To Build, or Not to Build, That is the Question: Techno-Optimism vs. Decelerationism

By Jeff Garzik and Ralph Benko

This is the way COP28 ends. Both with a bang and a whimper. The bang and the whimper are the same sound … heard by different ears.

The sound and fury of this opulent conference’s aftermath had the proponents of phasing out fossil fuels declaring a historic victory by the inclusion of the language “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”

Those who oppose the “transitioning away” from fossil fuels vociferously (and plausibly, based on the facts at hand) hold that transitioning is not happening, not going to happen, and cannot happen. The people of the world will not, in the pointed words of COP28 president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, agree to “take the world back into caves.”

The world has not seen such spinning since Claude Shannon vigorously pedaled his unicycle around Bell Labs. While juggling!

So…who’s right?

“Who’s right?” is the wrong question. It misses the truly epic point.

Buried inside the noise of the debate was the signal of a potentially historic consensus. Never fear; we are here to extract the signal from the noise for you.

COP28 reached and published (but sadly did not emphasize adequately) the conclusion that both the pro and anti-fossil forces can have their cake and eat it too. COP28 called for the tripling of nuclear energy capacity. Per Energy.gov’s official press release:

“During the World Climate Action Summit of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change today, more than 20 countries from four continents launched the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy. The Declaration recognizes the key role of nuclear energy in achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and keeping the 1.5-degree goal within reach. Core elements of the declaration include working together to advance a goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity globally by 2050 and inviting shareholders of international financial institutions to encourage the inclusion of nuclear energy in energy lending policies. Endorsing countries include the United States, Armenia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ghana, Hungary, Jamaica, Japan, Republic of Korea, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom.”

As acerbically summarized in a tweet by climate scientist Ryan Maue:

“The COP28 climate summit was a smashing (atoms) success with 200 nations agreeing to accelerate nuclear energy development. This is a major global inflection point, and it happened over the anti-science dogmatic opposition of Germany’s Luddite Green Party & their NGO toads.”

And:

“The Science has spoken: The United States needs to maliciously comply with the plain reading of the COP28 text. All nuclear development must be green lit and accelerated across the board. Costs will come down dramatically with construction scaled to meet global demand.”

Nuclear power, while not a panacea, provides safe, reliable, abundant, and affordable power. This allows us to maintain and grow the standard of living of all Americans and, indeed, all the people in the world… while emitting no carbon dioxide from that source in the process.

Despite the ambient love of squabbling that defines our era let’s struggle through to a place where we can take “yes” for an answer and embrace the win-win solution. Many of the leaders of COP28, explicitly, and more, implicitly, officially recognized that nuclear power may be the sword with which to cut the Gordian knot of energy abundance (and its attendant equitable prosperity) together with the elimination of carbon dioxide externalities (an outcome considered existential by many political and social leaders).

Meanwhile, the clash of interpretive spinning on which the press, ever desperate for clicks, feasts is a mere subset of a much bigger argument. That argument now is swirling in the corridors of power, finance, and high tech. Tech?

The word technology etymologically derives from: “tekhno-, combining form of tekhnē ‘art, skill, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing,’ from PIE *teks-na- ‘craft’ (of weaving or fabricating), from suffixed form of root *teks- ‘to weave,’ also ‘to fabricate.’"

To build or not to build, that is the question.

A specter is haunting the world -- the specter of technophobia.

Recently, Marc Andreessen created a stir in the Noosphere by publishing The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It posits, in an existentially important way, that tech is Good.

We especially salute Marc Andreessen for his declaration therein that “Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth. We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization.”

We observe that the official recognition of the promise of nuclear energy at COP28 heralds a new wave of techno-optimism, the subject of Andreessen’s Manifesto. It promises to unleash a new wave of energy abundance … and of building. We are in solidarity with Andreessen, who stated in a 2020 blog that It’s Time to Build.

We, the founders of Washington Power and Light, constituted in 2023 in America’s capital to emphasize the goodness of technology, especially, in our case, as to energy and energy policy, heartily concur.

In fact, as we have written at HackerNoon, we believe that the struggle between technophiles – or Techno-optimists, of which Andreessen and Horowitz occupy some commanding heights -- and the technophobes, luddites, and in the incisive description by the rigorous and provocative Noah Smith “declerationists,” is the paramount issue of our day.

Andreessen, after three powerful aphorisms, trenchantly (cue Also Sprach Zarathustra!) opens:

Lies: We are being lied to.

We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.

We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.

We are told to be pessimistic.

The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares.

We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.

We are told to be miserable about the future.

Truth: Our civilization was built on technology.

Our civilization is built on technology.

Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress,

and the realization of our potential.

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

I am here to bring the good news.

We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.

We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.

We have the will.

It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.

It is time to be Techno-Optimists.

Who is Marc Andreessen? What gives him authority to promulgate this manifesto?

Andreessen, for our Earthling readers, is a true Master of the Digital Universe and something of a living legend in that even Earthlings like (many of) you may have heard of him. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1996, after all, and TIME currently lists him as one of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Unless you are a Certified Geek like us, you are unlikely to know the names of the inventors of the Internet, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, who wrote the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). That’s the technical name for what normal people call “the Internet.”

Or know the name of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Or the late Ray Tomlinson, considered by many the inventor of email. (Shiva Ayyadurai plausibly contests for that title.) And so forth.

Leaving out Loudcloud (which put Andreessen and Horowitz on course to become self-made billionaires) and a whole lot more, the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (known by the cognoscenti as A16z per the iron law of the conservation of keystrokes) has gone on to become one of the mothers of the invention of our modern, marvelous world.

Per its self-description:

“Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. … We invest in seed to venture to growth-stage technology companies, across AI, bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has $35B in assets under management across multiple funds.

“Respect for the entrepreneur and the company-building process defines a16z. We know what it’s like to be in the founder’s shoes. General partners lead the firm, many of whom are former founders/operators, CEOs, or CTOs of successful technology companies, and have domain expertise ranging from data to artificial intelligence, biology to crypto, distributed systems to security, and marketplaces to financial services.

Andreessen originally rocked the universe with his invaluable contributions to Mosaic, “the first ‘killer app’ of network computing – an applications program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch.”

Mosaic’s successor, Netscape, launched the dotcom boom (quickly supplanted by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, itself then supplanted for market dominance by Google’s Chrome browser).

Andreessen, with his partner Ben Horowitz, didn’t stop there. They are still making waves.

Consider the Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

We hold its position—to build—as right and incisive. And indeed, we consider it a crucial philosophical, social, and political argument of our era.

Andreessen and Horowitz are confronting a prevailing attitude that tech is dangerous. Washington DC’s superpower (akin to that of DC comics) is Narrative, with heroes and villains. As recently noted in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer piece on Jamie Dimon: “Banks were the villains of the economy 15 years ago, but now it’s tech companies.”

Why? Many, including many in DC, see tech as a challenge to its power.

Exactly right.

And, thus, morally deficient, if not outright evil.

Exactly wrong.

The current significance of this fight is most pertinent now with the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence. (Full disclosure: the junior author of this essay is deeply involved via his position as a co-founder and executive of F1R3FLY.io, beyond the scope of this paper, in hyperdimensional computing, which has profound implications for AGI.)

Bottom line? Tech is tools. Tools can be used for good or evil.

In his Manifesto, Andreessen quotes extensively from Nietzsche, a proto-existentialist (often, thanks to the connivance of Nietzsche’s sister after his death, badly misunderstood as a nihilist). Nietzsche, in whose world we live, famously wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, in Aphorism 146:

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

Translated:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

This is a deeply moral, anti-nihilistic, and even heroic sentiment.

Andreessen hits all the right notes. Let’s excerpt:

Technology: “We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.” …

Markets: “We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy.”…

And: “The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio. Who gets more value from a new technology, the single company that makes it, or the millions or billions of people who use it to improve their lives? QED.” …

The Techno-Capital Machine: “Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.” …

Intelligence: We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can.” …

Energy: “Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth. We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization.” …

Abundance: “We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity. We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.” …

Not Utopia, But Close Enough: “However, we are not Utopians. … We believe the Constrained Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Utopia, Communism, and Expertise – means taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices. We believe in not Utopia, but also not Apocalypse.” …

Becoming Technological Supermen: “We believe that advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do. We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology.”…

Technological Values: “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness – strength. We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.” …

The Meaning Of Life: “Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy. We are not necessarily left wing, although some of us are. We are not necessarily right wing, although some of us are. We are materially focused, for a reason – to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid material abundance.” …

The Enemy: “We have enemies. Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”. This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.” ….

Andreessen’s peroration, again from Nietzsche:

Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man:

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself…

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” — so asks the Last Man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest…

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome…

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,” — say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision…

“We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

Our enemy is… that.

We aspire to be… not that.

The Future: Where did we come from? Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of exploration, of industrialization. Where are we going? …

And the Manifesto’s conclusion?

“It’s time to be a Techno-Optimist.

It’s time to build.”

We, geeks (the lead author having helped build the core of Bitcoin and write massive amounts of Linux code, who has more than dabbled in politics) with reasonably serious political chops (the other served in or with three White Houses, two executive branch agencies, multiple Congresses, wrote a plank included in two national political platforms, lead co-author of the critically acclaimed The Capitalist Manifesto who has more than dabbled in emerging tech) fully expected a concerted pushback to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

We were not disappointed.

Confession! We have not and are not likely to conduct a rigorous analysis. That said, as our heuristic, per Google’s page returns last we checked, Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto strongly suggests published sentiment runs close to the Kahnemann-Tversky ratio that holds that people will work two and a half times harder to avert a potential loss than for the equivalent gain.

No surprise.

What came as a greater surprise was the negativity of the tech sector press, such as Techcrunch, Wired, and Engadget. These leaned antagonistic, or at least skeptical, toward Techno-Optimism!

Perhaps the oddest, as noted near the beginning of the Ben and Marc associated podcast, was the critique by Techcrunch, which Horowitz calls out:

“And like all good manifestos many people loved it, many people hated it, and so there that's given us a lot to talk about. I just want to actually point out my favorite of the people that hated it was an article that was published in TechCrunch called “When's the Last Time Marc Andreessen has Spoken to Poor People or a Poor Person,” or something like that.

“And the thing that's so funny about it is that Marc, of all the people I know, I probably don't know anybody who's more self-made than Marc. Because he grew up in a tiny town in Wisconsin, he went to public schools -- like not good public schools like probably some of the worst public schools in the country -- and like never got any money you know from home, not because his parents didn’t love him, they didn't have any money to give him.

“… The people who wrote the article all went to like the fanciest schools I've ever heard of and you know Ivy Leagues and wonderful private high schools and these kinds of things. So now we have people who grew up rich telling somebody who grew up poor and massively succeeded what's good for poor people who want to succeed. So … I just thought that was so funny.”

To which Andreessen interjected:

“…the definition of luxury belief is it's a belief that could be held by somebody who's in sort of … an elite position … you know position of power, position of wealth and comfort … about how society should be ordered that is incorrect and the consequences of which would be disastrous … for the people that would be subjected to the consequences of that belief. But you know the people who hold the belief are insulated from the consequences …. They live in … kind of fancy places and have very good lifestyles and they aren't going to aren't going to suffer directly as a result, so anyway … it's a great example of a luxury belief.… [T]he sort of factual response to it of course is that capitalism and free markets are the machine that has lifted people out of poverty for … 500 years. We've run the experiment; the other systems don't seem to work as well.”

So, now what?

We hold the Techno-optimist position as right, incisive, and crucial to human and environmental progress. We hold it to be, indeed, the crucial philosophical, social, and political argument of our era.

Andreessen is playing David against the elite privileged Goliaths that tech is dangerous: morally deficient if not outright, or at least borderline, evil. Unless, of course, Goliath controls it.

This skirmish is most pertinent now with the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence.

Hello, Skynet? Will it save or destroy the world?

Or neither?

Red herring.

The real question is, do we trust the engineer-entrepreneur wizards to determine that?

Or place our trust in our elected or appointed officials and career civil servant muggles who are now actively bemoaning that they did not regulate the Internet and the Web at its inception and who still crave to do so.

There are many who explicitly wish to exercise political power to impose their control on Artificial General Intelligence, Hyperdimensional Computing, the Blockchain, and other key emerging technologies.

Imagine, despite its flaws, how poorer we all would be without the very Web on which you now are reading this. A Web that would have been assuredly strangled in its cradle by regulation if Uncle Sam had been quicker to succumb to temptation.

Is Andreessen scratching an intellectual itch with his Manifesto? Or will he put a tiny fraction of his resources, intellectual, social, as well as financial, to, in the immortal words of Steve Jobs, make a little dent in the universe by making the techno-optimistic creed stick? Much may depend upon his decision on this.

We concur: “We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop and drive them both to infinity. We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.”

To build or not to build, that is the question.

Jeff Garzik serves as the founder and chairman of the policy institute Washington Power and Light. Before co-founding Bloq, he spent five years as a Bitcoin core developer and ten years at Red Hat. His work with the Linux kernel is now found in every Android phone and data center running Linux today.

Ralph Benko serves as co-founder and general counsel to Washington Power and Light. He is the co-founder and general counsel for F1R3FLY.io and has worked in or with three White Houses, two executive branch agencies, and the Congress, as well as many political and policy institutes. He is an internationally award-winning writer.