I haven’t wanted to deal with Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto” simply because it’s been dealt with by a lot of very able critics quite well. Honestly, it’s a tempting target precisely because it makes such a bad case for what it is trying to advocate—or because its advocacy is less a manifesto and plainly not “techno-optimism” and more a kind of robber-baron defense of the privileges of an intellectually cramped and ridiculously self-regarding group of people whose egos would serve as space elevators if they could only be converted into buckyballs.
However, I did enjoy Noah Smith’s attempt to recast Andreessen’s self-indulgence into something more coherent, and even more so, Dave Karpf’s response today to Smith.
Karpf gives me something to work with that is more appealing to me by far, which is to consider how we narrate the history of technology more generally, and why it’s important not to allow the Silicon Valley elite to anoint themselves the avatars of all technological change, or even to cast them as the major representation of why technological change is dangerous or fearsome.
The history of technology is a really interesting field in my discipline. If I could hop in a time machine and do my career over again, I’d almost choose to be in that field rather than the one I am in, except I also know that the ways I think about the history of technology now and the scholarship I really like would not have been very well supported by the kinds of people I might have studied with almost forty years ago nor by the kinds of institutions that were at that time invested in technological history as a part of their research program.
The history of technology has moved not from optimism to pessimism as much as it has abandoned (or at least complicated) the narrative that Western society crafted with increasing dedication and intensity starting in the early 19th Century, that the rise of modern sociopolitical structures, secularism and science, and global-scale economies created an unstoppable wave of material and technological progress that would move with increasing rapidity to address all existing human challenges.
Historians of science and technology over the last fifty years came to understand that this story was wrong in its representation of Western and non-Western societies as largely technologically static before 1500. That it was wrong in its tendency to detach technologies from surrounding social and cultural formations, wrong to take technologies as intrinsically deterministic, as having fixed material characteristics that dictated the transformations that followed their introductions. That the idea that early modern science represented a conscious heroic commitment to challenge religious ignorance and commit to an open-ended pursuit of empirical truth—including the invention of new technologies implied by the science—was also wrong. A lot of Renaissance science was undertaken for the same reasons that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel: to please princely patrons, often intermingling devices and designs and art, or in other cases, alchemy and magic sat comfortably alongside what we consider to be science without any sense that they were rivalrous or incompatible.
When I teach my course on the History of the Future, I often try to show students that a sense that the future would be shaped primarily by the forward march of technologies, whether pessimistically or optimistically, really did not fully gel in global thought until the end of the 19th Century. What we often regard as fundamental technological changes from earlier in that century or back to the 16th Century weren’t necessarily imagined in that way by contemporaries. Only in the 20th Century did many of us come to believe that we lived in a world where technological transformation was rapid, ineluctable and almost entirely positive in nature—or, after World War I and II, did some of us come to believe that this basic dynamic was almost inevitably negative and destructive.
That sense is now firmly nestled in our consciousness, either as hope or dread. And yet if there is any technological change that should dislodge the fixity of that narrative, that would be the entire range of transformations associated with digitization and computation.
The first half of the 20th Century created an incredibly compact and consistent set of expectations that the technologies of the future would be intensified versions of those that had already affected human life in such startling and visible ways. That transportation would be faster and cheaper, erasing distance across the whole of a mass society. That medicine would eradicate disease and debility, that food would be more plentiful and affordable, that commodities which had been available only to the wealthy would be readily on hand for everyone. That we would be more in touch with one another at great distances, and that film and television would bring artistic experiences and news into every home. That new technologies would push science to understand everything in the universe, casting aside whatever mysteries had previously confounded our understanding.
The negative techno-futurism assumed that war would become more and more catastrophically destructive, that a materially wealthy mass society would become indolent or rebellious, that we would open some Pandora’s box in our bodies, our minds, our physical universe that would render us monsters, slaves or outright nullify our existence.
But in the heart of postwar technological futurism, when every expectation of intensification of prewar technologies seemed to be coming true—rockets to space! vaccines to eliminate terrible diseases! cars for everybody! washing machines and trash compactors and blenders and vacuums! frozen food and TV dinners! contraceptive pills and synthetic clothes! nuclear power plants! hydrogen bombs! drugs that make people drop out and tune out! and so on, almost nobody saw computation, digitization and the Internet coming, not the way we ended up living with them after 1980 or so.
Computers in the imagination of the Atomic Age were going to be giant things that took up floors of buildings, whole buildings. They were maybe dangerous, maybe going to rule us or replace us, maybe saviors who would manage what we couldn’t or amplify our capabilities. But nobody was thinking about computers or the Internet the way they turned out, or almost nobody.
Which I think leads to a point about the history of technology: techno-optimism (even well-formulated) and techno-pessimism (even well-justified) are not actually descriptive of how technologies are invented and disseminated, not actually descriptive of how technologies interact with societies and economies, not actually useful in helping us assess technology.
Dave Karpf gets it 100% right: these are not analytic descriptions of the relationship between historical change and technology, they’re ideologies. And most of the time, ideologies that are less about promoting some actual vision of technology and more about consolidating power over governments, corporations, or society at large, or attacking the consolidation of power by others. A techno-optimist is often serving as a kind of fluffer or publicist for some interested group or some individual, either trying to help them crack into some resource or system or to defend their stake against rivals and critics. Or in the best-case scenario, is a kind of dreamer who is closer to Christo than they are to Edison—a person who has come to believe in a thing that could be made the way that the artist believes that when he can see in his mind what Mount Everest would look like draped in purple canvas, he just has to make that real. A techno-pessimist is often mistaking technology for something else that’s harder to critique and attack (most frequently capitalism), or is consciously using the genuine anxieties and fears that many people locate in the fetish of a particular technology as a mobilizing device for that more difficult political project. And again, sometimes the ideology isn’t that instrumental; it is a person haunted by a nightmare, a dark vision of something, some object, eating into something vital and beloved in the world.
To describe a given technology as inevitable is an ideological attempt to create momentum that makes it inevitable—or summons a movement to try and fight its inevitability—even if the technology actually doesn’t work or make any sense in the context of what is possible at that moment. The scholar Bruno Latour is often read as a critic of technological change, which I think is a misinterpretation; one book I recommend even to people who view him skeptically is Aramis, or the Love of Technology. In it, Latour is quite gently appreciative of the persistence of various systemic actors in France who committed in various ways to building a transportation system that in retrospect just could not have possibly worked at the time, and perhaps never could work. That persistence was aesthetic, it was philosophical, and it was ideological--that having thought of a technology that could be that would solve a problem, the thinkers came to believe that they had to make it. It’s why there are people who won’t give up on jetpacks and flying cars even though they’re plainly not possible in the Jetsons-futurist sense (and plainly would be terrible and dangerous if they were possible). They’ve seen them and want them and love them.
In the reality of history, technologies don’t unfold in materially pre-ordained ways towards progress or disaster, and they don’t advance at a predictably more rapid speed. Look at rockets and space travel. We’re talking only now in more serious ways once again about the possibility of a moonbase, decades after science fiction treated it as a highly plausible or even inevitable outcome of landing on the moon. And I’ll be honest: the serious talk is not really to be taken very seriously: it is in the same sense ideological and interested as many other longings for particular technologies. The idea is that somehow if you can get enough people to buy in on the front side, they’ll never recognize a sunk cost and push money in and in and in until it finally happens. That’s the way Andreessen’s self-flattery works: he thinks he is one of those giants striding fatefully across history whose siren calls lure enough people and money in to something that was impossible until hey presto! it becomes possible. But that’s not how we got the Internet, as many critics observed. It is not how we will get a moonbase, if we ever do. We will only get that if someone figures out another way to get out of a gravity well or someone figures out how to make an honest-to-god von Neumann machine that can self-assemble a moonbase or if our existing economies find a reason why a moonbase is something you have to do. Or if we embrace an improvidently non-capitalist vision of the worth of an expensive enterprise, which Andreessen and Musk and people like them aren’t even vaguely dialed into as an ideological possibility.
Most technological change has an element of serendipity or accident in it. Technologies are sometimes dead ends. Or sometimes a powerful interest is so invested in them that it hardly matters if they work or not. Technologies contain material possibilities but they’re also an assemblage of path-dependencies that are not material but social and institutional. Technologies happen fast, and then they happen slow. They are ignored and then rediscovered, or hyped and then discarded. They hit limits that are physical, ontological, unchallengeably real, and limits that are about imagination and ideas.
Like Karpf, I don’t find it useful to think as an optimist or pessimist about technology. I am not sure that thinking about “technology” as a singular thing rather than as a many-splendored house of many rooms is very useful. Thinking ideologically about technologies either means you’re somebody’s patsy or somebody’s tool (or that you are seeking to align others behind your own interested project or fervid dreams). Thinking about a technology and the reality of its history, the possibility of its material and cultural properties, about its ownership and its circulation? Always useful, and often surprising.