Though technology is a powerful equalizing force, if money is involved, someone always stands to profit. Similarly, it is possible that technological solutions could mitigate catastrophic risks such as climate change, which would have a profound impact upon future global standards of living. A study of 120 countries between 19 found that a 10% increase in access to broadband could increase GDP by up to 1.3%, and these technologies are ever-easier to employ and distribute. Yet many technologies can be radical social equalizers despite their effect on wealth concentration, due to their accessibility and wide adoption. This is because owners of large fortunes and creators of intellectual property reap the largest financial returns, even as new technology increases standards of living.
This wealth gap persists both despite and because of technological progress: economic surplus driven by increased technological capabilities concentrates wealth at the top rungs of society. Global wealth is increasingly concentrated, with 1% of the world’s population controlling approximately 46% of all wealth. Though technological progress provides industrialized nations with near-universal increases in standards of living, it also brings side effects such as labor shortages, increasing wealth inequality, and artificial scarcity. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the increasing complexity driven by globalization, bureaucracy, and automation has given rise to an economic system in which theories such as Moore’s Law no longer scale. This view does not fully capture the complex and highly evolved relationship between technology, society, and economics. Many commercial technologies have indeed followed this pattern of improvement but technocapitalists extrapolate this process of exponential, technology-driven progress further to encompass all parts of society, not just technological progress. This idea is often generalized to mean that technological advancement occurs at an exponential rate, with accompanying exponential decreases in costs. To explain their beliefs, technocapitalists will often point to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a microchip should double every two years. This ideology is unsurprisingly most common among those who work in the technology and venture capital industries, particularly in Silicon Valley but also in secondary tech hubs like Seattle or Austin. This worldview has found no greater proponent in recent years than the investor Marc Andreessen, who, for example, wrote an essay crediting the technology industry with “saving the world” during the COVID-19 pandemic, going so far as to predict that the introduction of remote work through Zoom, Slack, and other apps was “a permanent civilizational shift.” Furthermore, they believe that technological innovation is necessarily created by private enterprise, and in particular through the institution of the startup, funded by private venture capital funds. Adherents of this ideology believe, consciously or not, that it is technology that determines the shape of social life and the fate of civilizations-rather than the actions of individual humans, coordinated groups, cultural trends, or structural forces.
#Naive optimism driver
Though technological progress provides industrialized nations with near-universal increases in standards of living, it also brings side effects such as labor shortages, increasing wealth inequality, and artificial scarcity.Ī central premise of technocapitalism is that technological innovation is the fundamental driver of history. Society will need to impose some direction. But for all the hype and optimism about the future that technocapitalism has generated, history shows us that more technology is not always the solution to technological problems, nor are market forces always the best way to address deeper societal crises. Business leaders, investors, and government policymakers are increasingly influenced by the fundamental ideas of this ideology, shaping the structure of our economy. Springing up on the West Coast of the United States and spreading throughout the developed world, we might call this ideology “technocapitalism.” Over the last two decades, technocapitalism has attracted trillions of dollars of capital, animated by a fervent belief in inevitable progress driven by information technology.
With this change has come a new ideology. The information technology revolution has changed the structure of our economy, as well as the structure of our daily lives. Market forces are not inherently moral ones.