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Age of Progress or Regression?

“Marc*: “We believe that there is no material problem … that cannot be solved by more technology. We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.” 


Göran**: “Sixty years after the Green Revolution, around 733 million people were hungry and undernourished in 2023, according to the World Health Organization — an increase of 152 million since 2019.”


Marc: “We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.” 


Göran: “Almost half of sub-Saharan Africans — 600 million — live without electricity.”


Marc: “We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.” 


Göran: “There is still a pattern of increased winter mortality in the UK.“


Marc: “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.” 


Göran: “Social isolation remains a debilitating human condition.”


Marc: “We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.” 


Göran: “Excess mortality as a result of COVID-19 has been found to correlate strongly with the proportion of people in poverty, with levels of GDP per capita, and with rates of income inequality.“


Marc: “We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.” 


Göran: “Abundance is hardly the situation of the human majority. In short, this variety of optimism is focused only on technology as a thing, and not at all on its value as a social resource and practice.”


****

Göran: “The conventions on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity were powerless against the postwar colonial practices of France, the UK, and the United States, from Algeria and Madagascar to Kenya and Vietnam, or against the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.


“Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians, with the support of the United States and its allies, combined with its insulting and humiliating defiance of the UN, including the act of declaring UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, a terrorist organization, indicates the beginning of a breakdown of the UN world. Israeli flaunting of international law and international courts — all made possible by Joe Biden’s protection, which Donald Trump is continuing — points to the emergence of an anarchic world patterned by imperialist geopolitics.”


*Marc Andreessen is the the prominent US venture capitalist, author of ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’. Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die…. 'We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength'. Andreessen even quotes from the Futurist Manifesto of Italian fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: 'Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character'. Friedrich Nietzsche is another 'patron saint' of his, and 'becoming technological supermen' his big dream. Asocial technologism and fascistic aggressiveness are noteworthy opposites to caretaking cultures of social fairness, equality, and justice, and of empathy, concern, and helpfulness.”

**Göran Therborn is a sociologist and Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University, UK.


The Age of Regression – an interview with Göran Therborn for Jacobin magazine, Nº57, Spring 2025


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