Marc Andreesen is no Jack Kennedy, nor is there one waiting in the wings

As you may know, a couple of days ago venture capitalist Marc Andreesen – who, incidentally, is co-inventor of the MOSAI web browser – issued The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. I zapped over to take a look, but couldn’t bear to do more than skim my way through it. I’d seen it all before and judged it to be an artless collection of tech-progress tropes spun-forth on autopilot.

Now, you may think I’m being ungenerous. He, after all, is Marc Andreesen, tech innovator, VC extraordinaire, and all-around Rich Guy. But compare his manifesto to this speech delivered by another Rich Guy at Rice University in 1962:

There’s no comparison. Well, there is, there always is. And Andreesen comes up short, way short, all 6 feet 5 inches of him.

Marc Andreesen is no Jack Kennedy. He’s no Theodore Sorenson, either; for Sorenson’s the one that wrote the words that Kennedy delivered so eloquently. I have no idea what Andreesen’s speaking skills are, but he has neither the socio-political imagination nor the rhetorical skills that Sorenson had.

But I fear that even Sorenson couldn’t draft such a speech today. The cultural materials simply aren’t available. When Kennedy spoke late in 1962 American was riding high. The steel strike that lasted through the summer of 1959 had been successfully resolved, at least for the workers, and the Cuban Missile crisis hadn’t yet broken. And then the Civil Rights Movement intensified and the war in Vietnam became a quagmire that killed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. OPEC called an oil embargo in the summer of 1973, which precipitated the implosion of the rust belt industries. In 1981 President Reagan killed the air controllers strike, which dealt a near fatal blow to the union movement. That, in turn, made a comfortable middle-class life a hard, sometimes impossible, reach for many blue-collar workers. The American Century was over.

Sure, the Soviet Union crumbled at the end of the 1980s. The internet went wide in the mid-1990s (enter Andreesen and the Mosaic browser), and now we’ve got AI all over the damn place. Fascinating technology, important technology; it could be, should be, transformative. Important issues are being discussed, alas, along with vanity issues like AGI and AI Doom. It’s embarrassing to watch. Along with this, climate change still looms. Wars in Ukraine, the Middle East – who knows, one day Taiwan – who knows where they might lead.

Now, as inspiring as Kennedy’s words are, we know perfectly well that he also had the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union as the back drop for his speech (should you forget, just ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson). Those soaring words – “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people” – were given wings by checks that were paying for technology that would keep us ahead of the Russkies. That Cold War rivalry made for an imaginatively and rhetorically simple world. Us vs. Them, and as long as we can keep that rivalry in the background, the positive rhetoric can soar.

Where’s the Us vs. Them story for today? Well there is one, and Donald Trump’s the one who is telling it. It’s not an inspiring story. It’s brought the Federal government to a stand-still.

Ross Douthat has written and talked about decadence. Whatever qualifications I may have, it’s a serious issue. Andreesen hasn’t confronted it, though I suppose he regards his manifesto as something of an antidote. He’s wrong.

I wish I could offer an alternative, a new mythology for the 21st century. I’ve got some thoughts – Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, my Kisangani 2150 project (now on hiatus) – but that’s all they are, thoughts. That’s more than Andreessen has. I hate to think that he’s representative of Silicon Valley. Someone, please, show me that I’m wrong.

More later.