Silicon Valley’s Vision of “Progress” Is Utter Nonsense

Almost no one wants what the snake oil salesmen are pitching

I recently read an essay by tech investor Marc Andreessen (billionaire founder of Netscape and investor in predators like Airbnb, Facebook, Coinbase, etc) with the very silly title of Why AI Will Save the World. In the piece, he tries to convince readers that AI is totally safe… so long as we dominate Ch!na in the AI arms race. (But I thought you just said it was safe?)

But never mind our Terminator future. There was a paragraph in the AI-worshipping piece that really got my attention:

…“science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.”

10,000X, really?

• Food quality has increased 10,000X since our ancestors enjoyed fire-roasted organic grassfed bison?
• Strength has increased 10,000X since our sun-tanned, muscled, agile ancestors hunter-gathered, danced, made love, made war, and relaxed in the sweat lodge before getting 10+ hours of sleep per night?
• Health increased 10,000X since our ancestors lived a full life with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer?
• The meaning of work multiplied 10,000X from the days when we labored as a clan and community to love and serve each other and directly preserve the future of our families?
• Personal knowledge multiplied 10,000X from the days when every teenager knew how to fend for themselves in the wild, possessing every hard skill needed to survive and thrive without Googling it on their iPhone?
• The environment is now 10,000X cleaner than when our ancestors swam and drank directly from ponds and rivers and breathed pollution-free air and walked on un-fracked land?
• And then there’s art. Is today’s hideous, meaningless modern “art” 10,000Xs better than the Old Master painters and the Renaissance sculptors?

I kept re-reading Andreessen’s paragraph while scratching my head. What in the world is he even talking about?

And then it hit me:

Silicon Valley technologists are completely out of touch with what actually creates human flourishing.

A few years ago, I visited Bardsey Island, a beautiful and mystical island off northwest Wales, said to be the resting place of Merlin and/or King Arthur. Over 20,000 pilgrims are buried on the island, plus it’s home to 200 seals, some Neolithic ruins, and some of the prettiest sunsets on the British Isles.

Only four people lived on the island full-time, and one of them showed me a museum-verified sixth-century brooch she found on one of her daily walks. As I held the tiny piece in my hand, I marveled at how beautifully crafted it was. So fine, so precise. How the heck did they have that kind of technology in this remote place 1,500 years ago?

We need more perspective on technology:

• Democritus devised atomic theory 2,400 years ago.
• The Romans had heated floors and were experimenting with nanotechnology 1,600 years ago.
• Health nut Hippocrates outlived the average American by more than a decade and died in his nineties.
• The Greeks were already building computers more than 2,000 years ago.
• The Aztecs invented popcorn forty centuries ago.
• The Egyptians invented breath mints.
• The Greeks invented sports bras.
• Hero of Alexandria invented the vending machine 1,950 years ago. (Also the wind turbine, a robot, and a syringe.)
• Persians invented freezers 3,700 years ago.
• The Chinese invented parachutes 4,000 years ago.
• Roman concrete is still far superior to anything we can produce today — ours lasts eighty years, and two thousand years later, theirs is still getting harder.

Meanwhile…

• Modern democracy is in decline for the 15th year in a row and it's accelerating.
• Housing affordability is plummeting.
• Depression rates are rising.
• US obesity prevalence is now over 42%.
• Suicide rates are soaring.
• US life expectancy rates have been falling since 2014.
• Americans sleep several hours less than they did a century ago.
• Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and dementia continue to savage millions of lives each year.
• Anxiety is crippling the next generation.
• The world is scorching hot.
• 1 million people per day are moving into slums.

We aren’t making meaningful progress if it’s not meaningfully improving the lives of the vast majority of humanity and the planet.

What have we done in the past century, really?

We overpopulated like locusts, collapsed biodiversity, savaged the seas, pillaged the trees, poisoned the air, and vaporized the soil.

Is it really progress to warm your house by burning down the walls?

The myth of progress

Our ancient ancestors didn’t believe in progress.

In their worldview, everything was a cycle.

Repeating over and over and over.

Revolutions around the sun.

Winter, spring, summer, fall, repeat.

The circle of life.

Then along came Judeo-Chr!stian belief, and with it, a radical notion — that all of this joy and pain and suffering and work and toil and war and peace were going somewhere; that it was all pointing to something, or more specifically, someone.

It’s a belief that we all still hold today, at least a humanist version. That we’re improving toward paradise… utopia… heaven on earth.

The great American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson didn’t believe in progress. He likened progress to an ocean — when the tide comes in somewhere, it means it’s going out elsewhere.

“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit…”

Are we really making progress when many people are now too afraid to even make eye contact? When most adult tourists today couldn’t find their way across Paris or London without Google Maps?

What does real progress look like in the twenty-first century?

It looks like cleaner air. Drinkable rivers. Swimmable oceans re-stocked with fish. Far more soil. Great swaths of wild forest. Organic food. Green energy. Actual democracy. More sovereignty. Less bankers and landlords and menace corporate extractors. It means more taxes on the elites or more ownership by the poor. It means far fewer homo sapiens. More sleep. Less screens.

But none of these things are wildly profitable to financialized tech monopolies.

Billionaires would have you believe they are drastically improving our lives. But the facts just don’t bear it out. All the good work of real human benefit is being done by the quiet ones; the nurturing mothers and caring teachers, the humble research assistants and community organizers, the priests and nuns and nurses and organic farmers and stand-up comedians. The real makers, the real contributors. We the people.

To be clear, humanity is making some meaningful progress towards a more sustainable, healthier, democratic, and economically fair world. But almost none of that real progress is being made by Amazon, Tesla, Facebook, Google, or any of the other big tech companies. Their job isn’t to create public progress, it’s to manufacture private profits.

Don’t let the tech icons fool you — they’re not prophets, they’re profiteers.

If there’s one area we crush many ancient cultures, it’s in the realm of health and safety. Infant mortality rates have plummeted, we have vaccines and antibiotics to ward off the worst effects of infectious diseases, and we generally don’t have to be worried about centuries of war or getting scalped by our neighbors.

But so what if we live to 100 if it just means a lifetime of slavish toil to enrich land-lorders and banksters and corporate shareholders?

Serfs were poor because they were exploited by feudal land-lorders, and our corporate overlords have us on a direct path back to assetless feudalism.

Metaverse, virtual reality, digital identity… who is asking for these things? Corporate profiteers.

If you want well-being, Silicon Valley should focus on:

• Debt-free shelter (no money-interest owed to banksters, no rent-interest owed to land-lorders)
• Sufficient sleep (9–12 hours per night depending on sleep drive)
• Meaningful work
• Healthy food (not Whole FoodsTM — actual organic, local, fresh, nutritionally-dense whole foods)
• Health and safety
• Togetherness (healthy relational dynamics — fatherhood, motherhood, marriage, multi-gen, friendship, etc)

But of course, Silicon Valley isn’t investing trillions of dollars in these things. They just aren’t profitable. They’d rather financialize the housing market and turn everyone into a corporate rent slave, make us work like dogs in their factories and office cells, fill us with poisoned foods so they can fill us with expensive drugs, and addict us to screens that train us to be hyper-individualists, leaving us lonely and bereft of meaning.

Remember, at the end of the day, you are just a source of shareholder profit.

Welcome to post-modern “progress.”

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