The Future, Interrupted
I’ve been thinking about a particular kind of silence. The kind that follows certainty.
You see it now in parts of Silicon Valley. Among those who once rallied behind “effective accelerationism” — a belief that technology, unleashed from the state's grip, could drag humanity into the future. Faster, freer, better. But today, that belief has hit a wall. And the silence is telling.
In October 2023, Marc Andreessen published what he called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was an open declaration that regulation is violence and that only unshackled innovation can save civilization. It argued that stagnation is a moral failure and that acceleration is the cure.
The essay struck a chord. Not because it was convincing, but because it confirmed a feeling already in the air — that tech wasn’t just a sector anymore. It was a mission.
For a while, that mission had momentum.
Venture capitalists, founders, and anonymous Twitter philosophers rallied behind the idea. They believed the future would be built by startups, not by governments. The institutions that gave us the internet — DARPA, the NSF, and public universities — were obsolete. They introduced a new playbook featuring quicker iterations, minimal rules, prioritizing AI over bureaucracy, and emphasizing speed above all else.
But speed can be a trick of perspective.
The same crowd that saw government as dead weight also saw Donald Trump as a solution. Not for his vision — he doesn’t have one — but for his willingness to burn things down.
He promised to dismantle the agencies that hindered them. The SEC. The FTC. The EPA. For them, this wasn’t ideology. It was leverage. If the state was a bottleneck, they would vote for the wrecking ball.
It never occurred to them that the wrecking ball might swing back.
Because Trump is not a futurist, he is a nostalgist. His version of progress is not Mars colonies or AGI. It’s more coal, more steel, more flags. His economic vision isn’t exponential. It’s circular. Bring back the past. Repeat the cycle. Rewind the tape.
That's why his new wave of tariffs doesn’t just inconvenience the tech industry. It undermines the very system that makes modern technology possible. Semiconductors, servers, and supply chains don’t emerge from a deregulated ether. They are built on top of global cooperation, public infrastructure, and decades of accumulated expertise.
Tariffs aren’t just taxes. They are signals. And the signal being sent is that the world is closing.
That’s a problem for an ideology that depends on openness.
Accelerationism only works when borders are porous, talent can move freely, the state funds research instead of cutting it, and international trade makes it possible to turn ideas into hardware and hardware into scale.
None of that survives a protectionist turn. Not in policy. Not in spirit.
And here lies the contradiction. Techno-optimists believed they could bypass politics and build faster than the system could slow them down. But now the system is not just slow. It is hostile and is actively disassembling the conditions they mistook for constants.
There is a lesson here, if anyone is still listening.
The future doesn’t build itself. It requires choices. Resources. Relationships. The very things the accelerationists dismissed as legacy baggage. They thought power didn’t matter. The market could replace the state, and a manifesto could replace a map.
But the world still runs on institutions. On compromise. On trade routes, public goods, and shared obligations. Even the most breathtaking innovation needs a place to land. A grid to plug into. A law to protect it.
What’s left now is a kind of drift. The rocket launched, but the launchpad is gone. The orbit is unstable. And the silence is not just confusion. It’s recognition.
The future was never going to arrive on its own.
Not without a world to hold it.