It's not true that all techno-optimist ideas come from old sci-fi shows. Some of them come from old back issues of the National Review.

I’ve been blogging on, and some would say whining about, the cult of the tech messiahs for at least a decade now, but I’m still learning about new connections.

We’ve previously talked about Silicon Valley’s bizarre antipathy to the concept of experts and how it played out first with biohacking and then with the full-on crazy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. We’ve discussed how Marc Andreessen singles out experts as villains not once but twice in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. I believe we brought up the example of Steve Jobs basically killing himself with alternative medicine.

But this is not my day job, and even if it were, I doubt they could pay me enough to spend all my time going down these rabbit holes. As a result, mine is a layman’s grasp of the subject, and there are still lots of gaps.

For example, up until a few days ago, I had no idea how far back this hatred of credentialed experts could be traced.

This comes from a Bari Weiss interview with Andreessen. You can check out the whole thing, but I strongly recommend you don’t. I found it while researching this topic, read as much as I could stomach, and closed the tab. 

 James Burnham was super helpful on these topics. He was one of the smartest political scientists, philosophers of the twentieth century on American politics. He was a full-on communist revolutionary activist and a personal friend of Leon Trotsky in the 1920s and ’30s, and then he broke from communism in the ’40s, and he went hard to the right. And he helped found the National Review with William F. Buckley.

He wrote these two books in the 1940s, when the heart of the big three-way battle between communism, fascism, and liberalism was raging in the world. One’s called The Managerial Revolution. And it basically says, these movements have real differences, but there is something in common, which he called “managerialism,” which is the establishment of an expert class. The expert technocrats, who are assumed to be able to steer society in healthy and beneficial ways, and then often lead you in very bad directions.