Optimism is a spell
"The way home is not the way back."
Colin Wilson - The Outsider
Update: this post was the first thing I ever wrote in English after over twenty years of doing so in Spanish. No matter its faults, I also like it because of the following.
While I was writing the first few paragraphs, Joscha Bach tweeted: "I wish someone would create a Wired, Ars Technica or MIT Technology Review that was not viciously anti tech".
Marc Andreessen published his techno-optimist manifest a couple of weeks later, and e/acc got phenomenal momentum. Something was cooking in all optimist's minds.
During the last few years, I've read the best minds of the early internet comparing large language models to Photoshop, complaining about being unable to wait for a bus without anxiously checking their phones and crying over and over about having to pay for Twitter. A silly list of examples that nevertheless works to show what happened; everything they said 30 years ago describes the current world more accurately than anything they say now. What a paradox.
At some point, they were so disappointed with big data, the engagement algorithm, and venture capital that they decided to turn their backs on technology to an extent so ludicrous they became irrelevant. They participate in MSM once and again, showing their rusty badges of honor and sharing pedestrian thoughts on the current eon with people who still live in one of the previous ones.
Far from an individual problem of single thinkers and media theorists, whole magazines followed through. What was once exciting media like Wired and Ars Technica -both born after Mondo 2000 when the tech scene was still part of the counterculture, and there were high hopes for the future (pun intended), are now unbearably pessimistic too. But who even cares what any of them print anymore? It's telling that irrelevance is always so tightly paired with pessimism.
Granted, this isn't exactly the future we wanted. Even if many promises came true, most of the warnings did too. Yes, the tech overlords are helping governments to implement 1984. Yes, we live inside a PKD short story -and one of the weird ones. But I'm tired of Black Mirror. By now, it's boring. Shallow. The cynicism, the dread, the misanthropism that stems from it.
Mindless-utopianism is far from being the answer, though. It's naive and sometimes dangerous (theocratic/transhumanist gnostic body-hating, I'm talking to you). It is part of why we're here today. We must be aware of every bit of dystopia we helped build and recognize that a lot of shit will hit the fan. Sooner than later. But at the verge of a trillion different collapses (from economic to climate to population to reality itself), amid a pandemic of pessimism, I refuse to follow along. Pessimism is not a choice.
Because it has always been about optimism. Optimism is at the very core of the internet and all cyber-culturez. The optimism of building something new, something better, something stranger. We lost it and need to recover it as soon as possible. Urgently. It doesn't matter if some users signed off. Technology's capacity to expand our selves, to enchant our lives, and to connect us is still right here, all around us. It still exists despite the incoming dystopia and the archon's wet dreams.
Not all current industries have this electric, vibrant spark at their core unless you remain in the YC alumni arena. Crypto does, even with the lambos and endless scams. Some fringe and growing movements, like e/acc and solarpunk, have it as a significant principle, no matter its faults. We have to look forward to the future like we once did instead of fearing it. Not hiding from it or trying to decelerate it from happening. To think it into existence and build it. Acceleration is a spell.