Building in the Ruins
On what comes after techno-optimism
Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.
This is my first post here in a while, but this essay picks up thematically from the last one, drawing again in its final section from At Work in the Ruins by
. After offering a tentative diagnosis of at least some of the paralysis which darkens our visions of the future, I suggest in the final section that there remain ways we can talk about building which neither take for granted the supreme confidence on which much of the “progress” discourse has been based, nor succumbs to the temptation to withdraw altogether into personal escape.Together, this essay and my last one form a thematic pair which might profitably be read consecutively. While each is intended to stand by itself, both are products of one and the same season in my thinking and writing life.
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In the past several years, and especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, a new public conversation has taken shape about progress and the convictions necessary to build the infrastructure that will condition human life in the decades ahead. In 2019, a widely-discussed article by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen proposed a new discipline they called “Progress Studies” to “concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future”; terms like “build back better” and “abundance agenda” have entered our political vocabulary; think tanks have popped up like the Institute for Progress and the Roots of Progress Institute, and publications like Faster, Please! and Works in Progress have been unfurled to advocate on behalf of the ideas on which future progress depends; Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s forthcoming book, Abundance, which will be published in March, promises to become another touchpoint in this ongoing discourse. Recently, a new brand of overtly-politicized techno-futurism has entered its upswing, demonstrating the ideologically-ambidextrous elasticity of the campaign for technological progress, which has proven adept at assuming both left- and right-wing configurations.1
Marc Andreessen’s 2020 essay “It’s Time to Build” is a stirring call to meet the unique challenges of its moment. This is perhaps surprising, considering it was published in April of that year, just as the virus was beginning its dramatic disruptions of our lives and the systems on which we rely. Listing the necessities whose supply was then unable to meet the exploding demand—coronavirus tests, cotton swabs, ventilators, negative-pressure rooms, ICU beds—Andreessen assumes the tone of a parent lecturing an errant child. He isn’t mad, exactly, just disappointed: “Why do we not have these things?” he asks sternly. “We could have these things but we chose not to—specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.” But the essay soon moves from these reproaches to beseechments, rallying for a more robust building program than the one which had produced the health crisis and supply shortages which had provided the occasion for the essay:
Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?
We’d been knocked down, Andreessen argued, but now is the time to pull ourselves back up and recommit to the labor of building.
Published just three and a half years later, the temper of Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, by contrast, is distinctly angrier and more aggrieved, so much so that the word “optimist” in its title seems forced almost to the point of irony. Among all the writings its author has posted to the website of his venture capital firm in the past several years, the manifesto has received the most attention, despite also revealing its author at his least articulate: Andreessen’s earlier indignation has now curdled into a resentment that seems able to speak only in aphorisms. Towards its conclusion, Andreessen produces a list of enemies—“not bad people”, he clarifies, “but rather bad ideas”—including, among many others, “stagnation”, “deceleration”, “de-growth”, “depopulation”, “risk management”, and “tech ethics”, urging that we oppose these dark influences with the redemptive promises of techno-scientific progress: “We believe that while the physical frontier, at least here on Earth, is closed, the technological frontier is wide open.” This is humanity’s last best hope for the amelioration of the human estate.
Last year,
compared Andreessen’s manifesto to “a revivalist sermon, or more specifically perhaps, a jeremiad, calling for repentance and a return to the religion of technology”. The latter term refers to the historian David F. Noble’s thesis that the spirit of modern technology and religion now flourish “not only side by side but hand in hand.”2 “[M]odern technology and modern faith are neither complements nor opposites”, Noble wrote in his 1997 book The Religion of Technology. “They are merged, and always have been, the technological enterprise being, at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor.”3 Andreessen’s own vocabulary welcomes this conflation, warning his readers of the deceits hissed by ‘liars’, before declaring that “I am here to bring the good news”. Indeed, most of the manifesto’s content is presented tersely by way of Andreessen’s periodic refrain of “We believe…”, which seems to be less a sincere profession of certainty than a display of creedal devotion performed in denunciation of a creeping apostasy.What is perhaps most striking about Andreessen’s writings, all of which are preoccupied with the future, is their common premise that the future may be built only if we recommit unequivocally to a narrow set of ideas first formulated centuries ago, and whose ascendancy is almost synonymous with modernity itself: economic growth and technological innovation working together to master nature for the satisfaction of human desires. The world of the future, Andreessen insists, must be built as a consequence of the renewal of old ideas.
Reactions to Andreessen’s manifesto were mixed, with some readers admiring the can-do spirit of its progressive vision and its moral regard for the future generations who would benefit from the growth he envisions, while others have opposed what they perceive to be its directionless program which places building for its own sake above the human good which building might serve, as well as its alleged latent inclination towards an anti-democratic, techno-oligarchic autocracy.4 But what much of the commentary has tended to overlook is that, at bottom, this debate over building the future, centers on the degree to which old ideas, ideas which are foundational to the self-understanding of modern civilization, still elicit the conviction they once did—and what might replace them if it turns out they don’t. If the essence of the post-modern condition is an “incredulity toward metanarratives”, as Jean-François Lyotard famously put it back in 1979, the ultimate fate of the grand narratives of modernity rests on whether or not they continue to persuade. The inability to believe in them is not, as Andreessen seems to suggest, simply a choice which might be receptive to his frustrated exhortations, but an expression of a deeper, if inchoate, incredulity towards the ends which they embody, and about the world which they are helping to take shape.5
In a recent essay in The New Atlantis, Samuel Matlack observes that the encounter between the faithful and the faithless with regard to the modern idea of progress—which he dubs the ‘progressivists’ and the ‘primitivists,’ respectively—has failed to yield a productive conversation about what we should or shouldn’t build and why. We should be so fortunate that each of these two camps has produced a representative manifesto in recent years by which we might evaluate their claims: Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is here set against Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine’s 2009 “Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto”, which, in tones no moodier than Andreessen’s own peculiar brand of optimism, voices a stiff rejection of the meta-narrative of enlightened techno-optimism:
Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it.
But “there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built”, Kingsnorth and Hine write: a denial of the elemental fact that all human activity must be pursued within the context and with the consent of nature. Civilization has become a “severed hand”, pursuing its work as though detached from the larger body of which it is a part.
What has hindered any hope for a more productive conversation, Matlack argues, are the blindspots belonging to each of these two sides which make them, if for different reasons, incapable of the humanism to which we should aspire: the progressivists aren’t thoughtful enough about what—and, more fatefully, what not to build—while the primitivists abdicate their role in our common undertaking of civilization, declining to develop an alternative building program which might be more considerate of human ends, and portraying the solution “more as a personal escape than a coherent social vision”. In short, progressivists want to build, but without much sense of the purposes which building might help to realize, while primitivists, in their morbid preoccupation with the malignities and excesses of modern techno-industrialism, are inarticulate about what a better building regime might look like. Ultimately, the debate over progress is reduced to grappling over a remote control: “Andreessen turns the dial up; Kingsnorth turns it down”, Matlack writes. “But it’s the same dial: Progress, understood as synonymous with modern civilization.”
The thread that is woven through each of these manifestos, and which would guide our inclination to turn the dial either up or down, siding either with the progressivists or the primitivists, is our belief or unbelief in the modern meta-narrative of progress: Matlack’s progressivists double down and champion its enthusiastic revival, just as the primitivists despair of it, seeming to pardon themselves from the task of building altogether. As the authors of “Uncivilisation” observe at one point:
[H]uman civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.
Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable.
And on this point, at least, Marc Andreessen may well agree.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is that, although it looks backwards to find its intellectual moorings, its promise of abundance confers a spirit of generosity upon the future and the people who will inhabit it. In another essay in the same issue of The New Atlantis, Yuval Levin defends the future-orientation of Andreessen’s gaze, while also dismissing his perverse insistence on the inherent virtues of technological progress. According to Levin, the inter-generational moral imperative which building serves is intrinsic to the basic fact that the living must build the world that will one day be inhabited by the not-yet-born. The “essence of our problem”, Levin writes, is that “[w]e have been losing the inclination to take the long view, because we have been losing our capacity to conceive of our moral situation through the lens of the human condition.” However thoughtless the progressivists may be about what might really be worthy of building, Levin argues that the primitivists’ refusal to build is an abdication of this moral responsibility, one which must be overcome by recommitting to those to whom we owe it: “We will build for the future”, he writes, “when we are invested in the people who will live there, and are willing to welcome them.”
But our present torpor is not caused by our lack of a committed moral regard for the future, or at least not primarily. Still less can the root of the problem be located in the over-regulation which Andreessen blames for pushing large-scale national or state-level infrastructure projects out of reach. On a deeper level, I submit, we are immobilized by a pervasive sense that the road on which we have long navigated our passage into the future—not just any road, but a superhighway paved with technological innovation and widened by economic growth—is bringing us someplace we aren’t sure we wanted to go, and as a result it has ceased to command the confidence it once did. Simply to observe, as “Uncivilisation” correctly does, that “[w]e live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and the foundations snatched from under us” is not the same as to promote the “willful paralysis” or the “perverse escapism” of which the de-growth discourse is often accused, and which Levin rightly rejects—nor is it necessarily to entertain “a catastrophism that can barely conceive of actually reaching the future at all.” If we find that we have been deprived of the capacity to build a world fit for future inheritance, this is not because we have lost the will to take the long view; it is because we struggle to believe with the necessary conviction in the narratives which once animated the collective action which we had imagined could be entrusted to shepherd us safely into the future.
Indeed, contrary to Andreessen’s reading of our situation, it is precisely our previous over-commitment to these narratives which is responsible for bringing us to this impasse in which the two extremes of a confident, ‘just-build’ progressivism and a diffident, ‘drop-out’ primitivism appear to be the only living alternatives. The reason it seems that the only solutions anyone is willing to defend are either to lean into the assumptions of modern civilization or to disavow them altogether is that our zealous devotion to the creed of progress, which has for better or worse built so much of what we have, has suppressed or even erased our memory and imagination for its alternatives. The dial seems only to have two registers—an up and a down—because the future now appears illegible, our questions about what, how, or even why we should build appear without clear answers, because we have become disinherited of many of the less totalizing and more localized answers these questions once elicited.
Levin is not wrong to urge us to commit to building, as he puts it, “the cultural and the material infrastructure that will let [future] generations thrive”. But to the extent that doing so requires that we retreat unanimously back into the certainties of a techno-scientific program whose only lodestar is economic growth and whose miscarriage is delivering us over to pessimism and listlessness, our successes are likely to be temporary and precarious. Building can—and must—take other forms. If, as Levin suggests, we acknowledge the human condition according to which the living endow future generations with whatever of permanence we manage to construct, then what we need most are approaches to building which are less fanatically yoked to a narrow set of metrics, and also less given to a universal and homogenizing ambition. In its closing lines, “Uncivilisation” reminds us that “[t]he end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.” Although the manifesto by itself could not fulfill it, this is the task which has been placed before us.
“Uncivilisation” is often read—and rightly so—as a rallying cry for artists and writers to engage their work under the shadow of the dire realities of climate change. Samuel Matlack’s characterization of the primitivists centers around the subsequent writing of just one of its two co-authors, Paul Kingsnorth, whose explicit declaration that he is “against” the progress which Marc Andreessen so ardently defends nominates him to speak for the primitivist side of the debate. But it is the recent work of the manifesto’s other co-author, Dougald Hine, which begins the humble labor of cobbling together a way forward which the closing lines of “Uncivilisation” could only gesture at. Contrary, perhaps, to the manifesto’s express admiration for the ‘inhumanism’ of the poet Robinson Jeffers, which de-centers the place of human beings within the larger totality of nature, Hine’s approach is profoundly humanistic in its commitment to searching for the social, cultural, and material infrastructure that might outlast what appear to be the increasingly fragile tenets of the techno-economic faith.
Hine’s 2023 book At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies is a standing refutation of the assumption, so common among the critics of what is often labeled ‘primitivism,’ that forfeiting this big narrative must also mean giving up altogether on the work of building and the inter-generational moral cause which it serves.6 Here is how Hine describes the bind which people who, for whatever reason, worry about the direction of civilization often find themselves in:
Even the bold talk about human extinction can be a way to defer acknowledgment: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the world as we know it. The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.7
If “Uncivilisation” is haunted by visions of impending catastrophe, these are here superseded in the imagination of one of its co-authors by a will to commit to the difficult work of building something in the ruins that will remain, even if that must now look different from what we had once imagined. Hine demonstrates that we have lost neither our capacity nor even our will to build for those who are to succeed us in the future—only our faith in the stories that we expected to deliver, as a practical inevitability, a future of affluence and mastery.
We might wonder how we arrived in a place where a document like the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, the message of which could once, and not all that long ago, be read as an unremarkable statement of the economic and technological tailwinds by which we are propelled into a promising future, can now only really be read as a futile plea to resuscitate a dying faith. What Hine’s book lacks in new tenets or principles requiring our vigorous defense, it substitutes with a set of questions which may yet light the way forward. The final chapter of At Work in the Ruins suggests four provisional tasks for beginning the work of building in a time in which little is more certain than that the old stories have become worn out: 1. To find ways of salvaging the good things that may perhaps be taken with us from the ruins of the world that is ending; 2. To mourn the loss of the good things that we cannot take with us into the future; 3. To notice the features of our current ways of living that were never as good as we told ourselves they were and to appreciate the opportunity to walk away from them; and 4. To search for the dropped threads from earlier moments in the human story that may have something to tell us now.8 We might find ourselves borrowing ideas and practices from ways of living that we left behind long ago. But many of the solutions which turn out to be most viable are likely to be entirely novel, and as inventive—at least in their creative use of human initiative—as Marc Andreessen’s most daring imaginings.
A constructive moral regard for the future of the sort that, according to their critics, the primitivists have forsaken need not require that we retreat back into the certainties which they begin by rejecting. But it falls to those who no longer number among the believers, those who have strayed from the orthodoxies propounded within the religion of technology, to look for other ways to engage with the world that continue to honor our inter-generational obligations. The fulsome recommitment to institutions of the sort Yuval Levin recommends is admirable, as long as it doesn’t implicitly ask us to persist in unexamined ideological commitments simply in order to avert our eyes from an abyss.9 We have no choice but to find ways to live within the contradictions of our moment: to find meaningful ways to realize our commitment to the future, but to do so under the shadow of our own uncertainty about where the mistakes we have already made are likely to take us, and what we will need once we arrive. Hine offers a starting point: “[W]e will need to rediscover”, he suggests,
that any world worth living for centres not on the vast systems we built to secure the future, but on those encounters that are proportioned to the kind of creatures we are, the places where we meet, the acts of friendship and the acts of hospitality in which we offer shelter and kindness to the stranger at the door.”10
In his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, which I discuss below, Marc Andreessen puts it this way:
We are not necessarily left wing, although some of us are.
We are not necessarily right wing, although some of us are.
We are materially focused, for a reason—to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid material abundance.
David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology, pg. 4.
Ibid., pg. 4-5.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, pg. xxiv.
Appropriately enough, Dougald dedicates At Work in the Ruins to his son, “born for these strange times”.
Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins, pg. 41.
Ibid., pg. 198. Also, see a recent episode of the Homeward Bound podcast in which Dougald explores some additions to this list proposed by
.For the case for institutions within the context of the United States, see Yuval Levin’s 2020 book A Time to Build.
Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins, pg. 8.
Great article, thank you. (as an aside, I happen to be currently half-way through reading David Noble's "The Religion of Technology"). I see the main problem with most debates on technology as three-fold.
(1).The whole debate is conducted with an anthropocentric (as opposed to symbiocentric) mind-set.
(2).Materialism is taken as given.
(3).The word 'growth' has been subject to verboklepsy (when words are 'stolen' and given a new meaning and then fed back to people who don't even notice the change). 'Growth' is used in the literal sense whilst sounding to the listener as in the figurative sense; eg: the term 'economic growth' (automatically linked to the idea of 'progress') is actually parasitic growth, which happens at the end of the the life of a human/animal - whilst at the same time it sounds as if it is 'natural growth' and by implication is obviously 'a good thing'. Who would question 'growth' or 'progress'? Well, if what was truly meant by these words when spouted by politicians and techno-optimists, then lots of people would question them. Who wants parasitic growth? Who would then naïvely confuse technical progress with technological progress?
Finally, we have had enough sufficiently advanced technologies for well over half a century to feed the world, provide adequate housing, generate interesting and creative opportunities for people to explore life, and to all live in peace together. The idea that the latest tech, AI, will somehow 'solve this problem' is utterly absurd.