The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Published on the Andreessen Horowitz website in October 2023, the manifesto is a compressed, aphoristic statement of what Andreessen calls Techno-Optimism. It declares technology the primary engine of human progress, names the enemy — the critics, regulators, and intellectuals who would slow technological development — and articulates a list of patron saints drawn from Hamilton through Schumpeter through contemporary figures. The document was controversial on publication and became a reference point in the subsequent AI discourse: defenders treated it as a clarifying manifesto for a movement that had operated without one; critics read it as an unusually direct statement of the ideology they had long argued implicitly governed Silicon Valley's self-understanding.