marc andreessen's i have a demand speech

After losing his shirt, pants, and boxers in crypto investments, the head of a16z is re-committing to the Nerd Rapture, and commanding that you join him.

Be warned mere mortals, technology is now your god and Marc Andreessen is its high priest. His now viral Techno-Optimist Manifesto reads less like a dive into ideology or plans as much as a fire and brimstone sermon about the need to bow before our tech overlords, or else. It has the right cadence, emphasizes the right parts, and makes big and completely unsubstantiated pronouncements as if they were facts. If you told me that at some point, he started speaking in tongues as he read that at an a16z meeting, I wouldn’t dismiss that claim out of hand. It certainly seems that the formerly aspiring emperor of crypto is back in top Singularitarian form.

Now, yes, this manifesto has already been shredded by numerous commentators for a variety of sins. It resorted to red-baiting right out of the John Birch Society playbook. It called asking for checks or balances on any technology, even for the sake of basic safety and sustainability an inimical act. It rages against rules and regulations that can slow down new software or tools in opaque but obvious contempt for things like labor rights, laws, diversity, and taxes. It was obviously meant to read like a straight-to-the-point rendition of MLK’s immortal I Have A Dream speech. Instead it’s the tantrum of a gadget-obsessed oligarch demanding we cower to his whims.

All of those are perfectly valid points of criticism and I have little to add to them. What I can do, however, is to dive deeper into the obscure belief systems which are lurking just under the surface of all those thunderous proclamations like hungry sharks ready to breach for their prey. You have to keep in mind that people like Andreessen, Musk, and the so-called PayPal Mafia don’t live in the same universe we do. While we tend to worry about paying our bills and keeping a roof over our heads, they’re dreaming of conquering the universe, literally, and AI is key to this dream. This is why the public’s growing fear and distrust of their projects and AI infuriates them.

But before we unpack all that, consider the section Andreessen called Abundance. In it, he declares that the planet is “dramatically underpopulated” and he sees a path to a human swarm of over 50 billion across the solar system and beyond, as we throw consumer good after consumer good at each other, forever, because “markets are the ultimate infinite game” according to the earlier Markets section. This grandiose vision of abundance of human numbers and needs is oddly reminiscent to the setting of the sci-fi novella The World Inside, which imagines that the Earth of 2381 becomes home to over 75 billion humans living in vast arcologies while also settling other planets.

the pathology of infinite growth at all costs

The World Inside’s first half reads like explicit fantasies of someone with free use and breeding kinks, portraying life in immense “Urbmons” as a literal non-stop orgy where men and women are free to have sex and reproduce with anyone they wish by merely introducing themselves — though families and marriages still exist, with couples often marrying in their teens — and having a large family is seen as both blessing and duty, its second half dives into the grave consequences of running the world in such a way. It seems heavily implied that their life of post-scarcity, consequence-free sex, leisure, and very little work is used to control the global cabin fever.

In response to the threat of overpopulation, Earth’s powers that be decided to lock up everyone not directly involved in agriculture inside buildings housing around 800,000 humans, then link those buildings together into vast megacities the size of states and provinces. Any other way to manage 75 billion of us, and counting, wouldn’t work. We currently live in a mix of density and sprawl, and take up a fifth of all land at 8.1 billion, so for the denizens of this world of 2381 to live like us requires 1.85 Earths, and would produce nine times the pollution and emissions. Setting the global population of The World Within free to roam as they please would end in chaos, war, and famine.

Human colonies on other worlds have a lot more elbow room, but Earth feels like their population must grow because that growing population feeds a growing economy by constantly growing consumption. On the one hand, the global GDP is guaranteed to infinitely soar. On the other, humans have to accept tradeoffs as long as they live on their home planet, one of which is the gilded cage of Urbmons, another is not having an exclusive partner, as turning down sex with a stranger is frowned upon, and finally, giving up all family planning as birth control is strictly prohibited. Oh, and if you don’t like this arrangement, you’ll be incinerated as a danger to the community.

Wait, why didn’t more people just go off world? Well, it so turns out that even a dozen humans will have a very difficult time setting up habitats on other planets, much less hundreds of millions, because space exploration is pretty damn hard. So when we’re told that 50 billion of us can settle the solar system and beyond, that’s technically not incorrect, but it also undersells the level of effort required to make it happen by many orders of magnitude. Andreessen’s vision is simple. Markets and an army of unnamed smart people under his guidance will make his dreams come true. In reality, in a world according to Marc, we better get our genitals ready for Urbmons.

We can sing paeans to space and our destiny to explore the final frontier all we want, detailing the stunning alien vistas our progeny might see so often that they get tired and bored with what would blow our minds. But the fact of the matter is that space is more of a cold storage for the building blocks of life than an environment for anything to survive. It’s airless, radioactive, and gravity is just a background constant of 667.4 billionth of a Newton. Unless we make some very radical changes to ourselves so we don’t die from some form of cancer and a depleted immune system roughly 20 to 30 years too early, most humans will be living on Earth for many thousands of years.

the tech bro quest for digital immortality

The simplistic notion of technological advancement — that markets and people paid enough will make anything possible — and stark opposition to moderation, regulation, and sustainability for some unspecified, post-scarcity utopian future made possible by infinite growth from selling infinite new stuff to infinite new people, are the guiding principles of what’s known as Longtermism. Andreessen’s market driven abundance for 50 billion plus people reads as if it was plucked right out of a Longtermist tract in which all of our decisions must be made with the future in mind, the farther the better, but that said future depends on constant GDP growth and industrial capacity.

If you accept that all we need to do is keep growing markets and any serious enough threat or problem will be overcome with technology in the nick of time, you can also be convinced that any restriction on that growth or technology means that the future may encounter a problem that a technology you stopped or slowed down could have solved but didn’t. This is why the manifesto calls any debate about a technology, how to use it, or considerations for sustainability and immediate effect an affront. You may be worried about what happens in 2024, but he’s worried about 20024. And not only is he worried about it, he’s determined to see it with his own eyes. Sort of.

One of the big dreams of Singularitarians is that in 2045, we will have not just hyper-advanced artificial intelligence, but AGI, models so complex that they can emulate an entire human consciousness and tackle any problem we could. It’s at that point they could upload their minds to these models and live on as avatars of themselves in vast cloud computing data centers they want to build. Next, they would use AGI to achieve what they call “superhuman intelligence,” and do nothing less than change the fate of humanity forever. And this is why Andreessen declared that AI is the ultimate solution to every problem. In his mind, it’s the key to immortality as a digital god.

Unfortunately for Andreessen & Co., the world isn’t set up to let them to do whatever they want. Rules still exist, and people chafe at being told that a product they do not want is for their own good, or that being pelted by hate and abuse against their will is just freedom of speech and they’ll have to live with it. Scientists balk at being asked to do impossible things on arbitrary deadlines. And governments get upset when you’re creating heaps of dead monkeys which suffered greatly as you try to shove chips into random people’s heads. Despite it seeming like our laws don’t apply to tech oligarchs, there are still some limits, limits they believe stack the deck against them.

syn/ack darkness, my old friend…

And this is where we get to effective accelerationism, or the “e/acc” in Andreessen bio on Twitter, err, sorry, X. If the world of the unwashed masses clings to their silly laws, governments, ethics, and sustainability at the cost of their glorious progress to digital divinity, that world needs to be burned down and a new one built in its place. One that doesn’t cater to any of those “enemies of progress” and won’t slow down their march to ever more powerful AI, then AGI, then, well, you already know the rest by now. This is also where the e/acc movement crosses paths with fascists, who also want to burn it all down and hate the same things, albeit for different reasons.

For commentators floating in the clouds, to whom human misery is an abstract figure to be eventually adjusted in a spreadsheet, e/acc seems like a fun, optimistic, cheery take on the future of humanity. Why wouldn’t it be? It promises abundance, fantastic technology, and immense improvements in quality of life. All you need to do is ignore the track records of those advocating its implementation, give zero thought to how all of these promises would be achieved, assume that every breakthrough they promise is possible and will materialize, and nod along when they promise it will all work out in the end. But a lot of things sound great if you ignore the details, where the devil lurks.

Here, at last, we reach the end of our descent into the madness of furious tech bros in whose minds, we are but fuel and fodder for their grand visions of tomorrow. Just two decades ago, the media sang praises to them and every thought they had was treated as a revolutionary new paradigm shift that will change the world forever. But the tech media has seen enough failures, empty bluster, and vaporware at this point to be a lot less excitable, a lot more jaded, and a lot more likely to ask questions with a skeptical tone, especially after getting the runaround or an email with generic technobabble of a bygone era in response to anything even remotely probing.

Now, all of a sudden, the peons are asking if another burrito delivery app is really the profound new invention the press release claims. If the “sharing economy” is bad for labor and housing. If training new AI models is exploiting struggling freelancers from all over the world. If boosting neo-Nazi accounts on social media and letting people customize their own reality on their digital feeds are good ideas. If those self-driving cars are actually safe. And, yes, whether the vision for 2045 and the Singularity was anything other than weapons grade copium with their mortality. It broke them. And in response, they found solace in toxic, authoritarian techno-dystopian dogmas.