Ms. Katherine Boyle, a General Partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, a very important Venture Capital firm, just gave an interesting speech at the Defense Ventures Summit (my friend Joshua Steinman published it on X, it’s only 15 minutes). Boyle is speaking in defense, if you allow me to skip to the peroration, of the ‘beauty & nobility of the American experiment’ & against ‘the ideology of doom & nihilism that permeates our culture.’ This deserves applause, but notice the confused language, the seemingly endless labyrinth of jargon where ideology, culture, nihilism, &c. dwell. That as much as guarantees that Ms. Boyle is speaking not primarily to the people in the room there, the aspiring techno-lords building defense firms, but to a much broader, educated public in America—she’s speaking as a politician, in short. When did our techno-lords usurp political rhetoric?
Coding & politics
The political conflict among intelligent Americans who can do math is between Effective Altruism & Accelerationism. Altruism is an academic movement in England & America that appeals to the young people, liberals & lefties, who are too nice, too wealthy, or too ambitious to be woke; but the most famous Effective Altruist is Mr. Samuel Bankman-Fried, who committed a remarkably successful crypto-related fraud for which he is now going to jail (I wrote about it when the scandal began). Beyond this nonsense, Effective Altruism is obsessed with AI research & business, leaning towards the hysteria now prevalent among Western elites, the demand to take gov’t control of AI, apparently in order to prevent the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, i.e. computers that would enslave or kill us. This is yet one more of those cases, typical of a decadent community, in which the morally corrupt people seem less mad than the others, who seem psychopathic…
This unfortunate state of affairs makes the Accelerationists the best, last, & only elite allies of reasonable & decent people. Accelerationists have bad press, not least because they don’t have enough interest in or respect for ordinary people; put otherwise, they are focused on tech & business. The most famous Accelerationist is Elon Musk, who has tried to remedy the liberal hatred of tech, especially himself, by buying Twitter & turning it into X. A bold man, but not a wise man. Humanism for Musk means spreading mankind among the stars, starting with a mission to Mars (I’ll write about this tomorrow). That sounds better than the crazy people who want to destroy mankind in revenge for global warming or the unkindness of their parents, &c.
The political form of the Altruism v. Accelerationism conflict is typical of America, indeed of modern times. The Altruists are the children of privilege, elite-education types who mostly don’t belong there; they’re working for the liberal elites more broadly—the more humanitarian & egalitarian their hysterical worries (is AI racist?), the more obvious it becomes that their major moral proposal is that gov’t agencies beyond election or scrutiny should control tech, hand in hand with private foundations controlled by billionaires, which are not only beyond election or scrutiny, but also beyond taxation. This is not a very nice summation of their position, but it’s nevertheless true: They are doing bad PR in service of an oligarchy making a bid for tyranny. The Accelerationists are also making a case for oligarchy, but a business oligarchy much friendlier to political freedom & often hateful of gov’t regulation—they’re libertarians, basically, on the economic side of things, but they’re also learning to be somewhat populist & more democratic in their rhetoric. They have not, however, committed to their only political opportunity, to help lead a democratic revolution against the liberal elites trying to regulate them out of business. Their proposal, tech is for everyone, the arts & sciences are the source of all progress for mankind, is not particularly plausible or attractive to the American electorate just now. As the Altruists & Accelerationists have become enemies, they have learned something of politics—the Altruists lobby gov’t for regulation in the hope of capturing regulatory agencies & gaining enormous veto powers; the Accelerationists are turning patriotic instead, trying to get into defense business & thus defend themselves from the federal gov’t by use of the federal gov’t. This is how you know they are the elite: They all believe that only the elite can get in business with the state & that the people don’t matter in America. All conflict reveals an underlying agreement: Here, the agreement is that the state is the fundamental technology, the very basis of modern enterprise, yet itself also somehow an object of that enterprise.
Coding & war
This is the context of Boyle’s speech & it explains her rhetorical focus: Patriotism v. nihilism. She criticizes Silicon Valley liberalism, which is more globalist than pro-American, more enthusiastic about doing business in China than doing business with the Pentagon. It seems that the increasingly harsh struggle between Altruists & Accelerationists has driven both parties to state their principle with greatest clarity. They now resemble what Publius says about gov’t in the Federalist #37, that it needs stability & energy both, which seems a contradiction in terms, requiring, in this case, both regulation of tech & innovation in tech. This brings us dangerously close to the ultimate argument for technological innovation: Fear of our enemies. We can never stop building empires of robots because we are afraid: If America doesn’t do it, then China will. After all, modernity isn’t just America, it’s also China! War is the father of us all, & king of all. Once you say this, though, you look back & ask, what happened to the love of everything we knew, what happened to America? Boyle says ‘democracy demands a sword.’ I’d like to know that that doesn’t mean the same as Woodrow Wilson’s ‘making the world safe for democracy’ in 1917 or George W. Bush’s ‘the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands’ in 2005, two particularly terrible attempts at globalization, i.e. modern imperialism.
Boyle talks about the need for defense & she adds, it’s the defense of civilization. That’s not a word you hear in public anymore—she’s well aware, she says it’s a word we should use more often. (But then she goes back to the same talk about ‘values’ that you hear everywhere else; later she adds, our values are true—clearly, she has no idea what values talk is all about.) She’s also caught in a strange contradiction: She wants us to take possession of our inheritance, be proud & practical Americans, but also she says we inherit an experiment, so it seems to be much more a matter of the future than the past. Is an experiment something you can love? Inherit? Is it even good? She speaks of her movement, ‘American dynamism,’ as the core American experience, something that binds together the ordinary people & the extraordinary people like her: All Americans are venture capitalists by birthright. Of course, if that’s so, put the proposition to a vote in the next election—wasn’t it on the ballot, in fact, in the previous election, which led to the recent Biden Executive Order regulating AI? More broadly, she doesn’t seem to be aware that people may already feel like they’re the result of an experiment, one that they’re not particularly fond or proud of… To clarify the matter, we must get to the fundamental question of means & ends. Boyle raises this question explicitly, only to avoid answering it. She says instead, ‘all good things are downstream of growth.’ But this is provably not true: The enormous economic growth of modern times has armed tyrannies about as much as decent communities. Boyle admits, people don’t even talk much about civilization today; if civilization is the name for the overarching political good, well, it cannot be downstream of growth, but is itself the origin of growth.
This is not to say that Boyle is unaware of the problem. She calls it ‘nihilism all the way down.’ She calls it ‘a war against America.’ She points to shocking truths about the American elite, that they wouldn’t honor veterans in American colleges, but they do have lots of people honoring Hamas terrorists. She points to shocking truths about the American people, that they shrug at the devastation of society—100,000 dead a year because of fentanyl is the example she gives. But her alternative is oddly sentimental, ‘a nation of builders, dreamers, & hustlers, who like to work, who like to win, & who always seek to build anew.’ I’m not sure this would be a winning political slogan, but I’m sure it’s not a reasonable ground of gov’t. Maybe she doesn’t even mean it that way. She continues, ‘technology is the escape hatch for a nihilistic world.’ If it’s escape for a few techno-lords & their minions, it seems workable, but it’s neither noble nor perhaps feasible in the long term—it’s a long defeat, a retreat into techno-monasteries as barbarism swallows up the world again; if it’s meant as escape for everyone, then it’s just not workable. There are many fine things in this speech, but its moral & rhetorical structure is a typical politician’s overpromising & underdelivering; yet Boyle admits, these are not ordinary times, we are facing a crisis of nihilism, so we should be supremely serious about civilization, regarding both what we can learn & what we can do.
Boyle says this war can be won, but ‘it takes will & it takes courage.’ I would like to add, it takes knowledge of the true science of politics—this is the age of political philosophy again, because an understanding of human nature & its possibilities, as well as the forms of organization likely to succeed in our times is indispensable; the need for it is felt more every day by the educated, but the more they feel the dangerous narrowness of their experience or reflection, the more they resist the need to broaden them, admittedly, a dangerous thing to attempt; the more they glimpse the civilizational aspect of our political conflict, the more they commit to short-term victories or trivial successes. But without it, these techno-lords will lose, like all previous industrialists, to say nothing of other classes of enthusiasts in previous, less corrupt versions of our liberal democracy. I have every confidence that our techno-lords, like previous ones, will ignore their ignorance, because they would not want to become educated any more than the people whose ignorance they deplore—fundamentally, the issue in replacing politicians with industrialists is, we’re buying efficiency at the price of nobility, so we’re in danger of forgetting we could be better. It’s true that politicians are in the habit of comparing themselves to their voters, to ordinary people, which corrupts them, but they are forced to face the memory of a great past now & then; techno-lords face only a dreamed-of future, so they have even less of a glimpse of human greatness—if they commit morally, willfully to comparing themselves with their clients, they will become debased before they can even taste power. If we’re in a situation where Elon Musk waste his time on X instead of thinking about Francis Bacon, modern science is not going anywhere good…
Humanistic criticism of money
So much for the speech, let me conclude with a few notes on the narrowness of its learning. The humanists among us might be struck by Boyle’s quotes. First, Philip Rieff, The triumph of the therapeutic: ‘Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed & certainty in going.’ She doesn’t quote the sequel, which is much less flattering to her cause: ‘Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.’
Then, of course, Tocqueville:
The American lauds as noble & praiseworthy ambition what our forefathers stigmatized as servile cupidity…
In America, fortunes are lost & gained without difficulty, & the country is boundless & is resources inexhaustible. The people have the wants & cravings of a growing creature, & whatever be their efforts, they are always surrounded by more than they can appropriate. It is not the ruin of a few individuals, which may soon be repaired, but the inactivity & sloth of a community at large which would be fatal to such a people. Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of their rapid progress, their strength, & their greatness. Commercial business is there like a vast lottery, by which a small number of men will continually lose, but the state is always a gainer.
That’s Democracy in America, vol. II, part 3, chp.18. She neglects in a very predictable way to quote Tocqueville’s condemnation of greed just at the beginning of her first quote:
There are certain penchants, condemnable in the eyes of the general reason & the universal conscience of the human race, that are in accord with the particular & momentary needs of the American association; & it reproves them only feebly, & sometimes it praises them; I shall cite particularly love of wealth & the secondary penchants that are linked to it.
Let me conclude. She also quoted Walker Percy: ‘You live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific & technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.’ This quote is the first thing that greets you, as part of the Mr. Andreessen’s Techno-optimist Manifesto, on a16z.com. Here’s a thought that occurred to me regarding the manifesto.