1/15/24, 5:31 AM A techno-pessimist manifesto - by Curtis Yarvin

A techno-pessimist manifesto
"One can easily see Trotsky at Burning Man."
DEC 20, 2023

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Are you a techno-optimist? This is a serious condition—as common as prediabetes.

Don’t laugh. You can treat your prediabetes—and your techno-optimism, too.

30% of Americans are prediabetic. All Americans are prediabetic, in a sense—we all have
access to hot and cold-running corn syrup. It comes out of the tap. In 50 years as an
American, statistics show, I have ingested a literal ton of corn syrup—a long ton. An
imperial ton! I believe that major organs of my body, for example the pancreas, are this
point primarily made from corn syrup.

It’s just the same with techno-optimism. As Americans—and we are all Americans now;
location, even birth location, is just a detail—we are all techno-optimists. The American
idea is the idea of techne, man-made order, creating a “city on a hill” in a new wild
continent. As John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, said: “a city on a hill
cannot be hid.” San Francisco is on a hill, or several, and it cannot be hid. Although
sometimes we wish it could. (To be fair, the hills are the best part—“crime don’t climb,”
as they say. Try pushing a shopping cart from the Castro to the Haight.) Technical and
moral progress have always been equated in the American philosophy.

And how did that work out? How is that working out—for us Americans? Quite well, at
first! But of late—well, opinions vary.

The Johannesburg protocol

Do you have an opinion? Do you doubt your opinion? Either you are a pessimist, and
want to see that instinct confirmed—or you are an optimist, but want to be a scientific
optimist: one whose belief is confirmed by doubt.

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If you want to doubt techno-optimism, here is a cure—as an influencer, I have designed

one. It will soon be available on my Web site, as a pill, for an incredible price. But you
can treat yourself at home, now, with no profit to me! Well, not exactly at home…

I call my therapy the “Johannesburg protocol.” It costs about five thousand dollars. The
protocol is: fly to Johannesburg. Spend a week walking around the city. Stay safe. Make
sure your hotel has a generator. See Johannesburg—capital of the Rainbow Nation—see
the future.

And when you get back, assuming you get back, take a day to think about how AI will fix
South Africa. Or… VR will fix South Africa? Or crypto? Or whatever…

Brainstorm! Invite your smartest friends over! Microdose some shrooms! And when it’s 4
am, the fridge is out of Red Bull, the whiteboard is a seven-colored mess and the floaters
are wearing off, you’ll realize—you are cured. There is something that was not in your old
philosophy, but is in your new philosophy. Your optimism has been treated.

What you will see in Johannesburg is abundant physical evidence of a world that was
functional 50 years ago, even 100 years ago, but is now halfway to Mad Max. Will it get
all the way to Mad Max? As the magic 8-ball says, answer unclear—ask again later.
There are, as always, twinkles of renewal…

Since such “points of light” may stimulate the malignant hope that Johannesburg
therapy is designed to treat, the cure rate is not 100%. If it fails, if you see any signs of
optimism returning, you need to go to a second-line therapy. It is more expensive and
dangerous; it never fails.

First, warm up your stem cells with more of Andreessen’s Sand Hill Road hopium:

We believe technological progress leads to material abundance for everyone.

We believe the ultimate payoff from technological abundance can be a massive expansion in
what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource” – people.

We believe, as Simon did, that people are the ultimate resource – with more people come
more creativity, more new ideas, and more technological progress.

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We believe material abundance therefore ultimately means more people – a lot more people
– which in turn leads to more abundance.

We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could

have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods.

We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and
then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.

We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, and
visionaries beyond our wildest dreams.

And into them will go… corn syrup. As John Winthrop—the Twitter anon—put it:

Actually, “America” is not “full.” We can fit another 46 trillion humans in there if we grind
them into a fine powder and store them in giant grain silos that will occupy every inch of the
country.

At this point, you are prepped for my risky but effective second-line treatment. I call it
“Kinshasa therapy.” Stock up on fish antibiotics and bootleg hydrochloroquine, take a
deep breath, and buy a round-trip ticket to the city formerly known as “Léopoldville.” Be
ready to spend more like ten grand. It’s still worth it. Optimism is a terrible disease.

While there are only 20 million people in Kinshasa, that should be enough for plenty of
“scientists, technologists, artists and visionaries.” Or at least it will be, once all its little
girls can afford a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer… leave your phone in the hotel, and
walk around without a map for a week. No, it’s not safe. Nor is Oakland…

The idea that there must be some instructional technology that can demographically
convert the population of Kinshasa, taught early and thoroughly enough, into that of
(say) Tokyo, is a fundamental axiom not only of techno-optimism, but of every kind of
modern optimism. As with any axiom, you believe it or you don’t. If you do believe it,
picture an alternate world B in which it wasn’t true. Once you have pictured that world—
picture how that world would imagine an alternate world, C, in which it was true. Now,
compare these three worlds—A, ours; B; and C. Which is more like A? B or C?

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Remember, you’re a scientist—you don’t believe in anything till you have doubted it.
Whereas if you had a religious mind, you’d start from the principle that God is good, then
reason therefore that He would have made the world good—and humanity, of course, in
His image, also good. You’re not thinking that way, are you? Just checking.

Whether or not there is or can be any elixir—technical, pedagogical or pharmaceutical—

that can turn Congolese into Japanese, the visitor to Kinshasa will be struck by the
extent to which, though nominally the capital of an independent country, this society is
dependent on technologies and resources it cannot produce. A very fragile system!

Even in food. Africa—the continent—grows about 10% of its calories. The rest is corn
syrup, from Kansas. Good times. You might think: why ship the corn syrup to Africa?
Why not ship—the Africans to Kansas? Somebody is way ahead of you on that, pal. Will
it not lead to more abundance? “Now, as I was saying, large language models…”

If you actually have a picture of how large language models will fix the Third World, let’s
hear it. Note that “Third World” was, as recently as the 1960s, an optimistic term. No one
can dispute how rapidly technology advanced between 1950 and 1970—exactly the era in
which the Third World as we know it was born.

Johannesburg and Kinshasa have the same technology level as Palo Alto and Berkeley. The
rules of physics are the same. Your iPhone works there. It wasn’t made there, but it
could have been. The same textbooks and papers are available there as here. The human
heart transplant was even invented in Johannesburg. Something has gone backward—it
wasn’t technology.

The implicit premise of techno-optimism is that technology drives civilization. To fix any
and all of the problems of society, just get out of the way of technology.

Across history, do we find this premise to be true? Usually, since intact civilizations
rarely forget how to do useful things, technology advances monotonically within any
civilization. Unfortunately, this implies that most civilizations fall at the height of their
technical skill. This is a statistical illusion, but it should still make us think.

It seems clear that the Third World is, in the medium term at least, humanity’s future.
The barriers that separate the First and Third Worlds are geographical accidents or

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legacies of the 20th or even 19th century. Everywhere they are visibly crumbling.

In even the medium term, the problem of curing the Third World becomes equivalent to
the problem of preserving the First World from whatever is ailing the Third World.
Indeed it is not hard to find recognizable patches of Third World inside the First. If this
does not strike you as the most important historical problem of our period, more travel
may be indicated—or at least, just read a Paul Theroux book.

The two curves

The state of the Third World reminds us that there is not one curve only that matters to
the human experience. The curve of technology matters—so does the curve of order.

Archimedes, after all, was slain at his whiteboard by a Roman soldier. In those days it
was the Romans who were the barbarians—later the Germans, and so on. Part of the
problem, for a pessimist, is our lack of any really impressive barbarians. Tacitus did not
like the Germans—he did not want to surrender to them—but he respected them. But
today, what is even out there to respect? ISIS? You gotta hand it to ISIS, but…

Today even in Kinshasa there are pockets of perfect order. As a mining oligarch, or
whatever, you can live an absolutely beautiful life in Kinshasa. But in these pockets you
are dependent on many forces, local and global, beyond your control. The system is
fragile. A mixture of order and disorder is frightening, even in the pockets. It seems
unstable—especially when it seems to be disorder that is advancing. The ultimate sign of
order is a semiconductor fab, which places atoms with nanometer perfection. A new fab
costs ten billion dollars. A five-dollar can of gasoline can burn it down.

Andreessen, no unsubtle thinker, is not a pure Pollyanna optimist. He too sees two
curves. His falling curve is the curve of human spirit, thymos or thumos, whose loss gives
us Nietzsche’s last men and C.S. Lewis’ men without chests. The last man is the human
being—specifically, the human elite—at the end of a civilization:

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation – the nihilistic wish, so trendy among
our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.

Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man:

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“The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His
species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest…”

Andreessen’s curve predicts mine—because the role of thymos is to maintain order. Pride
in maintaining order is a crucial element of a functional elite. When the elite loses this
pride, or even develops its opposite—Luciferian pride in destroying order— trouble is on
the horizon.

Historically, civilizations of last men tend to fall when they are overrun by barbarians.
Technology can artificially forestall this fate—but as Hannah Arendt put it, every new
generation is its own barbarian invasion. Barbarians may not even be needed. In the
end, Walter Benjamin prophesied, the last man will simply put himself to death:

Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Indeed, if present trends continue, “voluntary human extinction” seems likely to become
a live political issue within our children’s lifetimes. You laugh.

The moral equivalent of war

So far, it seems as if Andreessen, with his Nietzchean critique of present-day elites, is
more perceptive than me—if we accept that the secular decline in order is caused by the
secular decline in thymos. That a decline in the will to create order might cause a decline
in order is hardly speculative. So his second curve is more general than mine.

The innovation of techno-optimism is its determination to restore thymos in the only

way that man has ever restored his thymos: war. That is: war, on behalf of technology,
against the enemies of technology. Metaphorical war, but…

Andreessen knows what he is talking about, because he has seen at least one of these
pools of thymic energy: Silicon Valley. It takes a lot of thymos to make a Facebook. It is
not really a war, in the sense of getting your face ripped off by artillery. But when you
have a really hard deadline it sometimes feels that way.

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The idea of a “moral equivalent of war,” specifically as a cure for last-man syndrome, is
not a new one in American philosophy. In fact, it is the title of perhaps the most famous
American philosophical essay. As James wrote, in 1910:

We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the
military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement;
intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to
command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed, we
wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and
liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization for military-minded
enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.

Manliness! William James, of course, was a noted wilderness tracker and Indian-fighter
who would die heroically at the Alamo. Oh wait, that was Davy Crockett. William James
was a professor at Harvard. Even this problem is not a new one.

But James had a concrete, and quite remarkable, solution to the thymos crisis:

If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military conscription a

conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a
part of the army enlisted against nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out,
and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow.

The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing
fiber of the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind,
to man's real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard
foundations of his higher life.

To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to

dishwashing, clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel
making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our
gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness
knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and
soberer ideas.

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They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human
warfare against nature, they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would
value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following
generation.

Wow! Uh… Mao? Mao Tse-tung? Mao Tse-tung, to the white courtesy phone… it is a
shock to find a core policy of the Cultural Revolution proposed, at Harvard, in 1910. Yet
—is it actually a bad idea? Maybe the real Cultural Revolution has never been tried…

We do not usually think of life in 1910, before antibiotics and iPads and all that, as
degenerately luxurious. Yet 1910 clearly did—and who is the expert on 1910, anyway?
Us, or them? And how degenerate would William James find the typical zoomer?

When we look at the thymos crisis and compare the James solution to the Andreessen
solution, it is remarkable how different these brilliant American intellectuals seem.
Andreessen will restore thymos in two ways—by the direct energy of participating in
research and development; and by the indirect energy of supporting technology as a
cause, like global warming, or the Palestinians.

Neither of these is convincing. While pushing forward the frontiers of human power
over nature is indeed exhilarating, this experience is by nature itself limited to a few—
unless that magic elixir that turns us all into Einsteins is invented.

And as a democratic cause, a movement of the crowd, technological accelerationism is a

terrible product. The problem is that it is a good cause—a prosocial, orderly cause. It has
no victims or scapegoats. It does not inherently harm or damage anyone. In short, it is
like asteroid defense, not like climate change. You will never, ever see protesters gluing
themselves to the road to get governments to spend more on asteroid defense. This is
because defending the planet from asteroids is not a pretext for causing any kind of
harm or damage. Since it does not gore anyone’s ox, any victory is flavorless. A harmless,
prosocial cause is the worst kind of cause for arousing aristocratic thymos.

Whereas William James is just like: get a job on a salmon boat in the Bering Sea. You
can still—just barely—get a job on a salmon boat in the Bering Sea. Not only does this
thymotic cure have nothing to do with technology—it is technology’s opposite. Hm.

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E.M. Forster would like a word

The ineffectiveness of technological acceleration, as a cure for the chestlessness of
modern man, is hardly the biggest problem with the techno-optimist solution. The
problem is actually much worse.

Technical acceleration is not just not the cure for last-man syndrome. No—technology is
the obvious cause of last-man syndrome. Andreessen is curing cancer with tobacco.

Look at James’ list of dirty jobs. Dishwashing, clothes-washing and window-washing!

Half these jobs have vanished into the maw of the machine. And it is already clear that,
over the next few decades, the present assault of AI on white-collar “bullshit jobs” will
soon be matched by a robotic assault on manual labor—precisely the tool that is most
useful for turning lazy, willful boys into mature and effective adults.

William James could never have dreamed of a world in which most humans are useless. As
large language models become useful tools even in the most advanced research
specialties, the thymotically exciting tip of the technology spear is only getting smaller.
There are no jobs for chimpanzees. In fifty years, there may be no jobs for humans with
an IQ of 85—at a minimum. Unfortunately, this is roughly the average global IQ today.
The rise of the “zero marginal product” human is an inevitable consequence of the
advance of AI.

The deleterious effect of technology on human quality is seen all across the bell curve.
Technology is harmful to elites because it eliminates the difficulty and danger of the
“moral equivalents of war” that are essential to the mature psychology of the normal
human male. Technology is harmful to non-elites because it eliminates all the ways that
they can be useful to themselves or others, and turns them into useless mouths.

To anyone trained in utilitarian economics, the idea that any kind of productivity
increase could be harmful is deeply counterintuitive. In fact, there is a precedent for the
negative impact of technological advances on societies: the negative impact of resource
discoveries. The “resource curse” is well-known, if not well-understood.

The consequence of an oil discovery is that six people can stick a pipe in the ground and
produce the nation’s entire GDP. The result is that there is nothing for anyone else to

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do. Everyone else has to eat, true—but their easiest way to eat is to get a share of the oil
revenue.

Therefore they transition from the economic means of subsistence, producing stuff that
other people need, to the political means—taking stuff that other people have. Human
beings who are bored, incapable of productive work, and only know how to eat by
taking, are the most dangerous force in the universe—especially in the absence of
thymotic elites proud of the order they maintain. This is how the ten-billion-dollar fab
gets burned down by a five-dollar can of gasoline—and how civilizations end.

Thus it is incredibly ironic for Andreessen to present the acceleration of technology as

the cure for 21st-century athymia, acedia and anomie—which is actually the result of
technical acceleration. You might as well cure AIDS by injecting yourself with HIV.

E.M. Forster, writing in 1909, had a better vision of the technically accelerated future. In
his short story The Machine Stops, humanity is a population of spiritless, decadent
socialites living underground inside the belly of a single giant planetary machine, which
does everything for them. Then—the machine breaks. And the people just die.

We have learned a lot about building reliable systems. But people are fragile. We last
men are especially fragile. There are a lot of ways for us to die.

Once again, history rhymes

Where did this ideology come from? While the connection is obviously a coincidence,
techno-optimism is a curious historical match for another deeply American ideology
from the 20th century: Trotskyism.

In Literature and Revolution (1924), Trotsky wrote:

Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety,
with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will
lay down rules for the oceans. This does not mean that the entire globe will be
marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens.
Thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man
commands them to remain. And man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even

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notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. The
machine is not in opposition to the earth. The machine is the instrument of modern
man in every field of life…

Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build people’s palaces
on the peaks of the Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be
able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic
quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it
will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and
achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous!

Narrator: nor was it.

More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make
it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost
precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try
to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own
organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction,
and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason
and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments.
The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of
radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most
complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training.

One can easily see Trotsky at Burning Man:

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future
may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction
and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same
process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music and architecture—will lend
this process beautiful form. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and
subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his
voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average
human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above
this ridge new peaks will rise.

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Here again the “scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries beyond our wildest
dreams.” Was Trotsky the first “effective accelerationist?” Life takes you funny places.

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