New Year’s Message: Moving Fast And Breaking Things Is The Opposite Of Tech Optimism

Every year since 2008, my final post of the year for Techdirt is about optimism. This makes this year’s post (which will be the only post for today — go out and enjoy the holiday times, people) my 15th such post. As I said, this process began back in 2008 when I had a few people note that there was this weird dichotomy in which I wrote about all of the ways that technological progress was under attack, and yet I remained a strong believer in the power of innovation to make the world a better place. The question raised to me was: how is it that I remained optimistic, despite seeing all these attacks on progress?

You can go back and read that very first message, or any of the other final optimistic posts of the year here:

• 2008: On Staying Happy
• 2009: Creativity, Innovation And Happiness
• 2010: From Pessimism To Optimism… And The Power Of Innovation
• 2011: From Optimism And Innovation… To The Power To Make A Difference
• 2012: Innovation, Optimism And Opportunity: All Coming Together To Make Real Change
• 2013: Optimism On The Cusp Of Big Changes
• 2014: Change, Innovation And Optimism, Despite Challenges
• 2015: Keep Moving Forward
• 2016: No One Said It Would Be Easy…
• 2017: Keep On Believing
• 2018: Do Something Different
• 2019: Opportunities Come From Unexpected Places
• 2020: Make The World A Better Place
• 2021: The Arc Of The Moral Universe Is A Twisty Path
• 2022: The Opportunity To Build A Better Internet Is Here. Right Now.

I think about what I’m going to write in these posts all year long, and initially I thought this year’s post would be a continuation on last year’s, which talked about the opportunities for new, independent and decentralized services to take away market share from the large centralized silos, as well as new advances in generative AI often coming from smaller companies, rather than the old giants (though some of the momentum has shifted a bit this past year). The growth of decentralized systems has been super exciting and I’m super optimistic about where things are headed on that front.

But, then, in October, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published his own Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and suddenly there were all sorts of discussions about techno optimism… and most of those discussions were mind-numbingly stupid.

I should note upfront that I know some people have a kneerjerk reaction to people like Andreessen. Many of the responses I saw were along the lines of “stupid out of touch rich guy…” and I get where those responses come from, but I had a different one. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from Marc, and find that I tend to agree with 60 to 70% of what he says while finding the other part… confusingly simplistic. And I sorta had the same response to his Techno-Optimist manifesto.

(Just as a disclaimer, years back, Marc donated a small amount of money to us when we were sued, and used to link to Techdirt articles regularly. Another partner at his VC firm, A16Z, called me once to say that Marc told the entire A16Z staff that they should read Techdirt. But then, something shifted, and Marc blocked me — and tons of other journalists — on Twitter and stopped linking to Techdirt. So, apparently his opinion of us changed at some point. My opinion of him remains pretty much the same).

There’s actually plenty of stuff in the manifesto that I agree with. It’s just that most of it is the kind of obvious stuff. Technological progress has, on the whole, been incredibly beneficial to the world. It has improved the lives of literally billions of people, providing them much more for way less. I know that it has become out of style among some these days, but I’m a big believer in the Paul Romer view of the world regarding how technological innovation is the lever of economic growth, by taking ideas that are infinitely reproduceable (an abundance) and using them to effectively level up all sorts of things, including much that is or was scarce.

Ideas and the ability to share them are the key to growth. Thomas Jefferson got this right two centuries ago in his letter to Isaac McPherson. While it is often quoted in the context of questions around patents or other intellectual property, what Jefferson is actually explaining is how technological progress is the engine of economic growth, in that it enables new things without using up the resource (the idea) that create them:

if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me. that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benvolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. inventions then cannot in nature be a subject of property.

I see that in conjunction with Joel Mokyr’s concept of “the lever of riches,” and how technological innovation really does help bring so many people out of poverty.

There are, of course, plenty of important questions and concerns about the distribution of riches and those still left behind. There are important questions, similarly, about the concentration of power (not just wealth) that some of this technology has enabled as well. And I think those are questions worth thinking about, whereas Andreessen appears to be arguing that we can mostly ignore those questions if we just push for even more innovation and growth. I think that’s wrong, and actually limits growth as we’ll get to shortly.

And this is where Andreessen’s manifesto loses me. He argues that anyone trying to look at these issues and to come up with better approaches is somehow an “enemy of progress.”

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.

First of all, it’s weird to claim that these ideas stem from “communism,” when, um, basically none of them do?

But, more importantly, many of these principles are not at all “enemies” of technological progress, but making sure that it is most useful. I can agree that concept like “de-growth” are generally ridiculous and ignorant, but many of the other ideas… are actually important for the sake of technological progress. Take, for example, Andreessen’s discussion of nuclear power. Andreessen rightly points out that nuclear power (both fission and the potential for fusion) could be a silver bullet for “virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy,” but that it has not come to pass. He implies that the concepts he discusses above as the “enemies” are to blame for this:

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

But… that gets everything backwards. The reason for this excessive caution around nuclear power was the lack of thoughtful and careful early deployments, leading to disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

It’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that the precautionary principle has gone too far, and overreacted to such a degree that we’re holding back useful nuclear deployments, but if we had been more careful and thoughtful in the early deployments of nuclear power, such that meltdowns were not something we had to deal with and the risk was effectively zero, then we’d see much more nuclear power around the globe.

The same is true in other contexts. Almost all of the examples he puts forth as “enemies” here are not trying to hold back progress, but rather to make sure that progress is done in a way that maximizes the benefits while minimizing the downside risks.

Marc’s manifesto reads as though any attempt to minimize downside risks is, itself, immoral, but he misses the forest for the trees: if you (ahem) just move fast and break things, the backlash and restrictions are going to be much greater in the long run then if you just take some time and some effort to think about how to deploy things in a way that does much less damage upfront.

If you deploy nuclear safely and avoid the meltdowns, you get more nuclear power. If you avoid existential risk by creating tech thoughtfully, you avoid regulations that limit the usefulness of the tech. If you build safer platforms through smart trust & safety approaches, you avoid governments around the world trying to take over and control platforms through regulation.

Over and over again the things he fears as “brakes” on progress are almost always the opposite. They’re attempts to make sure that the progress is in its most useful, least damaging form, in part to avoid an overreaction and limitations as we saw with nuclear power and which some are (ridiculously) seeking around AI and online speech.

It’s one thing to be a techno optimist. I still very much consider myself to be one. I said years ago that the reason Techdirt exists is to try to advocate against those seeking to hold back innovation, because I believe the advantages of innovation are tremendous. That sounds similar to Marc’s manifesto, but the big difference is that I recognize that part of seeing through to that kind of future, where innovation comes faster and more widely distributed than it would otherwise be, is to not fuck it up in the process.

Nearly all of the things that Marc describes as “enemies,” are mostly attempts to make sure things don’t get fucked up in the process.

Are there some cases where people take those things too far? Sure. And it’s reasonable to push back against that and highlight the various trade-offs. But describing all of these concepts as enemies, when mostly they are seeking to simply make sure that we improve the outcomes, is silly.

I am reminded of the comment that Cory Doctorow has mentioned in reference to EFF founder John Perry Barlow. People often accused Barlow and others like him of being “cyber utopians” who naturally believed that technology would obviously be a force for good. But you don’t go creating an organization like EFF, which spends all its time and effort fighting to make sure technology is a force for good, if you think that’s the inevitable outcome of the technology.

You recognize that bad shit can happen, and that if you want to be a real techno optimist, you look for ways to minimize the bad and promote the good. That’s the optimism: that with some effort we can make sure that the good of technology outweighs the bad. But Andreessen’s version is that we should just ignore the bad and the good will magically wipe out all the bad. That’s not just simplistic, it’s ahistorical, as his own example with nuclear power proves.

There’s been a big push lately among Andreessen and others in Silicon Valley for this concept of “tech accelerationism” or “effective accelerationism” (sometimes abbreviated as e/acc). It pushes for this tech progress as quick as possible. And while I have said that the whole reason behind Techdirt is in the hopes of seeing more innovation happen faster, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the whole e/acc stuff, and it took Marc’s manifesto to make me understand why.

My view is more along the lines of Barlow’s: the most effective way to bring about more tech innovation and progress is to recognize that bad shit can happen, and to work to limit that bad shit, rather than solely focusing on more more faster faster.

The Andreessen manifesto, on the other hand, seeks to denigrate those looking to make sure that innovation is done in a way that is less likely to create the kinds of harms that would lead to backlash and restrictions in the hopes that maybe they can somehow magically reach some mythical end-state before the hammer comes down.

But, true techno optimism should be focused on figuring out the ways to enable such tech progress in ways that are more fair, equitable, and sustainable. That it’s done in a way that limits the downside risks, such that people are more eager and willing to embrace what it delivers, rather than cringe in fear of its negative impacts.

And I do still believe we’re in a moment where so much is possible. The things I said in last year’s final post still stand. This year we’ve seen great developments in decentralized tools, and the ability to break down centralized silos and push more power to the ends of the network. We have this opportunity now to build a better internet, one that isn’t just controlled by a few giant companies (including one Andreessen sits on the board of…), but rather one where the wider internet gets to decide how their information is used and who is in control.

Being a techno optimist requires an understanding of reality beyond “move fast and break things.” It requires an understanding that if you break too much shit society is going to shut you down, and potentially hold back important innovations (see: nuclear power).

I don’t see Andreessen’s vision of “techno-optimism” as that optimistic at all. It strikes me as the opposite. It seems mostly pessimistic, in that it feels the need to promote recklessness and danger in support of the benefit of a few. It is pessimistic about the idea that the world might embrace these innovations if they are first shown to be safe and thoughtful, rather than reckless and destructive.

Techno optimism is not blind faith that “all tech is good.” Techno optimism has to be couched in an understanding that there are tradeoffs with every decision, and if you want to get to those better goals sooner, it helps to think through who might be harmed and how, and seek to limit those risks, such that those risks won’t overwhelm the entire project.

Again, I return to Cory Doctorow’s memories of John Perry Barlow, who was often wrongly considered to be an optimist in the Andreessen sense. But as Doctorow notes, that’s not accurate at all:

But incentives do matter. Designing a system that can only be navigated by being a selfish bastard creates selfish bastardry, and the cognitive dissonance of everyday cruelties generates a kind of protective scar-tissue in the form of a reflex of judgment, dismissal, and cruelty.

And contrariwise, designing a system where we celebrate civic duty, kindness, empathy and the giving of gifts without the expectation of a reward produces an environment where the angels of our better nature can shout down the cruel, lizard-brain impulses that mutter just below the threshold of perception.

I remain an optimist in that I believe there are ways in which to design these systems that maximize the benefits and minimize the harms, and this is the best way to avoid the “nuclear” problem Andreessen describes.

Optimism is not blind faith, but actually working on the real challenges. I understand why people like Marc might wish to avoid those inconvenient realities, but it’s not optimism he’s presenting. It’s an attempt to dump the costs of his solutions on those least prepared to deal with them. And that strikes me as counterproductive.

Let’s celebrate actual tech optimism in the belief that through innovation we can actually seek to minimize the downsides and risks, rather than ignore them. That we can create wonderful new things in a manner that doesn’t lead many in the world to fear their impact, but to celebrate the benefits they bring. The enemies of techno optimism are not things like “trust and safety,” but rather the naive view that if we ignore trust and safety, the world will magically work out just fine.

As always, my final paragraph of these posts is thanking all of you, the community around Techdirt, for making all of this worthwhile. The community remains an amazing thing to me. I’ve said in the past that I write as if I’m going to share my thoughts into an empty void, not expecting anyone to ever pay attention, and I’m always amazed when anyone does, whether it’s to disagree with me, add some additional insights, challenge my thinking, or even reach out to talk about how to actually move some ideas forward. So, once again, thank you who are reading this for making Techdirt such a wonderful and special place, and let’s focus on being truly optimistic about the opportunities in front of us.