Critics outside of tech might be surprised to hear it, but many optimistic technologists believe that the mobile and social era of startups, and the subsequent reign of FAANG, fell short of tech’s tremendous potential. But optimists diverge from pessimists in their diagnosis of the problem. We attribute it to a failure of vision, rather than the value proposition of technology itself.

The 2010s era of tech was characterized by what Peter Thiel calls indefinite optimism. The indefinite optimist feels positively about the future, but doesn’t have a clear vision for how to get there. Indefinite optimists free ride on the inventiveness of definite optimists — those who have a clear vision for the future, and aim to build it.

In the 2000s, early pioneers of the consumer internet, cloud computing, data infrastructure, and smartphones precipitated a world where all humanity’s knowledge could be accessed, indexed, searched, mined, and machine learned; where people could connect effortlessly; and where new tools for science, culture, and commerce could be built upon the foundations they created. Steve Jobs – who resisted the temptation to release yet-another consumer mobile phone, and instead created an entirely new category of smartphone – is one of Thiel’s canonical examples of definite optimism. As Thiel and Blake Masters described it in Zero to One, Jobs led by his own vision and “change[d] the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others' successes.”

Incredibly, the pioneers’ vision of connectedness and democratized access to knowledge became a fundamental feature of the modern world. Their dreams were so well-realized that they now sound mundane. In the process, however — in part due to the abundance of capital it fostered— definite optimism gave way to indefinite optimism as tech’s default mode of operation.

The mobile and social era was precipitated by the success of its predecessors. Smartphones gave consumers a sticky place to while away the hours; cloud computing made it cheap for developers to build and deploy software. Together, these trends paved the way not just for social technology, but consumer mobile apps like Uber and Instacart. Hordes of new grads and gold rushers abandoned their management consulting and finance jobs and moved to San Francisco. Everyone had an idea for an app that would make them rich.

The potential for optimization towards a clear vision of the future — as with Zuckerberg, who still clearly believes in the power of connecting the world through his products, democratized AI, and so on — was diluted by the optimization of intermediate objectives. Ad-driven business models gave way to indefinite optimism by incentivizing organizations to focus on increasing engagement: a concrete, but socially mispriced, metric. And the techno-capital machine went to work, incentivizing extremely smart people to build new technology – but all of it was designed to make ad revenue go up, famously prompting Jeff Hammerbacher to remark that, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

Hammerbacher didn’t exempt himself from this group; he made this comment to Ashlee Vance while reflecting on his time as a Facebook early hire, building the technology that underpinned its ad business. Vance described Hammerbacher as a “conscientious objector” to the advertising business model, not because of what it did to consumers, but because of what it did to engineers: Hammerbacher “looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own [Facebook], Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents.”

Over time, the ethos that grew out of the ideals of the internet narrowed from “Build a world that looks like X” (hypertext system, cloud storage, smartphone) into “Build X for Y” (Uber for packages, Dropbox for designers, Airbnb for dogs) – a comparatively easier formula to attract funding, with X’s and Y’s swapped in based on whims, groupthink and shallow pattern matching. Founders justified this approach as a noble deferral: focus on building less ambitious, but more predictable businesses for ten years, exit for a respectable sum, then build the truly important things.

Incubators funded copycat companies to bring Silicon Valley innovation to international markets (and still are). Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple built up their M&A departments, providing much-needed liquidity for fledgling startups that had a strong user base, but whose business models couldn’t justify an IPO. In doing so, they accelerated the consolidation of tech as we once knew it — a cottage industry of startups, where anything felt possible — into a few juggernauts presiding sagely over a class of relatively inconsequential SaaS companies. Working in tech began to look more like a high status corporate job, with startups becoming protracted interviews for seven-figure management roles in Big Tech.

While we can debate the merits of a generation of entrepreneurs being steered into the adult daycares of Big Tech, it’d be unfair to hold founders to the same standard of behavior during a bubble, compared to less frothy periods. Bubbles can be good for generating new ideas, providing strong incentives to make useful technologies out of new tools, and surfacing the most promising talent. But even the bull run’s biggest winners didn’t exactly build a radically better world. For all its high-minded talk of disruption, the 2010s, in retrospect, were a necessary-yet-unambitious period of bringing the analog world online, without much consideration of what it would mean to reimagine the world itself.

In spite of how public sentiment soured on tech during this period, tech culture remained blissfully self-assured, epitomizing the indefinite optimist’s naiveté that everything was fine and would all work out in the end. It is only by looking back that we can clearly see its shortcomings.

Our lives were undoubtedly made better by the consumer internet and smartphones, which put the world’s knowledge and its people in our pockets for a remarkably affordable price. But Web 2.0 also produced extreme and unpredictable outcomes for which the indefinite optimist — who cannot reason beyond the present moment — was unprepared to take responsibility. This failure of foresight had consequences after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Tech was scapegoated as an exploitation vector for foreign actors, and vilified as the agent that hyperpolarized culture and broke people’s brains: heralding a new era of indefinite pessimism.

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Indefinite pessimists believe the world is going to hell, but they don’t know why, nor how to stop it. They retreat to dark corners of their minds, hypnotized by the demon-shadows that howl and flicker against the walls. This vague pessimism has found a place in the public’s opinion not just of tech, but of civilization more broadly. In their minds, technology no longer drives positive human outcomes, but is more likely to harm us.

Left unchecked, this excessive caution has since calcified into definite pessimism. Though many people are still trapped in a paralytic crisis mode — refusing to have children or make long-term plans because they believe the world will no longer be here in thirty to fifty years — others have internalized apocalypses as concrete events to plan against.

One problem, of course, is that no one can agree on which is the most likely apocalypse, or how much we should be willing to sacrifice in attempts to prevent them. We now have siloed “doomer industries” — misinformation, climate, AI safety — each preoccupied with saving humanity from itself.

Working in these industries is now considered a virtuous career choice. Theorizing about the exact features of these doomsday scenarios is seen as wise and forward thinking. But while this behavior appears to be productive, the crisis mindset spawns black holes which quickly devour, but never release, talented, well-meaning people. Collectively, it seems we are now more negatively focused on humanity’s impending destruction than we are positively focused on our potential for flourishing. This is bad.

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In his response to Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein criticizes his position as “reactionary,” as though this is an insult. While Klein is generally supportive of technology, he makes the fatal mistake of attributing Andreessen’s mindset to political ideology: a nostalgic yearning for some utopian past, for the days of the ancient Greeks, when manly courage and bravery presided over limp-wristed hand-wringing – instead of studying the changing mood within tech.

Over the last decade, tech has been told that its values are “problematic,” and that technology itself is the problem. We’re told that believing we can build the future into something greater than the present is not only wrong, but a sign of hubris and privilege, and that to attempt and fail at these endeavors justifies mockery. The average person in the United States now treats tech with suspicion, rather than excitement.

In response to this climate, today’s generation of tech is now conditioned to either revile their establishment critics, or feel caution and uncertainty about their contributions to the world. As techno-pessimists see it, technology is innately corrupt; it represents raw ambition that inevitably destroys more than it creates.

Technologists initially accepted this diminished position, at least outwardly, because they were operating in an environment that was too hostile to tolerate any nuanced debate about technology’s merits. The media won, for a while. But after COVID revealed so many fractures in our institutional ability to build and deploy critical public services, it became apparent to some that sitting on the sidelines was a poor use of tech’s skills and resources. Only technologists can both advocate fearlessly for innovative solutions and possess the skills to realize them. Without them, the world becomes immobilized by fear and bureaucracy. And it is this shift of sentiment that is driving a widening rift between tech’s outlook on the future today.

Techno-optimism is a reaction. But it’s not a kneejerk rally cry to mud wrestle D.C. policymakers for the right to build free markets. Nor is it a mindless glorification of mid-20th century technocracy, when a more competent U.S. government played a very different role in the development of technology than it does today. Instead, the resurgence of techno-optimism is an assertion that technology is the determining component of the future. Tech can’t do everything alone, but without tech, there is no progress. And after a decade of extreme techno-pessimism, getting that across means standing on top of a mountain and shouting so people listen.

Klein cites e/acc in his op-ed, describing it as “an odd, meme-based philosophy” which influenced Andreessen’s ideas. Like so many others, Klein focuses on the weirdness of e/acc, treating its illegibility as a vague, shadowy threat, instead of trying to understand what e/acc means to the thousands of technologists who’ve gravitated toward its message over the last year and a half.

E/acc is for builders taking back the reins from their own culture’s indefinite impulses; a reassertion of control over the past decade of wholly inadequate journalism, meek corporate infiltration of tech, and thoughtless grifters. It is a clear affirmation that without technologists, solving the world’s hardest problems – clean energy, human aging and disease, transportation – is hopeless. E/accs feel no shame in hope and excitement about the future, and they refuse to let the pessimists win.

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The distinction between an indefinite versus definite mindset is not necessarily a matter of values, but strategy and execution. We can reject the bygone, indefinite approach to tech that defined the 2010s without rejecting its core mission. It is good for people, technical or not, to feel they are in control of their future. It is good to work on projects that bring us personal satisfaction. It is good to try to solve big, hard problems, even if we don’t always succeed. These statements shouldn’t be controversial.

With renewed confidence in our abilities, and the lessons we’ve learned from operating in a world driven by cynicism, what will the next decade look like? We’re now seeing the emergence of a new generation of tech that embodies definite optimism: having both a positive outlook on the future, and a plan for how to get there.

Today’s tech frontier doesn’t look like the last fifteen years. The best minds of this generation are solving for energy too cheap to meter, programmable biology, powerful AI, and general purpose robotics. They’re more aware of how politics and culture can impact their work, knowing that technologists will have to fight and coordinate with policymakers and the media to bring these visions to fruition. Money is working. Builders are working. A new momentum is building.

Techno-optimism doesn’t require that we ignore the responsibilities that come with the power to change the course of history. Building and deploying safe, reliable technology is good engineering. Always has been. But we mustn’t let these concerns prevent us from taking action. Refusing to build the future would mean abdication of humanity’s most important responsibility: to get better over time.

The unknown unknowns of technology are not always avoidable, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to ameliorate them, either before or as they come. We should expect externalities to occur, and treat it as part of the development process. New technologies come with new risks. It’s how the history of technology has always worked, and how it will inevitably continue to work.

Pessimists hear this and reflexively reach for the precautionary principle, arguing that we must build immaculate technology that does not contain any errors at all. But an overabundance of caution results in infinite loops of the regulatory apparatus directly killing people through opportunity costs in medicine, infrastructure, and other unrealized technological gains. Or with critical technology – like nuclear energy – never existing at all because the regulatory and cultural climate makes investing in it too risky. There are no infallible choices. Human suffering inevitably finds a way to seep into the decisions we did and didn’t make.

We create technology, it produces externalities, we correct them, and these efforts produce new challenges in the process. Attempting to eradicate externalities from technological innovation would require limiting technology’s scope, strangling our ambition. As von Neumann wrote in 1955: “I believe, most importantly, prohibition of technology [...], is contrary to the whole ethos of the industrial age.”

Perhaps this comfort with externalities is why today’s definite optimists are able to hold both truths in their mind. It is possible to believe that building and deploying technology, without acknowledging the inevitable consequences that come with it, is a reckless position. Simultaneously, it is possible to believe that without technology, we cannot escape the problems that presently plague our generation. It’s not easy to convey these truths to — and at times, be the scapegoat for — the general public, but that is the job of a technologist.

Tech in the 2010s was about cashing out the best ideas we had at the time, given the state of science and culture. But it wasn’t enough to make deep improvements to humanity: the kind of impact that tech is uniquely capable of. A fundamental limit for technologists has been that our numbers are small. Scaling to the world is difficult, which is why finding ways to multiply our productivity, which artificial intelligence enables us to do, is such an unlock. With boldness, we can usher in the divine age that has already begun. Techno-optimism is on the upswing again, and we now see a decade’s worth of unburned cultural fuel feeding a raging fire of hope, enthusiasm, and concrete plans of action. Builders are ready to push civilization through to the next level. To summarize some of this in less than 280 characters:

Definite minds create good times.

Good times create indefinite minds.

Indefinite minds create pessimistic times.

Pessimistic times create definite minds.

We are back to the era of definite minds, and it is up to us to build the greatest era of human civilization, to accelerate our world into the divine age.

- @bayeslord and Nadia Asparouhova