A prominent Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen stated in his manifesto "there is no material problem - that cannot be solved with more technology". This ideology that now has the ear of President Trump and can be felt in our answer for everything from warfare to climate change. But, writes Caroline Ashcroft, this technological optimism has ideas deeper than a mere fascination for fancy gadgets, it instead forms a part of a totalising world-view about the force that shapes our political possibilities. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt's work in the aftermath of the nuclear bomb, Caroline argues we need to reassert that all technology is political, and that a blind faith in technology can only lead to ruin.

Radical techno-optimism abounds in the twenty-first century. The tech industry proclaims the myriad benefits of its offerings and rejects external oversight and regulation. Venture capitalist and tech billionaire Marc Andreessen’s ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ offers one particularly extreme version of these claims. “We believe,” he writes, “that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.” This sentiment lies at the heart of techno-optimism: more technology; technology to solve the problems of technology. While we might be sceptical about the biases of the Silicon Valley elite, there is also a more pervasive optimism about the possibilities of technology. The UK government’s Net Zero Strategy (along with others like it) relies upon the effectiveness of a range of technologies to reduce or balance emissions, and politicians globally see green technologies as a means to mediate between the ever-growing energy demands of industry and economic growth, and the threat of climate change and environmental degradation. Amongst other things, the promise of technology offers a way of sidestepping certain problems, thereby evading the costs of non-technological solutions: social, political, or economic. Technology is the Deus ex Machina of our time.

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Modernity’s unquestioned faith in technological progress would result in catastrophe.

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