OP said. Try just 1900: 9 out of every 1000 live births resulted in mum dying. Today? In the bottom quartile in my state of California? 18. Per. Hundred Thousand. That's right, two orders of magnitude, almost three.
Back then there were cities in the US where a third of newborns wouldn't see their first birthday. Look at us now! We stand like a colossus. Our children stand healthy. Strong.
You've created some fictional subjugation narrative that is nothing near the truth.
No it's not bullshit. Obviously over time all our conditions improve, partially because eventually it just becomes so cheap to do this stuff that even the peasants can get it, or because there was actual TANGIBLE SOCIAL CHANGE. It's usually both. In the UK the NHS was created after ww2, by golly isn't it a feat of technology that less poor people die here. In fact our life expectancy for the poorest is several years higher than in the US, and some countries in Europe have a life expectancy for the poorest people that is 10 years higher than the US. God, I thought the US had some of the most advanced technology on earth? How can this be the case? Surely it can't be beacause of social policy?????? heavy /s
Strongly advise reading Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st Century.
One of the key points made in the book, which is full of wonderful data and is a GREAT read if you’re into that sort of thing, was the idea that *wealth is much more unequal than income*.
From Vox’s coverage of the book:
> You hear a lot about income inequality, but as this chart makes clear wealth inequality is much more severe. In the United States, just 1 percent of the population owns about 35 percent of all the wealth. Even in relatively egalitarian Europe, the top 1 percent owns around 25 percent of the wealth. In both continents, the top 10 percent owns over half the wealth.
It’s hugely important to understand that point, which gets lost frequently.
You can’t argue about the benefits of the system — they are material. You can try to argue about global incomes rising. But it’s a hard argument to win when it comes to global wealth distribution.
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.
> dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market
That doesn't happen until after the luddite's first appearance in ~1816 [1]
> This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced.
No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against. Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards. Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight. The concept of high minded observations on empire are anachronistic embellishments[2]. The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground. I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then.
The wool trade supplied wealth to large parts of the cotswolds, east anglia, the lowlands and other places.
The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500.
You're being juvenile. If you're going to cheer for a historical faction that you feel reflects your values and jeer their opponents, it's probably best to not have a "basic knowledge of history". Historical groups aren't sports teams.
I read about history constantly bro. I probably have more knowledge than most I just was being humble because I felt like the person above me knew more than I did on this particular topic. I was not saying I was cheering or jeering anyone. I meant I knew some things about this topic that lead me to believe that what the other person was saying was historically inaccurate. But it is not something I had looked into in a while, so I would have needed to check my vague memories of the facts. This person did that for me and provided sources. Great! That's all I was saying. Why the hell do you feel the need to ridicule a stranger for your massive assumption of their values.
> That doesn't happen until after the luddite's first appearance in ~1816 [1]
According to Parthasarathi [1], Indian cloth already began having issues from the 1720s as East India Company contracts begun squeezing out local merchants. From the late 1760s, Indian weavers begun having trouble. South Indian weavers reported that in 1779 their incomes had dropped 35% since 1768 (Parthasarathi p. 78-79.) The Luddites first appear in history around 1811, a good 40 years after the beginning of the decline of Indian cloth.
1830 is much too late for the "turning point" as the Cuddalore Weaver's Protest had already occurred by 1778 [2]. I suspect your source comes from before the opening of the East India Company records.
> No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against.
Correct, I never disagreed.
> Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards.
> The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500.
The class consciousness of weavers only appeared from the beginning of industrialization. Weavers guilds operated in different economic and social circumstances with very different economic arrangements than the Luddite-era weavers. Guilds often enjoyed exclusive market privileges and thus had much more pricing power than weavers in the post-feudal era.
> The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground.
Of course, at that time the flow of information and general levels of education were low. But it's hard to imagine that weavers weren't aware of the prodigy of Indian textiles at the time. Indian exports dominated the textile market until the late 18th century and weavers would have been competing for sales to merchants with Indian exporters. Naturally most weavers would be completely unaware of the contracts and pricing power of the East India Company at the time and its knock-on effects in India. I'm not trying to imply that the Luddites cheered on the EIC in their exploitation, and don't think they did at all unless there's evidence of the contrary.
> I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then.
Europe and the Islamicate world had a lot of mutual animosity and respect for each other at the time. The British viewed Mughal wealth and organization favorably, and this was the basis for the term "mogul" as used in "business mogul". [3] Whether that would lead to sympathy or not is unclear.
> Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight.
Correct but their relative market position came at the expense of the market position of the Mughals. The guild based systems which created guaranteed markets of the middle ages were already long broken by the time of the Luddites. The very ruin from relative riches due to mechanization itself was based on riches based off the ruin of the Mughals. That the Luddites were trying to protect their own lifestyle is neither enigmatic nor evil. The Mughals attempted the same. But instead of trying to cast the Luddites as virtuous heroes, it's important to contextualize them as parties who were protecting a treasure that they had received at another's expense.
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.
> 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'm very skeptical of anyone trying to fit history in a single narrative. This whole text sounds like an over simplification.
It also presents the usual contradiction that any neo-liberal argument is "not a political argument". The author states :
> Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.
Then proceeds to glorify the techno-capital (their term) and shun communism. How is that not political ?
While I do like technology and optimism, I prefer a more honest view. I think I'm glad this manifest exists: I disagree with almost every item of the list, but it's useful as a reference of the views of rich techno-advocates capitalist and everything wrong with it.
Honestly, I felt this post just shows how delusional the people are who made out with billions during the tech boom of the past 25 years.
I was a huge techno-optimist in the late 90s and early 00s. If anything, my opinion has totally switched over the past 10-15 years as I increasingly see technology ripping societies apart, and benefits only accruing to those at the very top. So excuse me if I gag a bit from a post from newly minted billionaires saying how those crowing about the downsides of tech are just a bunch of Debbie Downers.
Tristan Harris, who was featured a lot in The Social Dilemma documentary, was on Bill Maher recently, and I totally agreed with this point he made: we have to forget all the optimistic stories we tell ourselves about tech, and instead just look at the incentives. With social media, we told ourselves all these stories about how it would bring us closer together and keep us better in touch with friends. But the financial incentives that exist for social media companies is solely based on stealing more and more of your attention: what keeps you scrolling to the next block. And it turns out nothing grabs attention like outrage. Tristan's point was that with newer tech like AI, we're likely to repeat the same mistakes if we just tell ourselves the same stories about all the good that can come from AI and ignore the incentives of those top companies speeding ahead as fast as they can. And if you look at those incentives, I don't think it bodes well for the rest of the 99.9% who won't control major AI systems.
Right — the technology we need is not the technology that is incentivized and produced by the market. Indeed, the market is tending to block the development we need.
I think one big thing I agree with is that folks are making themselves miserable by adopting this "woe is me" narrative about how life is so hard now and so on and so forth. Life is pretty good. I remember as a child being awed by what I thought then was the rate of progress and now it's even faster: AI, Space, and just appliance tech.
I'm pretty anti-pessimist so many of these things appeal to me. Ultimately, though, it's hard to care that much because I know that Marc Andreessen is just content marketing here.
His efforts to literally stop building homes in his town after publishing a work titled "It's time to build" really tarnishes everything he says and makes it obvious he's a bullshitter.
And most of that elimination of extreme poverty? In China. Now, I suppose you can consider Dengism capitalism, if you ignore the fact that it's markets and capital under controlled conditions being used to build up industrial capacity for the transition to communism, but hey. Whatever definitions let you sleep at night.
I think the big criticism with The Capitalist Manifesto is that it was essential the guiding philosophy in the late-1990's to early 2010s where the belief was that building a strong trade with China based on capitalist principles would lead to political change there.
It's impossible to say whether or not it is a fallacy of course, but this is a criticism that does need addressing.
The other major criticism is that it doesn't take into account externalities. It was written in the 1950s, before the birth of the modern environmental movement, but non-the-less the effect of unbound lassize-fair capitalism was understood and the book could do more to address this.
For me (as is common in political/economic trade offs) it's enough to say that the book makes some good points that seem more true than false, and there is enough data to show that it does work much of the time.
This is a profession of faith for tech bros so devoid of meaning and humanity in their lives that they have to worship "progress" to justify their existence.
> We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”
This killed it for me. Humans did just fine in isolation for a very long time...until others forcibly moved them or killed them. Growth, in the terms being described, is religious and juvenile.
> We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.
Interestingly, nearly every sentence begins with "we believe," a fundamentally religious statement.
Well, it's a manifesto. That's kind of what a manifesto is - a statement of your positions. If your manifesto is not going to devise those from first principles, then "we believe" isn't a bad way of putting it. (And even if it does devise them from first principles, you still have to justify your first principles.)
That's not a "religion" by normal definitions, but it's perhaps a religious way of stating it. (It could in fact be a secular religion, but the wording of the manifesto isn't enough to show that it is.)
My main bugbear with this is that - similar to many American screeds on free markets - it conflates "free markets" with "capitalism". You can have one without the other (employee co-operatives, partnerships), and vice versa (monopolies, cartels).
Free markets are about letting the market set the price. That requires multiple providers who are not allowed to engage in extreme anti-competitive behavior that prevents new entrants from becoming providers.
Capitalism is about being able to own shares in an organisation (you provide capital), where others do work and you get a share of the profits generated from that work proportionate to the size of share you own.
A lot of people say "I'm a capitalist", who go to work each day and get paid a wage. These are not capitalists. They're employees. They are normally an expressing an opinion that is pro-free market, and think that investment can drive more opportunities for work for themselves. They may own shares, and hope for it become a primary income source one day, but the majority have to have jobs.
It is reasonable to be optimistic about technology, and to make the case for free markets. It is not reasonable to suggest the only mechanism to make this happen is capitalism.
Capitalism drives the fly-wheel of what Cory Doctorow has called "enshitification". There is a constant need to service ever growing numbers in order to sate the appetite of truly pure capitalists, because it's the only thing they care about. This means we see the slow, painful death of multiple products we care about, because the things that make them something we care about are nothing to do with shareholder value, but functional value (even if that function is "fun").
I earnestly believe that technology firms need to start looking away from all forms of external investment - including venture capital - and to alternative economic models and structures of ownership. If you want to build a unicorn, they might get you there, for a while. But it you want to build something that really lasts, that you get to enjoy running and owning as a career (and why would you want to build any other kind of company), there are other models. And those models will eventually win out, because they are fundamentally, foundationally, impossible to "enshitificate".
This paragraph in particular made me laugh:
> 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.
A bunch of VCs whose only work is taking pitch meetings and allocating capital to who they think will win and who will lose, sat down and wrote this. Think about that.
Go start your big idea now with friends and family and people you like, making sure you build it in a way that is resistant to capitalism, but open to exploiting everything the free market offers. Technology is brilliant. But these idiots have all the gear and no idea - they're about to be found out, and their beloved copies of Ayn Rand books aren't going to help them.
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.
Gosh this is weird. So many of the points here seem really good and important, yet many of the other points here are so distorted as to be almost unrecognizable. It reads to me like bad religion.
E.g. he knows about the Aral sea and yet argues against the "Precautionary Principle"!?
(It seems strange to me to mention the Aral sea as an example of Soviet ecological incompetence, which it surely is, but then fail to mention the Salton sea, a similar disaster perpetuated by non-Communists.)
The biggest problem I have with this manifesto is that there's nothing actionable in it. What are we, the little people who aren't techno-elite billionaires, supposed to do now? Just wait for techno-Jesus to save us?
1. maintain and improve your emacs&nixos configurations,
2. create a personal database and add new capabilities to it (for example you could start by making a database to track github stars that could for instance store hashes of specific commits)
3. with your newfound data model and programmable/configurable environment, slowly integrate AI into your life
"The biggest problem I have with this manifesto is that there's nothing actionable in it. What are we, the little people who aren't techno-elite billionaires, supposed to do now? Just wait for techno-Jesus to save us?"
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] thread[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiaWsgtJrNI
I think the fallacy might be a little too much "magic happens here." Yes you can be optimistic about the future, but a good future is not automatically guaranteed. It requires very hard work and constant vigilance. It's not just a matter of having faith and waiting for the messiah.
Both blind optimism and blind pessimism are easy when you're not the one doing the work. Those doing the work tend toward realism.
This piece is better than some in that it at least makes the romanticism explicit near the end, but it’s burdened with the same self-conscious need to try to “prove” it’ll also make everything better in any terms one might choose, which is why these are all silly: they want to make believe that there aren’t meaningful costs or trade-offs for their romantic ideal. Nuance and shades of truth can’t be allowed, because they threaten the fake-reasoned rationalization for the romanticism, which romanticism is the point of the whole exercise, so cannot be threatened or alloyed, else they’d lose interest in it.
Where have the hackers gone?
The higher those costs are, the fewer people can afford to just go do something adventurous, new and interesting.
I mean, think about the staggering amounts of VC money in the bay area that pretty much flows straight to landlords.
Judging from the bulk of the comments in here, it doesn't look like I'm wrong.
Interesting to see a twitter thing slowly leak into the mainstream one step at a time.
Mostly an AI thing originally I think? (I'm addicted to the site, but don't follow the d list celeb drama lol.)
Stands for effective accelerationism, more or less what you read in this Manifesto (Marc Andresson said he identified it a while ago too so makes sense.)
[0] https://www.effectiveacceleration.org/posts/4LtypqdAmQ3AgKtJ...
Accelerationism is the belief that we should race towards catastrophe so that we can rebuild society in a better way.
E / Acc is a (sometimes ironic) amalgam of the two.
You won't be surprised to learn that not many in these groups have studied history.
#accelerate was a meme (which, mainly referred to a set of aesthetics) on Google circles around 2011
Since then, the meme evolved into a bit of a war between l/acc (the original sense of the term) and r/acc (Nick Land flavored).
e/acc is a play on this—but a decade removed, the original context has been mostly forgotten
To understand the original historical context, you can read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Accelerationist-Reader-Urb..., which traces it back to, among other things, an essay by Marx
1: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/eacc-effective-accel...
[edit] ok, nuance, yes he advocated movements to replace capitalism with communism, but he’s not the one mainly associated with attempts to bring communism “too early” (too early by Marx’s reckoning of the timeline of capitalism, that is)
It's either exponential growth forever and colonizing Mars or "why do you want to drag us back to the caves".
Having a conversation for the 1000th time with such people who don't recognize nuance is very tiresome and not worth it.
Everything must be maximally divisive, maximally triggering, and compressible into <200 characters.
Try "almost all people". People crave certainty.
Unless they're somehow unaware that, in its current manifestation, technology is a tool that converts knowledge into power.
An improved and expanded strategy for -- with articulated tactics to achieve -- the decentralization of power and wealth, a dismantling of hierarchy, and increasing personal agency, privacy and freedom must not be sacrificed in favor of technology for technology's sake.
Can we even do this? I don't know.
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.
That's an anonymous Twitter/X account @BasedBeffJezos not the actual head Jeff himself.
Founder(?) of the e/acc philosophy
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
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.
NYT - billionaire Sulzberger family
WaPo - Jeff Bezos
LA Times - billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong
Disney/Comcast/Paramount represent the consolidation of an industry that used to be hundreds of independent newsrooms into a dozen or so corporations. The murdoch family's New Corp is regularly analyzed as a political force on par with individual elected leaders, if not more so.
Entertainment: Apple/Amazon/Comcast/Disney/Sony/WarnerBrosDiscovery/Paramount
The problem is that the industry has consolidated into a number of players you can count on one hand.
But most of all through sheer, pure corruption. Because why else would someone become a politician - a relatively low paid position - if not to be in a position to transform all that power and influence into money, for the highest bidder?
(I'm not claiming that other countries don't have money in politics; but America is the one where it is most clearly enshrined with an actual name to the philosophy)
But other power brokers as well. Other politicians with more money. Their own stock holdings. Foreign powers. Well moneyed interest groups. Ideological organizations siphoning old money.
Occasionally even the scrappy start-up trying to game the system. These usually fail, see SBF - but they are not saints either.
There is no shortage in interests vying to corrupt politicians. Somehow they never mind and always succumb.
How exactly? Reducing profits defeats the purpose of becoming a monopoly, while any sliver of profit is the startup's opportunity.
To create a monopoly you need to restrict competition some other way, like through governmental regulation.
Only if you ignore the concept of loss leaders, or the very act of competing in the market itself by undercutting competitors' prices. Companies are very happy to receive less money in the short term in exchange for guaranteed recurring revenue in the long term, it's only rational after all, and applies as much to a yearly subscription being cheaper than 12 individual monthly subscriptions as it does to established companies accepting reduced revenue in the short term to guarantee their share of the market in the long term.
This is all pretty obvious from a basic understanding of how companies work TBH.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Henry_Dow#Breaking_a_m...
No government intervention necessary.
That's circular logic. Free markets are defined as those in which competition happens. Unregulated markets often tend towards cartelization and monopoly.
> and, you know, laws.
Which need to be enforced by governments.
> Point me to a resistant monopoly or cartel and I will show you a government granted/supported one.
The whole robber baron era is a counterexample - the likes of Standard Oil getting broken up by the goverment. Market competition is powerful but it only works when the government is actively enforcing a competitive market, which there is sadly little enthusiasm for lately.
Read some more on the robber baron era - you'll find out Standard Oil was already losing to competition before government action. For another great example how the free market broke a cartel, read up on how Dow Chemical fought the German bromine cartel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Henry_Dow#Breaking_a_m...
No government intervention necessary.
That's very clearly where you're going with this though.
> Point me to a resistant monopoly or cartel and I will show you a government granted/supported one.
Microsoft famously made deals with laptop vendors to prevent Dell, HP, and so on from selling computers with any operating system other than Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
Similarly, Intel stifled AMD by providing financial incentives to vendors who offered no AMD-based products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
Were those government supported monopolistic behaviors? Does the "free market" mean that a competitor could have simply made one company that produced an entire laptop, OS, and CPU from scratch to provide the consumer a cheaper choice?
Why would the "free market" lead to vibrant competition, rather than monopolistic hoarding of power?
The free market lead to that. Countless startups trying everything under the sun made sure incumbents like Apple or Google had to innovate, acquire and evolve to avoid Microsoft's fate. In a free market there is always a chance a new startup will spring up and upend the order. Tons of VC money are continuously trying exactly that.
NeXT would never have built the iPhone, they had given up on hardware.
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.
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.
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.
And it's precisely the GPs unwavering certainty that HFTs are net negative that accurately informs they do not understand the full implications of what HFTs offer.
Because when you're aware of the full picture, it is not at all obvious society will be better off without it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37912662
Have you ever wonder why the markets appear so irrational? Great economic data and the worse drop in months or vice versa. These are the expectations, emotions and psychology of the masses that are liquidated by market makers. Have you also just had a gut instinct to buy or sell and market moves completely opposite beyond your psychological limit. Only for it to start moving into profit once you have closed at a huge loss. This is all market makers do all day.
In principle there is nothing immoral here. Participants are all taking risks voluntarily, no one is forcing you risk trading the stock market. But in practice market makers take positions at the stop losses 90% of market participants giving them significantly overwhelming supply of assets at the best prices, while everyone else sees consistent intractable losses.
This is a Darwinian environment where only the biggest, fiercest and most aggressive players will win by killing weaker, smaller and less knowledgeable players. The only way for a small fish to win is to understand the rules the market makers play by. Their strengths, desires, weaknesses, limitations and once you do you realize that this was someone's capital, but it's also capital not going to the market makers.
You're ignoring my objection to this stuff, which has nothing to do with immorality and everything to do with with the waste and misdirection of resources. Why do people participate in this stuff? Because someone might get rich. From my POV, that's a waste and misdirection of resources. People getting rich is not the right motivation for pareto or utilitarian optimal allocations.
I empathize that it appears the case it's not an optimal allocation, but to say you know it's a misallocation leans overly simplistic.
What you see as misdirection of resources is the product of competitive market forces that drive innovation and efficiency. And the market often finds value in ways not immediately apparent.
Is less efficient resource arbitration (futures, forex) worth the trade-off? Producers can make their own market and set their own prices. But do that in an information vacuum and there will be increased deadweight loss in the form of higher bid-ask spreads, increasing costs, reducing economic activity.
There are more benefits in the form of reducing volatility and increasing liquidity.
It is not at all as obvious as you make it that society would be better off had HFTs and similarly received sorts of "financialization" not exist.
I empathize that it appears the case that the market has some emergent properties that allow it to optimize allocation, but to say you know its an optimal allocation leans overly simplistic.
"I think investing in a venture that will do <X> seems like a good idea" may, indeed, have some connection to an at least pareto optimal resource allocation.
"I will offer your $X in N months for <X>" might also play a useful role in resource allocation.
"I will buy this 3rd derivative instrument that reflects guesswork about guesswork about preferences and hold it for 3 hours" is just the financial service industry fucking us over.
I'm pointing out The Economy/Market and its mechanisms is a complex system. I urged caution making conclusions from facile knee jerk first order observables when it's the unknown nth order effects we should probably try to identify and characterize first.
> just the financial service industry fucking us over.
Maybe. But why think you know this? I haven't even tried to quantify the pros/cons, and I'm unwilling to stake a position until I do.
Now, what does seem true is that it is easy to tell stories about this system that focus on its pros, of which there are many, and thus to construct the overall impression that we should be cautious about changing or discarding it.
In and of itself, that's not a problem. However, combined with the fact stories about the cons are routinely marginalized, discarded as not serious, simply ignored and forth, this is a problem. It leads to a strong bias in favor of the status quo - look at the all the good things we get! we must careful not to lose them! - and an equally strong bias against change attempting to target the much, much less culturally visible cons.
When I see a system that combines externalities, wild inequality of outcome and this sort of builtin restistance to tackling the cons, my facile knee jerk reaction is to assume that it is rigged. More pertinently, even if the alternatives do present various risks, we should be exploring "the neighborhood" with an awareness that we may not even be in a local optimum, let alone a global one.
But that's just the brain's bias towards simple explanations and well-defined actors - the Ockham's Razor heuristic you could call it. Truth is we're still in the early stages of capitalism where most (all?) nations aren't stably resourced and as such geopolitical strategy and internal unrest can and will undo capital expansion with a stroke of the pen or a bullet from a gun. The need for monopolisable extractative resources such as fossil fuels ensures that capital will trend towards monopolistic behemoths with deep connections to their governments, and that permeates down into capital as a whole.
Moving to a more decentralised model of resourcing means less need for national security to favour and support massive quasi-governmental corporations that are "too vital to fail" and which leads to an environment where the inevitable endpoint of every market sector is consolidation into their own behemoth conglomerates. The more dispersed your resource acquisition is, the less dependent on massive corporations governments will be.
I can't just offer a crazy amount of money and get access, the other major players have to let me play.
[1]: https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/Wireless_Connectivity_Fees_a...
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.
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.
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.
> Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.
No, markets naturally culminate into monopolies and cartels. That's just human nature.
History has shown over and over again that monopolies and cartels are naturally occurring and that the only successful way to deal with them is to break them up via government intervention. Sure, some monopolies may eventually dissolve due to things like technical obsolescence but that's the type of thing that takes so long that entire generations can come and go, suffering the effects the entire time, before they break up.
This manifesto also doesn't seem to have a solution to "natural monopolies" like ISPs or utilities (water, sewer, electricity). It just pretends such things don't exist.
It also doesn't have anything at all to say about economic externalities (e.g. pollution/downstream impacts), policing of bad behavior, or "tragedy of the commons" sorts of problems.
If you had a technology-oriented country that sends all of its pollution to another country it could be the perfect world envisioned by this "Techno-Optimist Manifesto".
There is no "natural" culmination into monopoly, monopoly is THE ANTITHETICAL END of the market. Where monopoly exists there is no longer a competitive market floating prices. The state itself in then in control of all production or in affiliation with a stagnant racket that controls all production. There is no market anymore, because the state (a monopoly of its own) has ceased to enforce a market. It is a choice for the state to make. The contrast between the choice between a market and monopoly is as stark as the contrast between South Korea vs North Korea, or Norway vs Venezuela.
Reminds me of the spirit of "Data for Good", which has become a whitewashed phrase to avoid ethical scrutiny (see: shotspotter, Wejo, palantir)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost every single one of us does. The great, huge, gigantic majority of us does. Few realize it though.
None of what were treatable at the 1800.
> People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water.
In relative terms, almost none. I'm not sure how they compare in absolute terms, but just the answer not being obvious while the population increased by an order of magnitude already makes your claim quite bad.
> People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery.
And nobody had no prospect back them.
You can complain that there are some people living almost as badly as people lived in the 1800s. But it's not the majority by far, and you can't claim they are currently living worse.
And, of course, none of that is reason to not demand better things.
Back then there were cities in the US where a third of newborns wouldn't see their first birthday. Look at us now! We stand like a colossus. Our children stand healthy. Strong.
You've created some fictional subjugation narrative that is nothing near the truth.
One of the key points made in the book, which is full of wonderful data and is a GREAT read if you’re into that sort of thing, was the idea that *wealth is much more unequal than income*.
From Vox’s coverage of the book:
> You hear a lot about income inequality, but as this chart makes clear wealth inequality is much more severe. In the United States, just 1 percent of the population owns about 35 percent of all the wealth. Even in relatively egalitarian Europe, the top 1 percent owns around 25 percent of the wealth. In both continents, the top 10 percent owns over half the wealth.
It’s hugely important to understand that point, which gets lost frequently.
Wealth inequality > Income inequality.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/10/5561608/9-charts-that-explain-...
You can’t argue about the benefits of the system — they are material. You can try to argue about global incomes rising. But it’s a hard argument to win when it comes to global wealth distribution.
Really? It has produced a climate destabilization that may well destroy civilization within the next decade or two.
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.
That doesn't happen until after the luddite's first appearance in ~1816 [1]
> This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced.
No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against. Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards. Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight. The concept of high minded observations on empire are anachronistic embellishments[2]. The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground. I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then.
The wool trade supplied wealth to large parts of the cotswolds, east anglia, the lowlands and other places.
The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500.
[1] https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/2534... page 39, turning point is 1830
[2] https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/ne... They are literally talking about powered frames, and nothing else.
According to Parthasarathi [1], Indian cloth already began having issues from the 1720s as East India Company contracts begun squeezing out local merchants. From the late 1760s, Indian weavers begun having trouble. South Indian weavers reported that in 1779 their incomes had dropped 35% since 1768 (Parthasarathi p. 78-79.) The Luddites first appear in history around 1811, a good 40 years after the beginning of the decline of Indian cloth.
1830 is much too late for the "turning point" as the Cuddalore Weaver's Protest had already occurred by 1778 [2]. I suspect your source comes from before the opening of the East India Company records.
> No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against.
Correct, I never disagreed.
> Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards.
> The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500.
The class consciousness of weavers only appeared from the beginning of industrialization. Weavers guilds operated in different economic and social circumstances with very different economic arrangements than the Luddite-era weavers. Guilds often enjoyed exclusive market privileges and thus had much more pricing power than weavers in the post-feudal era.
> The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground.
Of course, at that time the flow of information and general levels of education were low. But it's hard to imagine that weavers weren't aware of the prodigy of Indian textiles at the time. Indian exports dominated the textile market until the late 18th century and weavers would have been competing for sales to merchants with Indian exporters. Naturally most weavers would be completely unaware of the contracts and pricing power of the East India Company at the time and its knock-on effects in India. I'm not trying to imply that the Luddites cheered on the EIC in their exploitation, and don't think they did at all unless there's evidence of the contrary.
> I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then.
Europe and the Islamicate world had a lot of mutual animosity and respect for each other at the time. The British viewed Mughal wealth and organization favorably, and this was the basis for the term "mogul" as used in "business mogul". [3] Whether that would lead to sympathy or not is unclear.
> Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight.
Correct but their relative market position came at the expense of the market position of the Mughals. The guild based systems which created guaranteed markets of the middle ages were already long broken by the time of the Luddites. The very ruin from relative riches due to mechanization itself was based on riches based off the ruin of the Mughals. That the Luddites were trying to protect their own lifestyle is neither enigmatic nor evil. The Mughals attempted the same. But instead of trying to cast the Luddites as virtuous heroes, it's important to contextualize them as parties who were protecting a treasure that they had received at another's expense.
[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/transition-to-a-col... The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800
[3]: Parthasarathi p. 103 and Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial A...
"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...
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.
It also presents the usual contradiction that any neo-liberal argument is "not a political argument". The author states :
> Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.
Then proceeds to glorify the techno-capital (their term) and shun communism. How is that not political ?
While I do like technology and optimism, I prefer a more honest view. I think I'm glad this manifest exists: I disagree with almost every item of the list, but it's useful as a reference of the views of rich techno-advocates capitalist and everything wrong with it.
I was a huge techno-optimist in the late 90s and early 00s. If anything, my opinion has totally switched over the past 10-15 years as I increasingly see technology ripping societies apart, and benefits only accruing to those at the very top. So excuse me if I gag a bit from a post from newly minted billionaires saying how those crowing about the downsides of tech are just a bunch of Debbie Downers.
Tristan Harris, who was featured a lot in The Social Dilemma documentary, was on Bill Maher recently, and I totally agreed with this point he made: we have to forget all the optimistic stories we tell ourselves about tech, and instead just look at the incentives. With social media, we told ourselves all these stories about how it would bring us closer together and keep us better in touch with friends. But the financial incentives that exist for social media companies is solely based on stealing more and more of your attention: what keeps you scrolling to the next block. And it turns out nothing grabs attention like outrage. Tristan's point was that with newer tech like AI, we're likely to repeat the same mistakes if we just tell ourselves the same stories about all the good that can come from AI and ignore the incentives of those top companies speeding ahead as fast as they can. And if you look at those incentives, I don't think it bodes well for the rest of the 99.9% who won't control major AI systems.
I like how people keep coming up with dialectical materialism independently. Just don't drop the M-word and no one will get triggered.
I'm pretty anti-pessimist so many of these things appeal to me. Ultimately, though, it's hard to care that much because I know that Marc Andreessen is just content marketing here.
His efforts to literally stop building homes in his town after publishing a work titled "It's time to build" really tarnishes everything he says and makes it obvious he's a bullshitter.
Go to the source materials.
- Rational Optimist. Matt Ridley
- The Better Angels of Our Nature. Steve pinker
- Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Johan Norberg
- the capitalist manifesto: why the global free market will save the world. Norberg
- Wizard and the prophet. Charles Mann
- Factfulness. Hans rosling
Or, just look at the data
pretty crazy they'd put a fallacy in the title of their book
Overall, since the 1990s total global inequality (inequality across all individuals in the world) declined ...
In 1990, 36% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. By 2019, this number had fallen to 9.2%.
It's not a fallacy ... it's reality
the fallacy is that global free markets are exclusive to capitalism. we're trading with china, and aren't they supposed to be socialist?
and i'll add to my reading list to challenge my bias!
It's impossible to say whether or not it is a fallacy of course, but this is a criticism that does need addressing.
The other major criticism is that it doesn't take into account externalities. It was written in the 1950s, before the birth of the modern environmental movement, but non-the-less the effect of unbound lassize-fair capitalism was understood and the book could do more to address this.
For me (as is common in political/economic trade offs) it's enough to say that the book makes some good points that seem more true than false, and there is enough data to show that it does work much of the time.
Perhaps you don't owe the devoid of meaning and humanity in their lives better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This killed it for me. Humans did just fine in isolation for a very long time...until others forcibly moved them or killed them. Growth, in the terms being described, is religious and juvenile.
Interestingly, nearly every sentence begins with "we believe," a fundamentally religious statement.
That's not a "religion" by normal definitions, but it's perhaps a religious way of stating it. (It could in fact be a secular religion, but the wording of the manifesto isn't enough to show that it is.)
Modernity requires reasoned argument and evidence.
Free markets are about letting the market set the price. That requires multiple providers who are not allowed to engage in extreme anti-competitive behavior that prevents new entrants from becoming providers.
Capitalism is about being able to own shares in an organisation (you provide capital), where others do work and you get a share of the profits generated from that work proportionate to the size of share you own.
A lot of people say "I'm a capitalist", who go to work each day and get paid a wage. These are not capitalists. They're employees. They are normally an expressing an opinion that is pro-free market, and think that investment can drive more opportunities for work for themselves. They may own shares, and hope for it become a primary income source one day, but the majority have to have jobs.
It is reasonable to be optimistic about technology, and to make the case for free markets. It is not reasonable to suggest the only mechanism to make this happen is capitalism.
Capitalism drives the fly-wheel of what Cory Doctorow has called "enshitification". There is a constant need to service ever growing numbers in order to sate the appetite of truly pure capitalists, because it's the only thing they care about. This means we see the slow, painful death of multiple products we care about, because the things that make them something we care about are nothing to do with shareholder value, but functional value (even if that function is "fun").
I earnestly believe that technology firms need to start looking away from all forms of external investment - including venture capital - and to alternative economic models and structures of ownership. If you want to build a unicorn, they might get you there, for a while. But it you want to build something that really lasts, that you get to enjoy running and owning as a career (and why would you want to build any other kind of company), there are other models. And those models will eventually win out, because they are fundamentally, foundationally, impossible to "enshitificate".
This paragraph in particular made me laugh:
> 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.
A bunch of VCs whose only work is taking pitch meetings and allocating capital to who they think will win and who will lose, sat down and wrote this. Think about that.
Go start your big idea now with friends and family and people you like, making sure you build it in a way that is resistant to capitalism, but open to exploiting everything the free market offers. Technology is brilliant. But these idiots have all the gear and no idea - they're about to be found out, and their beloved copies of Ayn Rand books aren't going to help them.
That is... really putting absurd amounts of weight on the term "Market Discipline".
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.
E.g. he knows about the Aral sea and yet argues against the "Precautionary Principle"!?
(It seems strange to me to mention the Aral sea as an example of Soviet ecological incompetence, which it surely is, but then fail to mention the Salton sea, a similar disaster perpetuated by non-Communists.)
The biggest problem I have with this manifesto is that there's nothing actionable in it. What are we, the little people who aren't techno-elite billionaires, supposed to do now? Just wait for techno-Jesus to save us?
1. maintain and improve your emacs&nixos configurations,
2. create a personal database and add new capabilities to it (for example you could start by making a database to track github stars that could for instance store hashes of specific commits)
3. with your newfound data model and programmable/configurable environment, slowly integrate AI into your life
FWIW, I'm going to be using Guix on my next computer.
This "manifesto" is batshit insane.