Was Nietzsche A TechnoOptimist?
If Friedrich Nietzsche were alive today, he would surely have millions of followers on social media. The greatest work of this 19th-century German philosopher, master of aphorisms, contains phrases such as “What does not kill me makes me stronger”; “Look into the depths of the abyss, the abyss also looks at you.” and the classic phrase: “God is dead”. God is still dead. And we killed him."
From Andrew Tate to the perverts of the Bronze Age, Nietzschean thought has also seen a bit of a resurgence online thanks to the excesses of the progressive left. As the “Red Pill leader” of his day, Nietzsche waged a polemical war against Christianity and the Christian-inspired philosophy of asceticism and egalitarianism. According to the modern Nietzschean view, Wokeism traces its genealogy to Christian "slave morality": a reversal of classical aristocratic morality that viewed virtue as a sacrifice, denigrated human superiority, and, above all, sought to protect the innocent.
Between the attacks on gifted programs and the growing tolerance for public unrest in American cities, modern Nietzscheans are certainly on the right track. But according to his latest torchbearer, venture capitalist and Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, Nietzsche can also help us understand today's resistance to new technologies.
As Andreessen explains in his recent “Manifesto of the Technological Optimists,” “they are misleading us about technology.” We are told it destroys jobs, harms the environment and creates inequality. Instead, he wrote: "Our civilization is based on technology", because technology is "the glory of human ambition and our achievements, the vanguard of progress and the realization of our potential ".
Andreessen's passion for aphorisms is well known. In 2011, he declared: “Software is eating the world.” During the pandemic, his call “It’s time to build” has become a rallying cry for builders and technologists across the country. His latest manifesto is no different. Written as a series of short sentences, Andreessen's advice is less about convincing technology skeptics than creating a Nietzschean aesthetic. On one side are technological “superhumans” who take risks in search of a richer, freer, and more abundant future. On the other side are the enemies blocking progress: pro-growth advocates, AI skeptics, government bureaucrats, and ESG consultants.
As a follower of Virginia Postrel's 1998 classic , The Future and Its Enemies, I know many of these points, and most of them are true. But aphorisms risk creating the illusion of depth and cannot replace reasoned arguments. Unfortunately, this analytical weakness ultimately makes Andreessen's manifesto a knot of contradictions.
Consider Andreessen's quote from anti-humanist philosopher Nick Land. “When you combine technology and markets, you get what Nick Land calls a technological capital machine, a perpetual machine of creation, growth, and material abundance,” Andreessen writes. “We believe,” he continues, “that the machines of techno-capitalism are not anti-human – perhaps not even the most pro-human machines.” This is useful to us . The technological capital machine works for us . All the machines work for us ."
But whether you realize it or not (and I think you do), this represents a complete reversal of Land's philosophy. Indeed, the term “techno-capitalist machine” is intended to indicate the powerlessness and subordination of humanity to the persistent forces of high society. Describe technological capitalism. As Andreessen says, our only goal is to ensure that “the rise of technological capital lasts forever,” not for us humans, Land says, but for the machines themselves. just a bootloader for the post-digital humans who will surely replace us.
Land is the dark inspiration for Effective Acceleration, oe/acc, an online subculture that aims to accelerate the emergence of superintelligent artificial intelligence. The name refers to effective altruism, an influential moral utilitarian movement whose proponents viewed the creation of dissonant superintelligence as an existential threat.
Land doesn't entirely agree with his predictions. A philosophical pessimist and misanthrope, he simply sees the end of human civilization with a kind of sociopathic indifference. Land even advocated examining the Black Death – a plague that killed 25 million people – from the perspective of mice. When asked if the human experience was important, Land replied: “I don't see why it should have any particular priority. »
Andreessen disagrees with the moralists' skepticism. “Intelligence makes everything better,” he writes. Like “Human Rights; we must develop it as completely and exhaustively as possible. . . . Artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our philosopher's stone: we literally make the sand think." Even if this is true, it does not lessen concerns about the sui generis risk that AI far exceeds human capabilities – an evolution that most AI researchers view as inevitable. Nor is it comforting to cite its intellectual debt to the godfather of AI death cults.
Andreessen's inner confusion arises when he wonders whether technological optimists are utopians. Although Andreessen sees technology as a “universal solution to problems” that will allow us to colonize the stars, he firmly rejects utopian thinking. Instead, he writes, “we cling to what Thomas Sowell calls the controlled view,” which sees compromise everywhere and sees progress as something “that only happens at the periphery.”
This is also my point of view. It also contradicts Andreessen's unbridled view of technology as a "liberating" force, its "ever-expanding spiral." In contrast, Sowell's “limited view” offers a conservative view of human imperfection and thus the ambiguity of technology.
Take for example the problem of population growth. Andreessen writes that technological optimists estimate that "our planet is seriously underpopulated" and that "the world's population could easily reach 50 billion people or more." I agree. However, the decline in fertility in developed countries is not due to Malthusian population control, but to the forces inherent in modernity itself. For example, the advent of oral contraceptives in the 20th century was undoubtedly “liberating” for women, providing them with new opportunities. have acquired autonomy over their own biology. At the same time, as the first truly “transhumanist” technology, this abolition of sex and pregnancy had profound cultural and demographic consequences with which modern societies still grapple.
The conclusion from these observations is not that we should or can abandon modernity, but simply to emphasize that we cannot ignore it. Therefore, a correct conservative attitude towards technology should not be optimism or pessimism, but rather clear-eyed realism, especially when the technology in question, such as artificial intelligence or biotechnology, has an impact direct on what it means to be human.
Although many innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, exactly how new technologies develop and diffuse is far from certain. We can use public policy and private initiatives to shape technology in ways that enhance our human nature and allow us to thrive rather than resign ourselves to doom and oblivion.
Nietzsche, for his part, would almost certainly have dismissed Andreessen's techno-optimism as another form of secularized Christianity, as if technologists were establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth. Indeed, the conformist and decadent “last man,” whom Nietzsche describes as passive mediocrity – and whom Andreessen declares his final enemy – is a by-product of technological excess.
As Nietzsche said in The Will to Power : “If you think you are choosing one solution, you are actually choosing the one that accelerates exhaustion; Christianity is an example. . . “Progress” is another matter.”
Photo: claudiodivizia/iStock
