On the Beauty of Tension

A Manifesto (of sorts) in Response to Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto (https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/)

Note: I wrote this 18 months ago in an effort to sort out my own views on the techno-optimist (boomer) vs. AI-dystopian (doomer) positions. Now, with boomers (including Andreessen) actively re-shaping government, the economy, and the world order, I thought I'd enter the chat. You can read it without reading Andreessen's manifesto. Apologies for the length, though. the Techno-Optimist Manifesto is long and I did respond to each section.

TL;DR: We need to understand nuance and live in tension. That's where most of the answers are. And that's where we'll find beauty and our humanity..

“Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.”  - Carl Sagan

 "Virtue is the golden mean between two vices. One of excess and the other of deficiency." - Aristotle

Lies

We are being called liars. Or they are. We call them liars, and they call us liars.

It's like the end of Reservoir Dogs only we don't point guns. We point our lies. Or we point our accusations about their lies.

Or maybe we're all liars when we lie about lies and liars. Then again, maybe that's a lie.

THEY claim technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.

Or do we claim they claim that?

THEY claim technology is the answer. That our civilization was and is built on technology. That technology is the realization of our potential, worthy of our worship and belief, and the best and only way to achieve a far superior way of living and being.

Or do we claim they claim that that?

Wait. WE are the THEY. Or at least we should be.

We conveniently arrange facts to support our views. We take up the human act of crafting narratives. We don't know we're lying-- such is the power of confirmation bias. Such is the tribal need to define ourselves against an "other." To blame the They. Our amygdala signals trouble and our pre-frontal cortex generates the explanation.

We think fast when we need slow.

We sell answers when we should be shopping questions.

Step one: stop calling each other liars.

Step two: acknowledge that We are the They.

Step three: argue like we're right, but listen like we're wrong.

Step four: return to step one. 

Truth

We advocate for adult conversations, discussions that remind us of Aristotle and Goldilocks and Malcolm (of "in the Middle" fame). Conversations that remind us of a time before we reduced others' positions to strawman arguments and before all of these false dichotomies.

We advocate for Stealers Wheel's Stuck in the Middle, with Gerry Rafferty and without Mr. Blonde.

Was there ever such a time?

Perhaps not, but now we push our narratives at scale. We make the coolest Filter Bubbles! And deep fakes! And we can tune our algorithms to prey on our worst instincts!

Ah, technology.

We are drawn to binary models. Ones and zeros. Black and white. Red and blue.

We believe that the zealots are important. They push us forward or they pull us back. Challenge convention. Question direction. 

And we believe that the best path is probably somewhere in the middle.

The gray, purple world runs on decimals. We model this world by rounding off. Some round up. Some round down. Utopians and Dystopians.

Pi = 3.14. Or is it 3.141592653589793? Or neither?

All attempts to model complexity are wrong. Some are useful. So says George Box. So says the million people who quote George Box.

But when we oversimplify-- when we claim causal relationships at the sight of correlations-- the models are useless. Worse than useless. They move us backward.

The truth: ad-hominem attacks do not move us forward (See above section on Lies).

We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.

But that hinges on recognizing these are human conversations. We're all human. Technology will either accelerate our progress or hasten our demise.

We need the will.

We need the will to raise our consciousness and recognize the power of The Golden Mean. We need empathy. Empathy allows us to be Stuck in the Middle.

In a time when Papa Bear bashes Momma Bear over the snout with his blue check, and Mama Bear tapes Papa Bear's mouth shut with a Visualize Whirled Peas bumper sticker, it's time to fly the Goldilocks flag above the messy middle of our existence.

We need to live in this tension. We believe in Tension. Relish its powers. Lean into it.

That is our truth. Tension is beautiful.

Technology

Tensionists recognize that societies, like sharks, grow or die.

And tensionists also recognize that societies, like dogs, can eat and eat and eat until they die.

Tensionists acknowledges that we need calories to live and too many calories will kill us. We must seek pleasure but too much pleasure addicts us. Pressure makes diamonds and pressure clogs arteries.

Like our techno-optimist friends, we agree with Paul Collier. "Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all."

But we reject the idea the "everything" good is downstream of growth. We suppose we're not supposed to pay any attention to the vanishing middle class and the sunburned polar bear.

Unchecked growth, growth without principles, growth without practical wisdom pulls us into multipolar traps. If we're not careful, growth can be a race to the bottom. To evolutionary cul-de-sacs. Maybe even to extinction.

It's not doomerism to say there's a non-zero chance.

Yes, lack of growth is stagnation, and yes, that leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death. Lack of growth emboldens victim-thinking. Victim-thinkers don't win.

Growth for growth's sake leads to polarization and crony capitalism. Such growth favors the few, particularly in a winner-takes-all world of platforms and network effects. Too often those few were born on third base and celebrate their triple. Such growth encourages regulatory capture.

Growth for growth's sake shifts Gaussian curves into Pareto distributions.

It leads to internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.

Technology can and should be a catalyst for growth. It has in the past is now and ever shall be.

Poverty is down. Infant mortality is down. Life expectancy is up. More people have access to food and water and healthcare than anytime before.

The floor is rising!

Techno-optimists love Pinker and Rosling, and techno-optimists fear reactionaries and central planning and too much regulation.

Tensionists agree.

But technology does not act alone. It pairs well with Liberal Democracy, market forces, the scientific method, and a healthy does of the Humanities. It pairs well with empathy and humility.

McGilchrist teaches us that civilizations and people flourish when the right and the left brain hemispheres are in balance. The master and his emissary. Or are they in tension?

Look no further than the Greeks, The Romans, Europeans during the Renaissance, The British Empire. Art and Reason. Balance… Tension.

Too much left hemisphere, too much optimization, too much intelligence without commensurate wisdom, kills civilizations.

Look no further than the Greeks, The Romans, The Europeans, The British Empire. Reason and optimization and bureaucracy.

You are right to say: Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials?

And tensionists agree that this productivity has enabled a higher and higher standard of living.

And that growth is good. Mostly.

As we find efficiencies, the relative cost of the raw materials goes down, and, as economists will also tell us, we use more raw materials.

Ignore the SnackWell Effect at your peril. When we're on a diet, we sometimes eat a whole box of low-calorie cookies. Yes. We're not proud, but we eat the whole box.

We do not believe that there is no material problem -- whether created by nature or by technology-- that cannot be solved with more technology. Anorexic teenagers on Instagram don't need more Instagram.

In fact, we believe that Hubris is the first sign of the mighty approaching a fall.

More is good. More can be great. But the unbridled quest for more can also cause us to abandon principles. Lose our way.

We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.

We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.

We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.

We had a problem of manufacturing capacity, so we put children in factories.

We had a problem with human connection, so we tuned our algorithms to tap into anger and seize kids' attention.

We had a problem with education, so we democratized information so we could sell more ads that would allow companies to sell more widgets.

We had a problem with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Ohio so we micro-targeted zip codes and flooded voters with misinformation to swing elections.

We had a problem with tax laws, so we invented the double Irish with a Dutch sandwich.

Give us a real world problem, and we can invent a technology that will solve it, regardless of the externalities.

And in our current construct, we can privatize the gains while ignoring those externalities and socializing the costs. Someone else will have to solve for that!

Technology allows companies to meet market needs at scale, and technology allows companies to exploit customers at scale.

Growth is good. Technology can be a lever for the world. We need to use that lever responsibly.

Markets

Markets are amazing. They are one of the wonders of the world and among the most important advancements humankind has made. Or maybe better said, they have been one of the most important ways to advance humankind.

Markets are the ultimate arbiter of value. They allow solutions to scale and they drive down costs of goods and services. They fund ideas that solve real problems.

Consumers vote with their wallet. Businesses must satisfy a need and innovate or die. Death is painful but necessary in a market economy.

We believe in creative destruction and we believe the market rewards the anti-fragile. The market makes us anti-fragile. Those who adapt survive. Those who adapt thrive.

Tension fosters and feeds and nurtures Anti-fragility.

We agree with the techno-optimists that free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy.

We believe that the market naturally disciplines but only to a point. Monopolies and cartels don't care about innovation and don't care about service and don't care about better, faster, cheaper. They don't have to.

But markets tend toward monopolies; market actors will do what they can to put themselves in a position to win. They are monopoly-seeking machines.

Markets don't prevent monopolies and cartels. Ethical people and cultures prevent monopolies and cartels.

The techno-optimists have markets mostly right. They lift people out of poverty. And the self-interest of people mostly aligns with societal good.

Markets include the well-intentioned and the not-so-well-intentioned. In the end, the diversity of actors and motivations contributes to the beautiful mess that makes up democracy and free markets.

But again, too much of one thing threatens to knock the world off its axis. Too much emphasis on the collective good tilts society to repeat the failed experiments of socialism and communism, while too many Ayn Rand disciples bring on a self-interested society lacking in empathy, losing its sense of community, and its commitment to serve the greater good.

We can't turn people into victims, but we also can't ignore that the majority of winners did not hit that triple, despite telling us how well they hit and how fast they run.

We make a living by selling our goods and services for a price. We make a life by serving one another. Markets make that all possible.

But market actors without conscience-- market actors disproportionately interested in the self-- fail to contribute to the common good in important ways.

No, they say. They make the common goods possible. And they're right, provided there are balancing forces. Absent that, they will rationalize tax avoidance by villainizing the government. They claim that competitors (often other countries) don't have to play fair, so why should they.

Markets are ruthless in important ways. They segment buyers and deliver extraordinary value to those who can afford their goods and services. Over time, prices come down and those goods and services become more widely available. People get access to amazing, life-enhancing goods and services.

Markets are ruthless in ruthless ways. They leave people behind. They tilt toward those with means. In a probabilistic world, we deploy algorithms at scale. Cathy O'Neil called them Weapons of Math Destruction.

Look no further than our higher education system, where nominative non-profits chase endowments and full-paying students in a profit-driven arms-race. We've shifted the cost burden onto the individual, cutting government funding and introducing debt to our next generations. They play the luxury brand, constraining supply and inflating prices.

All hail the power of the market!

It's rent-seeking, rent-maximizing behavior that ensures the top one-tenth of one percent are twenty-five times more likely to get accepted at elite schools. Someone has to pay for that new business building. Someone has to pay for that golf simulator.

And someone has to make up the class that will enter congress, serve on the courts, and perpetuate the nepo-baby wonders of this free-ish market!

Common Goods are the result of market-driven abundance meeting with civic-minded, community-oriented people. We invest in common goods when we live in the tension.

Common Goods emerge from a deep appreciation of this tension.

When markets are efficient, and there's a true meritocracy, and they're checked to curb the tragedies of the commons, they divert people who would otherwise build armies and foment revolution.

But unchecked, unbridled, over-reliance on market forces fuels inequality. It pours gas on populist movements. It breathes oxygen on the Us vs. Them flames of tribalism and class warfare. Amygdala's gone wild!

And the markets then deploy their capital to PR experts and lobbyists to channel that warfare to serve the markets.

We believe that casting central planning as the alternative to neo-liberalism is a false dichotomy, just as we believe painting capitalism as the root of all evil lends itself to cartoonish, throw-the-vegan-some-vegetable emotional rhetoric.

We need markets to generate the prosperity that pays for everything else we want as a society, and we agree that central planning is a doom loop.

Balance! Balance and tension!

We should live in this tension for it is in this tension that we thrive. It is in this tension that we make progress, lurching forward, seeing a brighter future. Figuring out how we get there together.

We believe in safe harbor statements. We believe that past performance is not always a predictor of the future. We notice that thousand-year floods are coming every ten years and that the rising tide of the last thirty years has lifted up the 300-foot-yachts while the row boats appear stuck in the mud.

To suggest that all markets are generative not exploitative seems naïve at best and disingenuous at worst.

We agree that a market has historically set wages as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker, but that correlation has broken in recent years. Now, capital investment can raise the floor of all workers, and workers are more replaceable than ever. Yet we're staring at a major demographic worker drought.

Buckle up.

It will take new thinking to reimagine our social structures and our incentive systems to ensure humans and labor survive and thrive in the face of capital. It is only through the messiness of experimentation and public debate that we ensure liberal democracies continue to play the infinite game.

Tensionists debate third-rail issues. Tensionists believe that we should all acknowledge that Social Security and Medicare are not viable, that taking them "off the table" limits our ability to move forward.

We need hard conversations that lead to tough decisions about spending. We cannot keep saddling the next generation with debt.

And we need to address the revenue side. We need to close loop holes that favor real estate developers and hedge fund managers. We need to harness market forces to drive our society forward, not to line the pockets of the few and re-live the gilded age.

The Techno-Capital Machine

We accept that the Techno-Capital Machine has contributed to significant material creation, growth, and abundance.

But we bristle when someone suggests a party will never end.

Tyrannosaurus Rex and Julius Caesar and Genghis Kahn all threw parties that were never going to end. Purveyors of tulips and desert housing developments and meme stocks prey on people who think they're joining a never-ending party.

The techno-capital machine spirals upwards until it gets too close to the sun. History is not a perpetual spiral upward, and evolution does not spare the smartest or most technologically advanced. Especially when smarts outpace wisdom and hubris has taken hold.

Humans have been around for 200,000 years. Cockroaches 300,000,000. We don't expect cockroaches to split atoms anytime soon. Can we say with confidence that humans are well positioned for another 299,800,000-year run?

We believe in the Fourth Turning and the idea that every 100 years or so, people get fed up with the way things are. Tectonic plates shift. Wars and revolutions happen.

Looks like we're due. Accelerationism as proposed will ensure we maximize the conflict and pain of our Winter season.

Moloch will see to that.

Market forces and technology are amoral. There are virtuous cycles of good ideas paired with emerging technology creating abundance. And there are vicious cycles of profit-seeking entities ignoring externalities and rigging the game.

See Opioid Crisis. See tobacco industry. See NFL concussion research. See the teenage girls of Instagram.

The Techno-Capital machine isn't pro-human or anti-human. It seeks profit and growth.

Intelligence

We believe sweeping statements are dangerous. All sweeping statements.

Intelligence is an engine of progress, but not "the ultimate engine."

There are smart assholes who do not always (or often) make things better. There are smart people who lack wisdom. They also do not often make things better.

We agree with Charlie Munger when he says: “hire a person with an IQ of 130 but who thinks it’s 120, as opposed to someone who thinks he has a 170 IQ, when he actually just has an IQ of 150.”

We don't particularly like to be in rooms where anyone (much less everyone) thinks they're the "smartest-guy-in-the-room." In fact, we might choose a root canal or Ishtar on a loop.

Paired with Wisdom, intelligence has the potential to lift us up. And artificial intelligence has the potential to aid us in greatly improving many aspects of our existence.

We hope (and believe) artificial intelligence can cure diseases, limit car crashes, help us avoid unnecessary wars.

Absent Wisdom, though, intelligence becomes a superorganism, intent on feeding itself with growth, determined to feed its objective function, which may or may not be good for humanity.

We have already seen AI capture our attention and the attention of our kids. We have seen spikes in loneliness and depression and anxiety. We get smarter and smarter but have not seen that correlate with happiness and fulfillment.

When Homer Simpson signed up for the debate team in high school, he had to argue against the 55 MPH national speed limit. His case: "Sure it will save a few lives, but millions will be late."

To suggest that ANY deceleration of AI will cost lives smacks of a rebuttal to Homer Simpson. To suggest that ANY slowdown in the process is akin to murder might actually give Homer the win.

There are many reasons to advance AI discovery, but to do so with little regard for risk strikes us as dangerous. There are bad actors, bad actions, and unintended consequences.

We must move forward responsibly.

Energy

We do not take energy for granted. It's critical for quality of life and progress.

It would be amazing to raise everyone's energy consumption level to what we have and then increase it all 1000X. We hope that's the case some day. But we also have learned that Hope is not a strategy.

And our Hope and our Hubris have conspired to slow sustainability progress and accelerate climate risk. We are in serious danger, and we need to act accordingly. Not through tick-the-box ESG exercises or tenuous political agreements subject to the next administration's whims.

We need investment and resolve and action. We need leadership.

Nuclear fission is likely part of the solution, but we're skeptical of anything labeled a silver bullet.

Nuclear fusion might also be part of the solution. But to assume that we've solved the problem, and to state that "there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment" suggests we should all shift our worship to the great and powerful Ostrich.

Technology has to be a big part of the solution to the climate crisis. We will not paper-straw our way back to sustainability. But technology is amoral and a technologically advanced society does not necessarily improve the natural environment.

We reject fish-riding-bicycle arguments, especially when the preachers preach with heads planted in the sand.

Abundance

We continue responding to the words of the Techno-optimist manifesto, but we recognize the horse is likely dead. Is it normal to feel sorry for an already-dead horse?

Intelligence and Energy will lead to abundance, but not necessarily for all. And not necessarily for us.

We love the pairing if and only if it's a throuple that includes Wisdom.

That throuple can reduce the cost to make pencils and can make all physical goods as cheap as pencils without maximizing paper-clips or minting trillionaires who wax philosophical about the virtues of near-free stuff while the fifty or seventy or ninety percent, in reality, languish.

Let's aspire to material abundance for everyone and let's do it in a way that mitigates existential risk and manages the externalities we've proven particularly poor at managing when we allow intelligence and energy to capitalize/ exploit markets in an unfettered way.

How many people exist on this planet or any other planet remains to be seen. We get that growth is good and can accelerate the flywheel, but growth for growth's sake can be disastrous.

Whether we have 8 billion, 18 billion or 80 billion people, we need to ensure humanity and human values flourish.

Again, intelligence plus energy plus wisdom. And technology can and should be the force multiplier.

Not Utopia, But Close Enough

We are also not Utopians, and we like the way techno-optimists frame Constrained Vision.

We like taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices.

"We believe in not Utopia, but also not Apocalypse" doesn't quite register, though. "Not Apocalypse" doesn't strike us as a belief.

Since Oppenheimer and the gang put a bow on the bomb, we've had the technology that can destroy us. We now have technology that makes that bomb look like a TRS80 to our MacBook Pro and we're readying the next quantum supercomputer.

Let's "slouch toward Utopia" making things better as we go. Let's be intentional about that. Let's not just assume it will happen. Without intentionality, ethical frameworks, and practical wisdom, we could be slouching toward just about anywhere.

Becoming Technological Supermen

We also believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology. For the benefit of humanity. This isn't understood. This won't just happen.

And we believe that we need to balance technical education and hands-on, practical skill-building with a healthy dose of the humanities. We need left and right hemispheres working together. There is Art and Beauty in what we can build. There can be virtue.

This balance will allow us to connect what we're doing with something greater than ourselves. This tension-- living in this tension-- gives us the best chance of building something that advances human values while mitigating risks, existential and otherwise.

The technological frontier is wide open, and we want to explore it. We want to feed our curiosity, our unending desire to know more and do more and be more. We want to live in the tension that exists when knowing more leads us to realize how little we know.

We know very little.

Technology is a grand adventure. We want to go on the Hero's Journey, to keep stepping into unknown worlds, as techno-optimists propose, "mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community."

But the spoils are not the end we seek. And technology is also not an end. Our hero goes on the journey in search of an elixir, and that elixir has everything to do with love and human connection. Wisdom.

We need the wisdom to seek wisdom.

Yes, "Beauty exists only in struggle."

It's nice to think we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. But oftentimes, when we master technology, Moloch masters us. We connect people who want to share cat videos and we connect people who haven't talked since high school and we connect people separated by distance. Hooray for us. Hooray for our shareholders. But Moloch has other plans and we connect people who spread lies and we connect people in the name of outrage and hate. Hooray for our shareholders. Hooray for Moloch.

Have we really mastered technology?

We believe in transcendental transformational leaders who rise above multi-polar traps. But we understand systemic challenges and game theory and why it takes an uncommon leader to rise above.

We have been the Apex Predator for a long time. We have been the Apex Predator for the blink of an eye. Both statements are true. We have no guarantee that we will remain the Apex Predator. We believe in the awesome power of technology and the awesome responsibility to harness it in productive ways.

We admire the great technologists and industrialist who've made a material difference in people's lives, and we're grateful. But we don't halo them with moral authority and we don't turn a blind eye to unintended consequences.

Beware of Worship. Who we worship says a lot about what we value.

We believe in humanity, individually and collectively, and we truly admire those who serve humanity. Those who serve one another.

Tensionist Values

Living in the tension can be hard. Complex problems don't lend themselves to White Knights, and Hollywood endings, and nine-word Instagram posts.

Living in that tension, thriving in that tension, only happens when we exhibit a certain set of values. Here's a running start at a list, but tensionists respect that you might have others. Tensionists want you to have others.

We believe in long-termism and believe that many of our current problems stem from too many people operating with a near-term horizon.

And we believe in a bias for action. For getting things done.

We believe in systems thinking; we look for systemic causes to complex problems and we don't start by looking to assign blame.

In fact, we believe that blame slows progress and makes change really expensive.

We also believe in accountability and believe that people who take personal accountability move the world forward.

We believe in loyalty and patriotism, and we believe they have nothing to do with performative flag waving. We believe some of the most loyal and patriotic people are the ones who speak truth to power.

We believe that we move forward together when we practice listening and empathy. We should remember that we have two ears and one mouth.

We believe in iterative learning. We love experiments and hypotheses, and we commit to what Amy Edmondson calls Intelligent Failures.

We believe in small bets and differentiating between one and two-way doors.

Nelson Mandela had it right. We never lose. We either win or we learn.

We believe in empowerment. We believe that answers live in the markets and that the best way to learn is not by implementing some grand central theory but by allowing a thousand flowers to bloom.

We need architects, and we need gardeners and we need architects who respect gardeners and gardeners who respect architects.

We believe in bold risk-taking and we believe in courage.

We believe in Practical Wisdom. We don't believe people's self-interest will always aggregate to doing what's best for society, and we believe leaders need to step up and do the right thing, sometimes in the face of perverse incentives and in conflict with what appears in their personal interest.

We believe that winners prove resourceful rather than bemoan their lack of resources.

We believe in grit and resilience and ambition. We believe in people who want to make a dent in the universe.

We also believe in people who finish reading Voltaire and just want to tend their garden patch.

We believe in Art and we believe in Science.

We love the get-it-done nature of the left hemisphere, and the dot-connecting, context creating right hemisphere. We want them to coexist. To work in partnership. And we know left brain people are right brain people and vice versa. It's never that simple.

We believe that we need to hold opposing views in our mind at the same time.

We believe that humans are biased, and that knowing that doesn't mean that we are no longer biased, but we have a responsibility to surface and mitigate risks from bias.

We believe in liberty and freedom AND we believe that people should commit to doing what's right for the greater good.

We believe that an Optimism Bias is good for the world. That optimists take risks that don't make sense and move us forward.

We also believe that we need counter balance to those optimists. Not necessarily pessimists, but realists. Healthy skepticism.

We believe in the Stockdale Paradox, that "you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

Some of today's facts are brutal.

We believe that Brene Brown is onto something when she talks about vulnerability being a strength, a super power. We believe in vulnerability and being scared and optimistic and angry and thoughtful.

We believe that projecting confidence and strength all of the time leads to autocracy and a myriad of bad outcomes for individuals and for the world.

We believe that inclusive leadership is leadership and real leadership is inclusive. Real leaders create a sense of belonging.

We believe that the best teams live in the tension; they are a beautiful mess of conflicting ideas where voices matter, people are seen, and decisions get made.

We believe rich is better than poor, cheap is better than expensive, and abundant is better than scarce.

We believe in making everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.

We believe that an unending quest to make people rich, goods and services cheap, and everything abundant will not necessarily bring us fulfillment, joy, and happiness.

We believe that we are lucky to be alive, and that to whom much is given, much is required. We believe that living in the tension is an awesome responsibility.

We maintain the unwavering believe that we will prevail in the end. We must.

The Meaning of Life

We don't really get why some political statements landed in this section of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, but we'll play.

Tensionists are not right wing or left wing. In fact, they don't believe in a single continuum. It's too reductionist. Too dangerous. We reject The Big Sort. We fight against tribalism.

Our positions are nuanced and diverse. Tensionists don't align with any one ism or any thirty isms.

We don’t care if someone shops at Walmart or Whole Foods. Drives a pickup or a Prius. We care that people feel heard. That people are respected. Given agency. Allowed to thrive.

To live in the tension is to have strong convictions but to hold them weakly. To argue like you're right but listen like you're wrong.

Technology has little do to with the meaning of life.

Material possessions have little to do with the meaning of life.

But leveraging technology to create material abundance and prosperity allows people to explore the meaning of life, even if the starving and the oppressed often look to a higher power.

We believe in Maslow and the power of self-actualization. We believe in the joy of closing the gap between where we are and where we might be.

We believe in the power of human connection. We suspect that the meaning of life flowers from this power.

When our better angels harness technology, we unleash that power.

But sometimes we fail to summon those angels, and our beloved technology isolates us, makes us feel less than, contributes to our anxiety and depression, pits us against one another.

We hesitate to assign technology with some intrinsic ability to free us.

Means to ends. A step on Maslow's ladder.

Better Angels, where are you? We could really use a visit. 

The Enemy

Oh, boy. Here we go. Initial section: "Lies." Penultimate section: "The Enemy."

Here, Tensionists don't want to play. Shouldn't play.

Bogeyman and strawmen and black and white and good and bad are too simple. Too simplistic. How can we simplify without becoming too simplistic?

Tensionists can't be wishy-washy, relativists. Sometimes, they have to pick a side. In this age of liquid modernity, sometimes we need to just "pick the damn movie."

They stop short, though, of villainizing an opposing perspective. They've seen the polarization and the rise of extreme voices and don't want to pour more gas on a raging inferno. They recognize the systemic causes of radicalization.

We don't like stagnation or anti-merit or anti-ambition or anti-greatness.

But to pull out the broadest of brushes and reduce differing perspectives or competing approaches to villainous caricatures spews gasoline at the direction of the current inferno of polarization.

To suggest "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" are enemies, and to make no attempt to appreciate the tension between techno-optimism and real risks we face should give us pause.

It's almost as if the perspective is informed by incentives, conscious or unconscious, to allow startup technology (fueled by clever seed-round investments) to eat the world.

Upton Sinclair warned us: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

It's also difficult to get a man to understand something when he can make billions by turning that something into a cartoon character villain. Or can get elected by doing so. Or can unduly influence elections and seize power.

We worry deeply about trends toward illiberalism and the deplatforming of voices.

And we understand that there are dangerous voices spreading misinformation that could result in death and destruction.

We believe that the resulting tension could be and should be healthy, and that the people with the awesome responsibility to make decisions inside of that tension will get some right and some wrong and will have to act with imperfect information.

We believe that our government can be woefully out-of-touch and that we have amazing civil servants who should be empowered to help us navigate this tension.

We know that there are corners of the Ivory Tower that spew nonsense and prevent us from moving forward, and we believe that academia and research not beholden to for-profit enterprise and shareholders has a vital place in helping us navigate and resolve tensions.

We worry that the villainization of the press and of science and of governments and of institutions of all kinds looks and quacks a lot like the fascist playbook.

We are sitting on a duck pond, and we hope we're not sitting ducks.

That should scare all of us and inspire us to act. To speak out. To push for nuance and tension.

It's an alchemists magic trick to assign the worst of motives to someone with an opposing view and create an angry, motivated populace. THEY don't care about the poor and THEY want heroin cartels to dance across our border and THEY don't think anyone should get rich and THEY are all racists at heart.

These alchemists will make statements like: "Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation-- the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death."

Ouch. Where to start. With the billionaires calling someone with an opposing view an elite? Suggesting that these calls for balance must come from people who are rooting for "more suffering and death?"

We believe our best days are in front of us. But that’s not a given. Empires fall. Species go extinct. Our strengths become our weaknesses. Our successes lead to hubris.

Civilizations end for a lot of reasons. As suggested in the Enemies section, institutions age, orthodoxies take hold and ossify, bureaucracy cripples progress.

They also end when civil discourse breaks down. When we feed people's basest instincts and sow seeds of revolution. They end when this polarization takes governments and, by extension, countries hostage.

Civilizations end when the most powerful person in the room is no longer the person with the most support or the title or the pen or the gavel. The most powerful person in the room carries grenades and pulls pins and doesn't care about collaboration and compromise.

It's noble of these "non-elite" techno-optimists to deign us with their infinite wisdom, letting everyone else know how foolish, how stupid they've been.

Thank, God (aka Techno-Optimists) for calling out the know-it-all credentialed worldview with having failed us. We appreciate you knowing-it-all when it comes to know-it-alls, and we so appreciate how you've labeled every idea counter to your idea as a zombie idea, vestiges of failed communism. You make McCarthy so proud!

And we should be forever grateful that they will lead us out of the dark, shining flashlights with their confidence and brilliance.

We're so glad they would deign to relieve us of our "self-imposed labyrinth of pain" by showing us the light, the truth, and the way.

But it seems like they're telling us to jump into warm water while taking that temperature to a rolling boil.

Outside of charitable fundraising, we don't much like polar bear plunging and we're not a huge fan of frogs in boiling water.

We invite all to live in the tension. Jump in. This water really is warm.

The Future

Where did we come from?

Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of exploration, of industrialization.

It was also built in the tension. Absent that tension, absent diverse and opposing viewpoints, where would we be?

What world are we building for our children and their children and their children?

That's the right question.

We could list a bunch of positive and negative attributes. We'd all want the positive ones.

We could imply that all the negative ones come from not buying into our worldview.

Yes, give us abundance and happiness and optimism and adventure and discovery and an oompa loompa and a brain and courage and the force.

And fight the evils of the dark side and misery and suffering and fear and resentment and… you get the idea.

The truth? We have no real idea what the future holds. And the most dogmatic are the least likely to be right. We all suck at prediction. Zealots really suck. 

A techo-optimist manifesto is an ism, even if it calls for the rejection of most isms.

Tensionists believe in the future. We desperately want there to be a future.

We don't know what it will look like, but we hope that it will be a place where humans demonstrate love for one another, strive to keep getting better, and thrive in the tension.

For it is in tension that we find struggle and connection and love and joy.

We agree with Maggie Smith, that the world has good bones. We're not sure about her math. We don't think fifty percent of the world is terrible. But we get her direction, and we choose to see its good bones.

Let's create a future based on tension. Let's surface those good bones and live in the beautiful tension together.

There's beauty in Tension and there's even more beauty in Together.