Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen's Manifesto on a Techno-Optimist future has divided views and opinions around the World.
Some, like Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, have called it "the path towards progress" and "a breath of fresh air", while others have labelled it an "over-the-top declaration of humanity’s destiny as a tech-empowered super species", or worse still, a "5,000+ word cringy listicle".
We love building word clouds at Canard Analytics as they provide an intuitive way to quickly visualize the overarching themes in a body of text.
Andreessen's manifesto provides a perfect opportunity to show one in action, and so we subjected his magnum opus to our word cloud treatment.
Andreessen's central thesis is that "there is no material problem . . . that cannot be solved with more technology."
This acts as a rallying cry to the builders of the world to unite and create the future we wish for, through the use of the Techno-Capital Machine (the combination of innovative new technologies and access to an open market).
It is not then surprising that his most frequently used word is technology, followed by words like people, energy, intelligence, and markets.
Some Further Analysis
In order to build a word cloud that delivers meaningful insight, you first have to remove all the words that are necessary for the piece of writing to flow, but add no real value when visualising the key themes.
Words such as "and", "or", "of", "also", "as" are known as stop words and must be removed before the cloud is built. We take out over 550 of these stop words before compiling our word clouds.
In the case of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto this equates to 55% of the total words in the article.
We then further break down the words used in the cloud to show the relative contribution of the most popular ones. The word technology appears 47 times which equates to just over 2% of the word count used to build the cloud.
All-in-all the top 20 terms comprise 15% of all the words considered.
A pie chart shows this breakdown nicely.
There are 1206 distinct words identified in the cloud, and the fact that the top 20 words (1.66%) corresponds to 15% of the word count shows the author's intent to push his central theme that any and all problems in the world can, and should, be solved by unleashing new technolgies into the open market.
We Can Build You a Word Cloud
Building a professional looking word cloud can be time consuming and difficult to get right. This is especially true if you need a level of customization that includes custom cloud shapes (do you like what we did here?), and a specific set of colours, sizes, and fonts to match your brand.
We've built a full suite of word cloud tools that we use to create high-quality, custom word clouds (as well as charts and tables similar to what you see here) on demand.
If you would like to know more about our word cloud offering then head over to our word cloud product page and get in touch with us today.
