Out-of-Shape, Billionaire Technology Investor Can’t Get Enough Technology, Money

'A clue' is the missing technology in Marc Andreesen's recently published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto."

Last week, famed venture capitalist Marc Andreeson published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” In it, Andreesen boldly claims “there is no material problem —whether created by nature or by technology —that cannot be solved with more technology.” (More tech than what, who knows? Just more.) I commented on Andreesen’s specious reputation as a maverick investor last year in regards to Flow, WeWork co-founder and legendary con artist Adam Neumann’s nebulous housing play, but this manifesto is some next level horseshit. 

Before writing further, I must disclose that I did not read all 5,000 of Andreesen’s poorly-written, illogical manifesto, and my commentary is augmented by TechCrunch’s laudable response post, “When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person?” [Many other publications have since skewered Andreesen’s turbid tome.] The TC authors do a great job highlighting Andreeson’s bias, ignorance, and chasms in logic, asking zinger questions like: 

When was the last time Marc Andreessen walked through the streets of San Francisco, where wealthy tech workers pretend that they don’t see the homeless encampments outside of their companies’ HQ?...When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person—or an Instacart shopper struggling to make ends meet, for that matter?

It’s worth noting Instacart is an Andreesen-Horowitz (the name of Andreesen’s venture firm, aka ‘a16z’) portfolio company, as is Postmates, Airbnb, and Lyft, all of which have greatly reduced the number of stable, low skill, living wage jobs and replaced them with inconsistent, wage-slave gig work —work that can quickly disappear if consumer demand disappears, investment money dries up, and/or government regulation undermines their business models, like what is happening with Airbnb in NYC. A16z was also an investor in Facebook and Twitter, tech behemoths responsible for making a good chunk of the world’s population into antisocial, propaganda-spewing, intellectually-stunted, screen-addicted zombies. 

Technology’s human costs are only matched by its environmental ones. While not often seen or acknowledged, information technology depends on an energy and water hogging server infrastructure whose upkeep will become untenable in a world of scarce, expensive energy. Most technology —from circuit boards to batteries —is made of elements like silicon, cobalt, and lithium whose resource-intensive extraction scars and pollutes the earth. And while tech is often heralded as a tool for higher consciousness and knowledge, the majority of it is used for buying and selling landfill-bound junk no one really needs. A16z’s portfolio companies include several startups assisting people to buy more junk, whether it’s designer shoes (ShoeDazzle), razors (Dollar Shave Club), or suburban homes (OpenDoor). Andreesen’s idealized view of technology suggests a Star Trek-like future when the actual applications portend a future that’s far more Wall-E in look and feel.  

In the movie Wall-E, the earth becomes too overrun with trash for human habitation.

Does technology like Andreesen writes about and invests in make life more convenient? Sure, but mainly for its user and in very narrow contexts. Does technology’s net impact —when impacts on service providers (e.g. an Instacart shopper or Lyft driver), public health, environmental tolls, and other considerations are factored in — make the world better than it would be without? Not necessarily.  

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The other night I read a quote from rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel about the importance of stopping the workaday life to observe the sabbath. He wrote: 

He [the Sabbath observer] must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.

I believe people like Andreesen —and other technophiles like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.—do not understand why it’s important to stop working, nor do they understand reality outside the “nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness” and “wringing profit from the earth.” They likely cannot comprehend what Heschel means by “the world has already been created” because their lives are devoted to overcoming what they perceive as Nature’s limitations, selling more consumer goods for the most trivial inconvenience, more powerful and fast vehicles, more planets to inhabit when earth’s bounty is exhausted, and so forth. To them, a world without digital, industrial, battery-powered technology is a barbarous, unevolved place.   

Unlike Andreesen, I have an expansive definition technology, one that is perhaps best expressed by Walt Whitman, who wrote, “The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account/That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.” To me, God is the ultimate technologist, and as Heschel attested, God created the world: the interplay of flora and fauna, the fecundity of the earth, the majesty of the human body and mind . What could possibly be more beautiful, complex, sophisticated, and valuable?    

This obsession with improving and augmenting nature with technology seems especially prevalent for those who aren’t connected with nature —who don’t honor and take full advantage of their bodies’ capabilities, who don’t respect and spend time outside in nature, who don’t sing, dance, play, or converse without technological assistance. For these disconnected techno-addicts, nature is never enough and they are not enough —not fast enough, smart enough, healthy enough, powerful enough, bountiful enough, convenient enough. Rather than tapping into internal and organic resources —using their bodies, intellects, capabilities to connect to their fullest extent—they obsess over external, manufactured technological solutions to overcome their sense of lacking. Methinks this obsession is borne of an unconscious desire to transfer responsibility from the individual and internal to the corporatized and external. And as long as problems are out there and not within, no problems will get solved and it’ll always be someone else’s fault. This is the opposite message the world needs right now.