What is techno-poptimism?
Other than a slightly amusing pun, of course.
There are few better places in America to grow up as a nerd who loves history than the city I was born in, Philadelphia.1 I grew up minutes away from a Revolutionary War battlefield. George Washington had slept everywhere, but primarily Valley Forge. There’s all the Declaration of Independence and Constitution stuff. We’re a short drive from the most important battle of the Civil War. We have the Liberty Bell, Penn’s Landing, and the steps Rocky ran. I could go on, but the point is, we have a lot of history.
Yet, one of my favorite pieces has nothing to do with any of those big things. It’s a building in Fairmount Park called Memorial Hall, which was once part of an amazing thing called the Centennial Exhibition. This is also sometimes known as the 1876 World’s Fair, the first official one ever to be held in America. If you’ve never read about it, I recommend you do so (although please finish this first!). Held in Philadelphia to commemorate 100 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this was a worldwide event. Almost 10 million people visited this in the six months it was open and this was before the automobile, let alone the airplane. That is an astounding amount of visitors. These are Disney World numbers. And there were no rides, animatronics, or big costumed famous characters. This was just showing off what technology was capable of, because in 1876 that was a big deal. And you were certainly rewarded if you went, because you saw the first public demonstrations of a couple of important things known as the typewriter and the telephone (kind of proto-iPads and proto-iPhones for you young uns). We were barely a decade past tearing our country apart. Yet, we were very excited about the future.
I am an ardent believer of the antiquated notion that you don’t need to accept a person as holy and pure to expose yourself to their ideas. With that disclaimer, let’s talk about Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Despite the book’s flow being off, having some muddled ideas, and a bizarre chapter that exists primarily as a diss track on poor, lovable Malcolm Gladwell,2 it’s a book with some parts that really make you think. He swings for the fences, and sometimes, he connects.
The part that most struck me is his – somewhat muddled – breakdown of the difference between Definite and Indefinite and Optimistic and Pessimistic in societies. He advances the idea that the last 40 years America has been an Indefinite Optimistic society. We believe the future will be better, but we have no idea how.
When I say this is somewhat muddled, it’s in part because there’s not a lot of great evidence given for this idea.3 Frankly, I’m not sure it’s even true. It may be a non-falsifiable idea. But, in a way, it feels true. As he discusses, the United States used to plan stuff, and come up with big projects, and tried to build a better future. The building part is key. Isn’t this, essentially, the thesis of Daniel Walker Howe’s famous history of early 19th Century America, What Hath God Wrought? And, frankly, in a way it’s part of the thesis of Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty.4 In fact, it’s pretty much the thesis of every history of the American 19th Century that isn’t explicitly about slavery or the Civil War. Just decades of relentlessly trying to build a bigger, better world. And yes, we did some truly horrible things while doing that. Many of which were completely unnecessary to build that better world. But even the doctrinaire Marxist position is that 19th Century American capitalism was one of the most robust forces the world had ever seen.
The world I have lived in may, in fact, still be that way. But it’s never really felt that way. Sure, there’s been optimism. I grew up in the age of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Crystal Pepsi. We truly were, as Jesus Jones said, watching the world wake up to history. But, as much as Francis Fukuyama is mocked for it now, declaring that we were at the end of history wasn’t farfetched among what I’ll generously call elite opinion. This was the age of the New World Order, after all, and not the Hulk Hogan version. Liberal democracy and free markets were the peak of humanity, and as the 1990s went on we knew we’d globalize it and put it on the internet. That’s certainly an optimistic view, but a somewhat homogeneous one of essentially just expanding and preserving what we have.
One of my favorite mind-blowing thoughts is that if you go to the Smithsonian you can see the Wright Flyer, the culmination of attempts humans had been making as long as we’ve existed. You can then walk downstairs and see the Apollo 11 command module. It took us millennia to fly. It then took 66 years to get to the moon. There was a good stretch of time when we felt as if we could do anything, and we pretty much could. We don’t really do that anymore.5
But here’s the thing: Americans are still an optimistic people. There’s even evidence that we’re still optimistic that technology will improve our lives. Although, maybe not all technologies. But the idea that we can use technology to build a better world and overcome our problems – techno-optimism – is background noise. It’s widely believed, but rarely discussed. It’s no longer a prominent strain of our political thought or discourse, which is mainly focused on what we can’t or shouldn’t do and not on what we can do.6 Which is odd, because techno-optimism has been, for centuries, an important, driving force in the western political and cultural marketplace. This was not something limited to the great inventors and engineers and scientists. Techno-optimism wasn’t just the belief of Edison and Tesla. It was also the view of Marx and Reagan. In fact, at the risk of traumatizing the libertarian Silicon Valley cryptobros, techno-optimism is arguably the animating force behind all of Marxism. It needs to be returned to a prominent position in our political and cultural discourse.
Although Americans are still broadly techno-optimists, it’s the indefinite kind. The definite techno-optimists, the ones who carry the flag for this centuries old belief, are a small, cloistered group of people – almost all of whom are software engineers and work in Silicon Valley. This is a problem for many reasons. But part of that is because the people who create this one subset of technology are not always the best to be rallying society to the cause. Here’s a few problems (and some of the things I plan to write about:
You never know who’s the new Einstein, Jefferson, or Asimov and who’s the new P.T. Barnum. One of the things I hope to focus on is trying to help us figure out which new advances are things that will actually help society, and which ones are just a way for rich people to get even richer. Crypto – and Web3.0 generally – are of great interest to me. For all the potential benefits the blockchain provides us, it’s hard to take a lot of these pronouncements seriously from people who are fixing to become billionaires from it.
They are often wholly apart from how the rest of society thinks. This isn’t the same thing as saying someone’s an asocial nerd. Mark Zuckerberg, for all the complaints one can level towards him, knew what people wanted, and no one is going to accuse him of being a man of the people. But technology relies on people. You can build the most impressive technology ever and if it makes you look as idiotic as Google Glass does it’s going to fail just as miserably.7 Or you can split the atom and create a source of renewable energy that won’t cause the planet to burn and watch it whither away because people are much more scared of a freak accident than radically altering the planet over the course of centuries. This – the need for us to create technologies that people want and also to get people to change their thinking to better use the technologies on offer – are another core part of this newsletter.
They’re often completely devoid of knowledge of how the systems they plan on disrupting work. I’ve heard tech billionaires talk about replacing soldiers with drones and ending human involved warfare – which makes sense until you spend five seconds thinking about what warfare actually is.8 Much of the hullabaloo over decentralizing government through blockchain society is very exciting until you realize the people talking about it are apparently unaware of the concept of state power. I intend to spend a lot of time looking at these disconnects between technologies designed to change a system and a system that works so differently they’ll have little effect.
Those last three points all work together to one of the biggest problems of modern techno-optimism, and one of the things I most look forward to writing about here, which are the constant over-the-top predictions that prove wrong – often quickly and spectacularly. As I finish writing this I read about the continuing collapse of Clubhouse, the last technology that was supposed to change how we interact.9 Nothing ruins optimism in technology’s ability to improve our lives than flying cars. One of the best things we can do is start calling out the bullshit.
We’ve redefined technology to mean the type of technology these people work with. Let’s go back to that 1876 World’s Fair. Yes, that was the debut of the telephone and typewriter. It was also the debut of Heinz Ketchup, Hires Root Beer, and an important plant control advance. There were pavilions not just for machinery but mining, agriculture, and weaponry. We had a much broader view of technology which meant it was a much more democratized field. I look forward to using this to discuss to help broaden our view of what technology is.
We’ve let techno-optimism become dominated by people who subscribe to a childish version of libertarianism. Techno-optimism has historically been a belief that transcends ideologies. Yes, we’ve managed to draw technologies into our interminable culture war. But I don’t care if you’re a libertarian, a Marxist, a conservative, or a DNC liberal, you can – and should – believe in human progress. Tying this to any one ideology is not good for anybody.
Relating to the last point and also to their own detachment from regular people, they’re mainly concerned with a future center on people who can code and do advanced mathematics and not centered on, well, people.
That last one is why I picked the name technopoptimism, beyond the fact that it made me laugh. There is a school of criticism called poptimism, which is based on the idea that popular music is as worthy of respect as rock music.10 Basically, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it isn’t good. That’s a big part of the idea behind this. Techno-optimism needs to be returned to people. Technology is a tool that’s designed to supplement people, and not the other way around. And that’s what I want to do here. I want to give you work out ideas – and hopefully give you something interesting to think about – on technology and society. I’m no software engineer, so this won’t be discussions of the inner workings of the latest idea out of Palo Alto. Instead, it’ll be the things I mentioned above. And, of course, looking at ways that we can use the whole gamut of technological progress to try and build a better society. That will interact with society, culture, law, and politics. Although I promise I’ll do my damnedest to avoid the never-ending culture war bullshit that takes up so much space on the internet.
The idea of holding a World’s Fair in America died with bankruptcy and a Sunsphere and it’s not returning before Friday. But we let a lot more die with it. We became overly concerned with the perils of technology than the possibilities of it. Techno-optimism became vague background noise with the only people actively promoting it being hucksters, dictators, and a secluded group of specialized engineers. It’s time we take it back. This Substack isn’t going to accomplish that. We need a thousand of them just to start. But for now, let’s get some regular people talking about how we can innovate, grow, and build our way into a better future. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
Conversely, if you were a kid who liked sports, it was decades of misery. I guess everything has trade offs. Also, get ready for a lot of footnotes in this one.
I should note that there’s lots of fair criticisms of Gladwell, but I don’t think Thiel’s qualified. Also, I’ve become very protective of him ever since I was 95% sure I saw him on a running trail. Malcolm, if you ever read this, please hit me up so we can sort if that was you. Not being sure will haunt me forever.
There’s also the rather odd listing of modern China as an example of a society that doesn’t believe things will get better, which I’m rather dubious of being true ten years ago when the book was written, let alone now.
I’m going to return to these books multiple times and each time I’ll recommend you read them as they’re both excellent.
If this seems influenced by The Great Stagnation that’s because it is. I’m not sure how much I believe in it but there’s parts of it that are very hard to disagree with.
This is probably too important to drop into a footnote, but I would highly recommend reading Matt Yglesias’ article on how we should just innovate ourselves out of our environmental problems. I have been an environmentalist for as long as I can remember having thoughts. Yet, it’s a movement more defined by a Greta Thunberg-esque neo-asceticism than anything else. The idea that we need to make our lives worse instead of using some brain power and will power to solve our problems is the antithesis of this newsletter and, at the risk of being melodramatic, everything good about America.
And, also, it was poorly rolled out. This is the time for the unsuccessful guy on the Internet to criticize successful billionaire geniuses. Using Google’s typical “roll it out slowly” approach backfired. They should’ve flooded the market with inexpensive versions of these, taken a big loss upfront, and let them become widespread enough that people just accepted them as part of daily life. I’m assuming part of the problem was because the people involved in rolling out the product didn’t realize how dorky it would look.
I intend to return to this one – and soon – because it’s such an egregious example and also because I need to save things to write about.
In a way, it did, as it launched a new rarely used feature for a larger player.
I want it to be clear that I wholly disagree with this, and am an ardent rockist.
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This is the time for these thoughts, given the emphasis that COP26 put on tech that hasn't yet been developed. I'll be reading from a hopeful tech idealist perspective.
Please write more. Tech journalism and writing is so fucking bad and finally there is someone (you) with a fresh, critical approach. I saw your comment somewhere that you want to abandon this Substack, please don't.