IT TAKES a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestos for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering Internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, he outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order unencumbered by what Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, and tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us – the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both – we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.

The vision has attracted a good deal of controversy. But the real problem with Andreessen’s manifesto may be not that it’s too outlandish, but that it’s too on-the-nose. Because in a very real and consequential sense, these ideas are enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it. You can see it in the work requirements associated with public assistance, which imply that people’s primary value is their labour, and that refusal or inability to contribute is fundamentally antisocial. You can see it in the way we valorise the CEOs of “unicorn” companies who have expanded their wealth far beyond what could possibly be justified by their individual contributions. That wealth is widely regarded as a product of good decision-making and righteous hard work, no matter how many billions of dollars of investors’ money they may have vaporised, how many other people contributed to their success, or how much government money subsidised it. In the case of ordinary individuals, however, debt is regarded as not just a financial failure but a moral one. (If you are successful and have paid your student loans off, taking them out in the first place was a good decision. If you haven’t and can’t, you were irresponsible and the government should not enable your freeloading.)