CONCEPT
Panglossian Neoliberalism
Morozov's 2024 term for the credo that <em>"we already live in the best of all possible worlds"</em> and that there is no alternative to market-driven technological provision — the structural ideology AI both produces and reinforces.
Panglossian neoliberalism is Morozov's name for the ideological formation he identified in his 2024 Boston Review essay 'The AI We Deserve.' It fuses two distinct claims: the Panglossian claim that the current arrangement of the technology industry is fundamentally sound and requires only optimization, and the neoliberal claim that the market is the correct mechanism for performing that optimization. AI is simultaneously the product and the engine of this credo — produced by the market-driven institutions whose legitimacy it reinforces, and operating within those institutions to produce outcomes that confirm the credo's core propositions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Panglossian dimension — named for Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, who maintained in the face of every catastrophe that this was the best of all possible worlds — holds that the venture-capital-funded, commercially-driven arrangement of AI development is not merely tolerable but optimal. Problems that arise are not structural but local; dissatisfactions are not political but technical; the response to any