What’s up with all the tech titan manifestos? (See: Zuckerberg, Altman, Andreessen, et al)

Mark Zuckerberg is the most recent contributor to a shelf that is beginning to sag under the weight of its tomes. Indeed, at this point it is almost easier to point to the tech titans who haven’t written a manifesto than to list the ones who have. The genre includes Sam Altman’s The Intelligence Age and The Gentle Singularity, Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology, Marc Andreessen’s questionably poetic Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s absurdly long Situational Awareness, and the tech company Palantir’s manifesto, which was taken from its CEO Alex Karp’s book, which is itself a manifesto. There is something very peculiar about all of this. Traditionally, manifestos have been written by outsiders, by iconoclasts seeking to overturn the established order. The best illustration is perhaps the most famous manifesto ever written. When Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels, he was living in exile in Brussels, his activities heavily curtailed and under surveillance; barely a week after the manifesto was published, he was arrested and expelled from Belgium. More recently, the Dogme 95 manifesto—which sought to ov…