I agree with most techno-optimism, but e/acc is a pretty braindead version of it unfortunately.
Nadia's article here seems like a much more reasonable version of this philosophy that embraces political solutions instead of naive pure tech ones.
By contrast, "Beff Jezos" (Guillaume Verdon) says he wants to be a "cultural engineer" [1, Lex podcast], but when recently challenged by Lex Friedman and Connor Leahy [2], he comes across like a dorm room libertarian who has an immature idea of what he's saying, not someone with something new to say, which I think is at least partially him trying to maintain a kayfabe [3] for the e/acc community (like a nichy techno Trump) and partially him actually being a true believer.
My critique [4] of e/acc, Jezos, Andreessen's thread is essentially that these philosophy-esque ideas are actually (unlike what they believe) not very ambitious in that they in practice advocate for: "don't touch the system, it works for me", and never mention (or seemingly talk about) how this tech can actually have massive impacts for regular people, or how we can use the gov't and broad prosperity and access to tech (and tech-enabled hyper-democracies) to further accelerate the best version of our vision for the future.
These guys are like the Underpants Gnomes of futurism:
Step 1: Build superhuman technology without any safeguards.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit for me.
I at least expect "Profit for everyone" at step 3, but taking a try at Step 2 is what really would impress me.
Nadia's article here seems like a much more reasonable version of this philosophy that embraces political solutions instead of naive pure tech ones.
By contrast, "Beff Jezos" (Guillaume Verdon) says he wants to be a "cultural engineer" [1, Lex podcast], but when recently challenged by Lex Friedman and Connor Leahy [2], he comes across like a dorm room libertarian who has an immature idea of what he's saying, not someone with something new to say, which I think is at least partially him trying to maintain a kayfabe [3] for the e/acc community (like a nichy techno Trump) and partially him actually being a true believer.
My critique [4] of e/acc, Jezos, Andreessen's thread is essentially that these philosophy-esque ideas are actually (unlike what they believe) not very ambitious in that they in practice advocate for: "don't touch the system, it works for me", and never mention (or seemingly talk about) how this tech can actually have massive impacts for regular people, or how we can use the gov't and broad prosperity and access to tech (and tech-enabled hyper-democracies) to further accelerate the best version of our vision for the future.
These guys are like the Underpants Gnomes of futurism:
Step 1: Build superhuman technology without any safeguards.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit for me.
I at least expect "Profit for everyone" at step 3, but taking a try at Step 2 is what really would impress me.
[1] Beff on Lex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU
[2] Beff v. Connor Leahy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zxi0xSBOaQ
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe
[4] https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947