“What is Essential is Invisible;” Enter Energy/Acceleration

by Jeff Garzik and Ralph Benko

We agree with the recently published Techno-Optimist Manifesto

We agree with the recently published Techno-Optimist Manifesto, hailing, among other things, the importance to civilization of energy and, thus, of good, practical energy policy. Abundant, reliable, readily affordable power is what unlocks a nation's dynamism, builds factories, creates jobs, enhances national security, and reduces poverty and famine.

A specter is now haunting those of us (including us) who believe that equitable prosperity is a great thing for people and the planet both. This specter is the shade of those who are anti-technology and anti-prosperity.

Pro-prosperity goes under the rubric of e/acc, shorthand for “effective accelerationism.” As an aside, that might be a coinage derived from “effective altruism.” The latter had its day, although now is tarnished by the spectacular fall of its most enthusiastic and flamboyant promoter, Sam Bankman-Fried.

The opponents of tech, and of its attendant general prosperity, have been dubbed the “decels.” Possibly a sly allusion to “incels.”

e/acc also goes by the term “techno-optimism.” Many prominent center-leftists are at least as enthusiastic about the promise of technology to improve the lives of people and the planet as are the card-carrying members of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

Techno-optimists tend to lean libertarian, whether left or right. Prominent among the leading proponents are masters of the universe Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Bill Gates, Vitalik Buterin (with stated reservations about AI), and Peter Thiel. Also notable are economist, blogger, and journalist Noah Smith (an incisive self-professed political southpaw), public intellectual Peter Zeihan, who refers to the process of deindustrialization now underway as “decivilization,” and Ryan McEntush, who presents at a16z with exceptional clarity on matters such as how to scale nuclear power.

The villains in this drama are those who committed to “degrowth,” or shrinking the economy, perhaps best exemplified by the “spectre of degrowth communism” of “Kohei Saito, the rising star of contemporary Marxist thought….”

Marxists Never Cease To Delight in Spectral Haunting

Marxists just never cease to delight in spectral haunting. Some people just have to learn the hard way.

We’ve written about the tussle between us techno-optimists and the luddites at Toward a Pragmatic American Energy Policy; To Build or Not to Build; at Washington? Just Face Facts; and at Yankee Ingenuity. Let’s up the ante.

The sweet spot of Washington Power and Light, our policy institute, is good energy policy, the foundation of equitable prosperity. In that, we are not alone.

Marc Andreessen recently, in his The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. wrote:

“Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth. We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. … We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity. We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.”

And as Noah Smith observes in Don’t be a Decel:

“Energy technology is arguably the most important kind of technology that humans create, since everything else we do is downstream of our ability to harness energy.”

It isn’t very romantic of us, but … our mission is to encourage policy based on real-world data to produce great results, rather than relying on faith-based dreams we call “hopium.” We consider ourselves proud pragmatists.

Pretty much everyone, including the innumerate, has heard of Einstein’s E = mc2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. PBS calls it the world’s most famous equation.

While it is profound to prove that energy and matter are interchangeable, in day-to-day terms it’s not the most important equation around.

We nominate, instead, e2/acc: effective energy accelerationism.

Capitalism’s monster

Those advocating economic “shrinkage” (to steal a phrase from Seinfeld) are an odd lot. Consider the frailty of the romantics, like Saito. He was critiqued by Thomas Fazi at Unherd, as “capitalism’s monster.”

To wit:

“It is no coincidence that Saito comes from Japan, which enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. But for most people on the planet, especially those living in poorer countries, climate change systematically ranks among the lowest policy priorities — well below more pressing material concerns such as hunger and poverty, access to water and sanitation, and education.

“To the billions of people who still live in extreme poverty, and the millions who don’t even have access to electricity, Saito’s vision of degrowth communism, and his plea to scale back production and consumption, is unlikely to be very appealing. In fact, Saito’s insistence that countries in the Global South should refrain from pursuing growth — even ‘green growth’ — might very well be seen as a form of Western eco-imperialism. …

“In this sense, degrowth communism suffers from the same drawback of old-school communism: it’s an intrinsically universalist worldview, one that purports to offer a one-size-fits-all solution for all human societies, regardless of local cultural and civilisational specificities. This globalist outlook is typical of post-Nineties leftism, which Saito harks back to in several respects. This is also evident in his rejection of the nation-state, viewed as a reactionary, quasi-fascist construct, rather than the framework through which virtually all the major social, economic and political advancements of the past centuries were achieved.

“It’s a view that is completely at odds with global realities.

Capitalism’s monster?

At odds with reality?

Yeah, that’s our poster child villain, all right!

Curtis Yarvin: the greatest living Hobbesian philosopher, formidable poet, and classic antihero, declares Trotsky at Burning Man

Among others in the techno-pessimistic camp is the always interesting contrarian Curtis Yarvin – the greatest living Hobbesian philosopher and poet, a classic antihero rather than villain, and possibly simply being arch – recently published “a techno-pessimist manifesto.” Therein, he wrote:

“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 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….

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

“Life takes you funny places.” True!

Washington Power and Light

Last year, we constituted a new, tech-savvy think tank in Metro DC, Washington Power and Light, to advocate for, to quote Bastiat (see below), a “real, serious and pragmatic” energy policy, a policy rooted in technological reality rather than “pretty to think so” romantic dreams.

Thus, we heartily welcome a recent big reveal at Ben Horowitz’s blog, “Politics and the Future,” that a16z has desired to engage politically, seriously, to conduct a savvy “revenge of the nerds” political crusade to make the pro-techno worldview stick:

“We believe that advancing technology is critical for humanity’s future, so we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values specifically for technology.

“While “Big Tech” is well represented in Washington D.C., their interests are often at odds with a positive technological future as they are more interested in regulatory capture and preserving their monopolies. As a result, technology startups need a voice.

“We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.”

Badly needed! Politicians have mostly taken their eye off the ball and turned Congress mostly into a slapstick pie-fight over mostly trivial matters.

Consider the daily political news. Much of it covers the struggle between the Democrats (the Donks) and the GOP (Pachyderms, thank you, Thomas Nast!). And, implicit therein, the forever war between the left and right.

And much of the news now is devoted to the internecine intraparty struggles, such as within the administration, between the privileged progressives and the rank-and-file workers of the labor-and-ethnic left. And the marquee battles between the MAGAs (“the Chaos Caucus”) and the Regular Republicans in the House.

“A full phase-out of fossil fuels would take the world back into caves.”

Meanwhile, note the recently convened and concluded CAP28, whose presiding officer rocked the world by observing candidly, as reported by Reason:

“Into the caves we go: Al Jaber also said that a full phase-out of fossil fuels would ‘take the world back into caves.’

Some scientists and activists have not welcomed Al Jaber's blunt realism, but have said his comments are ‘verging on climate denial.’

“To be sure, Al Jaber has been properly criticized for a possible conflict of interest, as he is also the CEO of the Emirati state-owned oil and gas company, ADNOC. But he's correct to weigh tradeoffs and to point to the fact that world leaders need a more concrete plan, since toothless U.N. agreements don't really cut it.”

“What Is Seen and What is Not Seen”

We confidently submit that, in the spirit of Bastiat’s final work, CE QUON VOIT ET CE QUON NE VOIT PAS – “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” – that which is invisible is often more consequential than what is visible.

And the previously almost invisible war between the techno-optimists (“the squares”) and the techno-pessimists (“the hippies”) is, we believe, the truly important political, social, and cultural battle now going on.

As the fox confided to the Little Prince, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Thus, let us look with our hearts.

Why is the war between the techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists of existential importance? Bastiat, courtesy of Mises.org:

In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

“In fact, it is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. If often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences. Take, for example, debauchery, idleness, prodigality. When, therefore, a man, absorbed in the effect which is seen, has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but by calculation.

“This explains the fatally grievous condition of mankind. Ignorance surrounds its cradle: then its actions are determined by their first consequences, the only ones which, in its first stage, it can see. It is only in the long run that it learns to take account of the others. It has to learn this lesson from two very different masters — experience and foresight. Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.”

The struggle over tech is crucial because it is, at base, a struggle between prosperity and austerity. Prosperity affords us agency.

Poverty is a vice, not a virtue. The Soviet bloc, exponentially poorer than the capitalist running dogs of the West, experienced far worse environmental degradation than did the capitalist world.

It is better that we fight over what to do with our discretionary income than scrap for subsistence.

Shall we use our surplus wealth to clean up our rivers and air?

Plant forests?

Invent new tech?

Buy more aircraft carriers?

Pay down the national debt?

These are much worthier fights to have than those available while struggling for survival in a condition of great scarcity.

Sorry, Luddites. Few indeed wish to return to the caves.

Bad policy. Bad politics.

As Churchill, on the floor of the House of Commons, observed, ‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.’

Misery loves company. That said, misery makes for bad policy.

So, let’s accelerate our technology and, with it, our prosperity. Then… watch the Congress. Those fights will be merry indeed but much more productive than what we are now witnessing.

Bravo to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto: “We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop and drive them both to infinity. We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.”

To remain great or regain greatness, America can and must have abundant, reliable, readily affordable energy from practical, reality-driven sources. Abundant, reliable, affordable power unlocks a nation's dynamism, builds factories, creates jobs, enhances national security, and reduces poverty and famine.

Accept no substitutes.

Jeff Garzik serves as the founder and chairman of the policy institute Washington Power and Light. Before co-founding Bloq, he spent five years as a Bitcoin core developer and ten years at Red Hat. His work with the Linux kernel is now found in every Android phone and data center running Linux today.

Ralph Benko serves as co-founder and general counsel to Washington Power and Light. He is also the co-founder and general counsel for F1R3FLY.io and has worked in or with 3 White Houses, two executive branch agencies, and the Congress, as well as many political and policy institutes. He is an award-winning columnist.