I glazed over the character attacks (which I should not, thank you for pointing that out) but I think Karpf brings up a lot of really thoughtful points that are

I glazed over the character attacks (which I should not, thank you for pointing that out) but I think Karpf brings up a lot of really thoughtful points that are helping me clarify where I land on the techno-optimist/pragmatist/pessimist spectrum: > What makes Andreesen’s 90’s retread so odd is the way he frames it as a challenge to the status quo. Technological optimism has been the dominant paradigm throughout my adult life. > The most powerful people in the world (people like Andreessen!) are optimists. And therein lies the problem: Look around. Their optimism has not helped matters much. > The Internet isn’t just the realm of the future anymore. It is also our present and has a substantial past. It is worth examining how the past promises of those 90s techno-optimists worked out. > What do you get for the tech billionaire who has literally everything? The cherished startup vibes of his youth. It’s literally the only thing he doesn’t have anymore. (That may be too speculative/personal but I think it's a really interesting point: the tech elite are approaching mid-life crisis age) > that “manifesto of a different time and place” is the Futurist Manifesto, written in 1909 by Italian poet F.T. Marinetti. A decade later, Marinetti would be a principal author of the Fascist Manifesto. > Andreessen spends 4,000+ words warning about the plague of pessimism that is sweeping the land, and then he finally lists the villains who are responsible and… a lot of them are tech workers, employed by Silicon Valley, but focused on the type of hard practical questions that bum him out. > You can't claim the mantle of Bayesian rationalism without learning a single thing from the failures of your own dominant philosophy over the past 30 years. All these direct quotes are pretty focused on the Techno-Optimist Manifesto itself and raise some legitimate doubts IMO