I wouldn't say I "used to" have a similar worldview. In fact I find myself agreeing with most every passage in the manifesto. Agreeing with "yes, but..." - because while we can assert our "belief" in things, when those beliefs are taken for granted while not lining up with actual reality, they form their own oppressive dogma! For example it's quite rich for a VC to make assertions about free markets while simultaneously having drastically altered their investment strategy due to government ending the decade long feeding trough of near-zero interest rates. Hence the general criticism of being out of touch.
Your comment is a good synthesis point. In fact one might say the amount of criticism and nay-saying is directly related to the inequality, either economic or social (dis)enfranchisement of lacking purpose. So pushing in the opposite direction isn't really helping the cause of growth, but rather causing that gulf to widen and the criticism of "techno optimism" to grow.
The fundamental problem I see is making sure governments pass productive laws that encourage computational wealth to remain distributed, as opposed to authoritarian laws that actually cement routine corporate control while reserving ultimate control to the state. The latter approach basically only works with quantifiable monetary wealth, in that the state can collect taxes and then convert them into material welfare. But this approach doesn't work with non-fungible liberty, where the distributed structure must be preserved rather than ever being centralized to begin with. eg GDPR vs TikTok hysteria. Or antitrust enforcement to end this anticompetitive bundling of software, services, and hosting, versus "eliminate sec 230".
Your comment is a good synthesis point. In fact one might say the amount of criticism and nay-saying is directly related to the inequality, either economic or social (dis)enfranchisement of lacking purpose. So pushing in the opposite direction isn't really helping the cause of growth, but rather causing that gulf to widen and the criticism of "techno optimism" to grow.
The fundamental problem I see is making sure governments pass productive laws that encourage computational wealth to remain distributed, as opposed to authoritarian laws that actually cement routine corporate control while reserving ultimate control to the state. The latter approach basically only works with quantifiable monetary wealth, in that the state can collect taxes and then convert them into material welfare. But this approach doesn't work with non-fungible liberty, where the distributed structure must be preserved rather than ever being centralized to begin with. eg GDPR vs TikTok hysteria. Or antitrust enforcement to end this anticompetitive bundling of software, services, and hosting, versus "eliminate sec 230".