Well, I’m about to broach one of those two subjects that one doesn’t talk about at cocktail parties, those being religion and politics. Hell, maybe I’m about to broach both of them. In any case, I saw this little gem over on Masto and wanted to post it here for wider discussion.
When the techbro titans of the Valley can’t actually produce what they have promised, they expect their followers to have the faith to believe that they can at some point. A lot of Andreesen’s quotes from his “manifesto” sound like a capitalism-centered version of what you’d hear from many a church pulpit on any given Sunday in America, where the notion of “God” is replaced by Valley tech titans and technology itself.
So, in your opinion, is techno-optimism a religion, a political ideology, both, or neither?
One of my favorite quotes from the article, discussing an article written by Ruth Eveleth for Wired in 2019 on the connection between Silicon Valley and the Italian Futurist movement of the early 20th century:
For the Futurists, history had to be pushed aside to make way for the future. They embraced the growing fascist movement in Italy as the route to moving obstacles out of their way. The Futurists were seen as a “a church of speed and violence,” wrote Eveleth, or we might say of moving fast and breaking things.