From this perch in Silicon Valley, it was easy to believe that, whatever the news might say, life was getting steadily better. This view had become something of a religion among tech elites, including Hunter-Torricke’s boss, who had recently recommended the canonical text on the matter, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, as part of his public book club. “I argued with Zuckerberg about that,” Hunter-Torricke says. “Because, for me, that entire view is flimsily reasoned.” He told Zuckerberg that it did not engage with the “deep frailness” of the various institutions and systems underpinning human prosperity. Around the world, states were disintegrating, climate systems were approaching tipping points, economies were stagnating, and inequality was rising.
Despite his misgivings, he continued collecting his paycheck. “I made the calculus that on balance, it was better to be within the system trying to improve it,” Hunter-Torricke says. On his office wall, Hunter-Torricke hung a page of a newspaper from 1849: a report on the Paris Peace Congress of that year, where some of the world’s leading bourgeois intellectuals promoted the view that war was now a thing of the past, and that humanity might finally be on a path to a peaceful future. Of course, they were wrong; the horrors of the twentieth century were yet to come. The print served as a reminder for him that, whatever his colleagues might say, historical progress was neither linear nor inevitable.
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