I am neither Luddite nor a communist, and while I agree that any genuinely progressive society will be built on technological and scientific progress, and market mechanisms have an important role to play, there is plenty to disagree with in Marc Andreessen's recent Techno-Optimist Manifesto. I am a huge admirer of Andreessen’s contributions (he was co-developer of the world’s first popular web browser), but his manifesto seems to be based on a naively optimistic view of how markets work.
The argument that technology is not necessarily an extractive industry per-se is a straw man. There are other, legitimate, grievance against large tech companies, viz. their enormous market-power, and the widespread negative social consequences of surveillance capitalism. Yes, tech. is not necessarily an extractive zero-sum industry, but nevertheless the tech sector has been very successful at rapidly building monopolies by exploiting network effects, and then using their vast accumulated wealth to simultaneously lobby against anti-trust regulation, and in favor of draconian IP measures, the latter of which, by leveraging government force to stop sharing, are designed specifically to prevent social surplus being generated. Moreover their mining of "data exhaust", i.e. invading user's privacy, is an externality not accounted for in market prices, and is also used to further consolidate monopoly positions.
Once monopoly positions are established, companies have a temptation to detrimentally exploit their users, a process which Cory Doctorow calls "enshitification".
Andreesen's overall argument is based on an assumption of efficient markets in equilibrium, but most real markets are characterized by incomplete contracts and disequilibrium, and this results in some economic actors holding immense power over others. Those with power do not always wield it to the benefit of society. The economist Samuel Bowles has a very articulate explanation of these problems.
Markets do have their place, but like any technology they are not a silver bullet, and for many use-cases they need strong regulation and oversight in order to correct market failures.
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Thank you. I had just read this before posting my own response on the matter. People like Marc should not be exempt from criticism, regardless of their contributions. Many of us have made contributions, but the question of visibility remains.
https://culturalfuturist.substack.com/p/the-tech-renegade-manifesto
Really interesting. Thanks for writing. I wonder what you think of the idea that markets are and have been incredibly opaque in the past, but perhaps as they become more transparent and synchronised through technology and the ability to conduct fractional transactions, andreessen's view of markets becomes more accurate?