At a WelcomeFest panel, moderator Marshall Kosloff said that Ezra Klein had written his part of Abundance as an attempt to foment a rapprochement between progressives and Silicon Valley. (Klein’s co-author, Derek Thompson, nodded emphatically.)
Kosloff’s sentiment was well-founded; while supporters of abundance tend to center it on discussions of housing, the Klein-Thompson brand of abundance has always included a healthy dose of techno-optimism. The book, after all, begins with a utopian sci-fi vignette. In Klein and Thompson’s imagining (from p.3):
“Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.”
If only wishing made it so. Unfortunately, Abundance skips over a lot of the near-fantasy steps required to get there. Currently, AI is losing money hand over fist, so there are no real “profits” to share, just hype and paper wealth. (Thompson seems to be realizing this dynamic.) I would also love to know how the firms are persuaded to cough up the cash. Maybe this is Klein and Thompson’s dream having a backdoor pitch for nationalizing Big Tech?
To Klein in particular, a key goal was clearly to promote a liberal techno-optimism. But don’t just take it from me:
- To Scott Galloway on the Prof G Pod, Klein said “one of the aims of the book is to repair what we think of as a dysfunctional relationship that has emerged between liberals and technology.”
- He adds that “There is a tendency to put technology, I think practically after 2016, it’s run by a bunch of oligarchic billionaires, there’s a ton of, certainly in the liberal mind, disinformation, and propaganda on Facebook,liberals sort of turn on technology. But there’s a lot you just can’t solve without technology.”
- To Chris Hayes on Why is this happening, Klein said “And this is one of the, you know, the book is operating on a lot of levels, but one of levels is kind of like ideological vibes, I would almost call it. I think the relationship between, you know, liberals or Democrats or something and technology has become dysfunctional.”
- On Pod Save America, Klein framed the dynamic as a “question of what is your relationship to technology, what is your relationship to what is coming, is it fundamentally optimistic[?]”
- On Bari Weiss’ Honestly, he stated “I think we think that the relationship, the politics around technology have become highly dysfunctional”
- Discussing how the book came about with Thompson on his Plain English podcast Klein declared “I felt progressives had developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology.” Which had resulted in “the left, in its anger at these [Big Tech] companies began sort of giving up on technology.”
So when populists accuse abundance advocates of being pro-BigTech, we’re not asking you to just take our word for it. (We’ll likely write something similar about Thompson and Yglesias in the not too distant future.)
Image credit: “Ezra Klein in 2020 cropped” by Irn is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.