this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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104
Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? (davekarpf.substack.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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On Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"

It has been thirty years. 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.

They promised that technology would solve our environmental problems. And there has, just recently, been some real progress in clean tech. But the trend lines are somewhere between bad and cataclysmic. We do not inhabit the future they insisted they were building. For Andreessen, in 2023, to declare that “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology” is an act of willful self-deception. Just how long are we supposed to clap-and-wait while Andreessen’s investment portfolio tries to science the shit out of the climate crisis?

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[–] hlfshell 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is extremely difficult to get someone to understand something which their paycheck depends upon them not understanding it.

The solutions that would work for climate change - dramatic reduction in consumption, recycling, large scale government regulation and oversight to ensure adoption of these policies - that doesn't make money. New technology does.

The deadliness of climate change extends not from its all encompassing effect, nor the monumental cataclysms it'll unleash, but instead that it's solution requires a complete rethinking of systems that make a select few very powerful people privileged in the first place.