The Technoprogressive Agenda After Fascism

Ten years since the Technoprogressive Declaration we need the technoprogressive vision of radically democratic high-tech future more than ever

The IEET's mission has been to find and promote technoprogressive thinkers and ideas for twenty years. We have always seen ourselves at the intersection of futurism, progressive politics, and public policy. We have promoted a universal basic income to solve the technological unemployment that we expect to face. We have worked on how to regulate human genetic engineering before and since the arrival of CRISPR. We generally accepted that the future would accelerate while we tried to resist millennialist fever dreams.

Now we find ourselves at the confluence of accelerating technological change, principally AI, and ascendant fascism destroying the post-WWII political order. What does technoprogressive politics offer in this moment, in the struggle to put fascism back on the dust heap and in building a new domestic and global order?

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Since the November U.S. election, I have been working with political consultant Eli Zupnick on fleshing out the technoprogressive policy agenda. We plan to outline a set of technoprogressive policies and invite thinkers who already identify with the term "technoprogressive" or are adjacent to write about them for the IEET. We will also organize meetings and conferences to address the evolving technoprogressive policy space.

We think three threads need to be woven together so technoprogressives can help defeat fascism by painting a desirable path in its wake. First, we must return to a militant, redistributive social democracy. Second, we need to treat the promise and peril of emerging technologies as urgent, current political issues, not hypotheticals still decades away. Third, we need to re-focus on big projects that inspire faith in government and the reforms of the regulatory state that would allow us to achieve them.

The technoprogressive current can be seen in history in dozens of movements that combined the Enlightenment faith in reason, science, and progress with the Enlightenment political values of individual freedom, egalitarianism, and democratic sovereignty. In the 20^th century, social democracy embodied this combination, building secular public education and the administrative and regulatory state while taming inequality and capitalist excesses. Politically, social democrats were able to bind the social progressivism of the educated with the economic populism of blue-collar workers and the economically precarious. As social democrats became more tied to the middle-class social progress agenda, however, they adopted neoliberalism and lost blue-collar workers to the far right. The way back is militant class-first social democracy; anti-trust to break up monopolies, progressive taxation, and universal social programs.

The social democratic agenda is still relevant in the fight against tech monopolies and oligarchs and in defense of social welfare and electoral democracy. However, the social democratic strategy for the 21^st century has to adapt to our new social and technological reality. Any rights won for labor will accelerate automation and the need for a universal basic income. Crashing birth rates and anti-aging medicine will exacerbate the "old-age dependency" ratio, but healthy longevity reduces burdens on the welfare state. AI risk, bioweapons, and nuclear weapons make clear the need for new, stronger transnational institutions. Technoprogressives assume rapid, discontinuous advancement in emerging technologies and point to how these technologies could be used to build a freer, more equal world.

The third leg of a new technoprogressive politics, Eli and I believe, comes from "abundance Democrats" like Ezra Klein. From the painful experiences of failed technoprogressive projects like California's regulatory morass defeating plans for high-speed rail, to the disastrous effects of not-in-my-backyard regulations on housing availability in Democratic states, the abundance Democrats argue that if we want people to take democracy seriously again, we have to be focused on building and not just regulating. As faith in the logjam of electoral democracy declined, support for strongmen and their authoritarian promises grew. The Musk-Trump alliance has cemented the idea that bold billionaires unfettered by the law can at least destroy things. In their wake, we must make the case that progressives are willing to do what it takes to build.

Technoprogressive Policies

Technoprogressives are the progressives willing to aggressively use emerging technologies and the democratic state to accomplish big projects, from healthy longevity and more housing to a post-work society and space exploration. Instead of relying on market forces technoprogressives will use antitrust to break up monopoly and oligarchy, progressive taxation to take the burden off the 99%, and universal provision of income, education and healthcare. With this frame we can begin to identify the kinds of policies that a technoprogressive movement or organization would promote. These policies have radical and reformist versions, can use more or less market mechanisms, will take different forms in different countries, and can rely on more or less optimism about the pace of innovation. technoprogressives may agree with some of these policy ideas, and not others. Eli and other contributors will chime in with their own versions.

But to get the conversation started:

Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the Future of Work: Technoprogressives assume automation and AI will begin to cause technological unemployment and that implementing a small but growing universal basic income will be inevitable. Progressive economists still overwhelmingly believe in the goal of full employment, however, and the adoption of a UBI can be complemented by educational policies and skill-matching programs to ensure that all workers are as prepared as possible for the rapid changes in labor demand and are able to find what employment they can. Large public sector initiatives, such as the Green New Deal, will help grow some new jobs. Strengthening labor rights will give workers more say in controlling the automation of their work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance: Large language models were built on the collective labor of billions of humans, and we deserve a say in how they work and some dividends from their profits. Given the impact of AI on our energy use and environment, on our media, politics, economy, and global security, AI requires strong governance, not the laissez-faire accelerationism suddenly en vogue. The European Union's regulations on AI are a good start. Nonetheless EU-style regulation needs to be complemented by experiments with public ownership or public utility models for the most powerful models, ensuring universal, equitable access to trustworthy AI tools.

Digital Democracy: Building digital citizenship starts with investment in K-12 and university STEM education and ensuring universal access to high-speed Internet. The Internet needs to be defended from censorship, both with anti-trust action to prevent media concentration in the hands of oligarchs and by defending net neutrality. Comprehensive privacy laws, algorithmic transparency, and robust data security standards will help protect us from manipulation by corporations and governments. We also need to adopt digital democracy tools for organizing, deliberation, and voting, reducing the cognitive and time burdens on citizens that keep them from participating.

Securing the Biotech Dividend: The most popular technoprogressive moonshot proposal is to provide public funding for therapies that slow and reverse aging. Technoprogressives agree that clinical and healthcare regulations must be liberalized and streamlined, especially for enhancement and longevity therapies. Technoprogressives support expanding reproductive rights from access to contraception, prenatal screening, and abortion to include assisted reproduction. We believe universal healthcare systems are the ideal means for distributing the biotech dividend, so in the U.S., we would support universal healthcare proposals like Medicare4All.

Science Funding and Industrial Policy: Technoprogressives recognize that a strong innovation ecosystem is always built on government policy, from educating the workforce and federal investment in foundational sciences to industrial policy combining tax credits, grants, and public-private partnerships. Just as the "Sputnik moment" spurred scientific investment and innovation around aerospace in the 1960s, we have half a dozen moonshot opportunities today that would accelerate technological innovation, from the Green New Deal and Artificial General Intelligence to reversing aging and exploring space.

Sustainable Technologies: Technoprogressives support renewable energy innovation that includes wind, solar, nuclear, and fusion technologies. They also advocate for pursuing safe, ethical studies into large-scale interventions like carbon capture and solar radiation management, with international cooperation and governance. Transportation investments should include high-speed rail, electric vehicles, and public transit systems. The Chinese have already demonstrated that strong government policy can achieve remarkable progress with renewable energy, high-speed rail, and electric vehicles. The democracies need to catch up.

In the coming months, we will be soliciting essays debating the merits of these initiatives. Please get in touch with me at director@ieet.org if you would like to write something for us in the 500-1500 word range.

For good measure, I'm parking here a copy of the Technoprogressive Declaration we issued ten years ago in 2014 in Paris. At the time, the authoritarian threats to liberal democracy were not yet clear. But the Declaration's vision of a technoprogressive intellectual current reaching out to futurists and social movements may finally have arrived.

Technoprogressive Declaration 2014

The world is unacceptably unequal and dangerous. Emerging technologies could make things dramatically better or worse. Unfortunately too few people yet understand the dimensions of both the threats and rewards that humanity faces. It is time for technoprogressives, transhumanists and futurists to step up our political engagement and attempt to influence the course of events.

Our core commitment is that both technological progress and democracy are required for the ongoing emancipation of humanity from its constraints. Partisans of the promises of the Enlightenment, we have many cousins in other movements for freedom and social justice. We must build solidarity with these movements, even as we intervene to point to the radical possibilities of technologies that they often ignore. With our fellow futurists and transhumanists we must intervene to insist that technologies are well-regulated and made universally accessible in strong and just societies. Technology could exacerbate inequality and catastrophic risks in the coming decades, or especially if democratized and well-regulated, ensure longer, healthy and more enabled lives for growing numbers of people, and a stronger and more secure civilization.

Beginning with our shared commitment to individual self-determination we can build solidarity with

Organizations defending workers and the unemployed, as technology transforms work and the economy

• The movement for reproductive rights, around access to contraception, abortion, assisted reproduction and genomic choice

• The movement for drug law reform around the defense of cognitive liberty

• The disability rights movement around access to assistive and curative technologies

• Sexual and gender minorities around the right to bodily self-determination

• Digital rights movements around new freedoms and means of expression and organization

We call for dramatically expanded governmental research into anti-aging therapies, and universal access to those therapies as they are developed in order to make much longer and healthier lives accessible to everybody. We believe that there is no distinction between "therapies" and "enhancement." The regulation of drugs and devices needs reform to speed their approval.

As artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies increasingly destroy more jobs than they create, and senior citizens live longer, we must join in calling for a radical reform of the economic system. All persons should be liberated from the necessity of the toil of work. Every human being should be guaranteed an income, healthcare, and life-long access to education.

We must join in working for the expansion of rights to all persons, human or not.

We must join with movements working to reduce existential risks, educating them about emerging threats they don't yet take seriously, and proposing ways that emerging technologies can help reduce those risks. Transnational cooperation can meet the man-made and natural threats that we face.

It is time for technoprogressives to step forward and work together for a brighter future.