Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel and The Crypto Fascists of Silicon Valley
Andreesen and other broligarchs are horrible, mediocre, insecure people with no redeeming human qualities who don't get the respect they feel they're due. So they try to force us instead.
While various other tech billionaires get more attention, Marc Andreesen is one of the more grating ones. He’s one of the ones who made a big deal about being a former Democratic Donor when switching his support to Trump. Andreesen is also one of the investors in Substack - this platform.
In October, 2023, he published his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” an incoherent mess of ideas and quotes scraped off the internet that combines the worst elements of a bloated and pompous sermon with a corporate motivational speech, and the research and fact-checking skills of a 14-year-old, all with shout-outs to actual fascists.
It’s sanctimonious, self-congratulatory and un-self-aware, while attacking “enemies” with imagined grievances. It’s all based on a shallow and largely fictional understanding of the subjects being discussed.
It’s supposed to be a statement of faith. “We believe…” it says, over and over again - 113 times. If he actually had history and facts on his side, he wouldn’t have to believe - he’d know. (“We know” is said zero times).
The list of “Patron Saints” is frankly offensive. It includes the fictional John Galt from Ayn Rand’s fantasy novels lumped in with distinguished physicist Richard Feynmann & Vilfredo Pareto, dubbed “the theoretician of totalitarianism” who was appointed to the Italian Senate by Mussolini.
All the section heads here are taken from the Manifesto. This is how it starts, appropriately enough.
“Lies”
With certain megalomaniacal characters, it’s said that every accusation is a confession. The first thing Andreesen does is make an accusation - vague, broad and foreboding: “We are being lied to,”
“We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.”
It’s not the technology that’s the problem: it’s the horrible, horrible assholes who own it. This passive framing - “we are told” leaves out who’s doing the telling, because no one is.
There are lots of people who love tech and see it as a solution to problems. The reason they don’t like it is that instead of productive benefits for all, it’s being used for useless garbage (spending trillions of dollars on AI that keeps drawing hands with eleventeen fingers). The other is that many tech broligarchs have never created anything new of value at all, and their specific corporations - social media, search - have broken plenty of laws, manipulated elections, and profited immensely all of the intellectual property and work of others. Their technology facilitates real harm and act as platforms for criminals, from which they profit.
This is also the way that a grinning preacher looking to demonize opponents would kick things off. “They’re all mad and sad because we’re happy.”
“Truth”
“Our civilization was built on technology.”
In this section Andreesen goes so far as to directly quote Jesus in a way that is shocking, but not surprisingly crass.
“I am here to bring the good news. We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.”
Now, while I am not a religious person, this still turns my stomach, because it’s such a grotesque perversion of all of Christ’s lessons. It is literally anti-Christian, because the good news that Christ was announcing was the fulfilment of a Jubilee year - a Year of the Lord’s favour, where the wealthy and the temple would cancel their debts, release debt slaves and prisoners, and allow people to return to land they had lost.
Civilization is not based on technology. It’s based on the law, and it always has been.
I am all for technological progress, but I am not going to pretend that technology is an untrammelled good. Technology has no inherent virtue, or inherent evil. It’s a tool and countless technologies from radiation to medicines can both kill and cure. The dose makes the poison. Whatever is powerful is powerful for good or for evil. There is no denying that technology has been developed and used to kill millions and millions of people.
Technology can disrupt and change social relations in ways that are positive as well as negative, and that create new moral and political dilemmas. What Andreesen ignores is that we have a capacity to create technology so powerful that it can cause unforeseen problems and crises we don’t know how to recover from.
“Technology”
Here, Andreesen spreads out and does a lot of rambling. As Orwell pointed out in Politics and the English language, unclear expression was a sign of unclear thinking.
Andreesen writes:
“There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.
Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.
Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.
And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology.”
So, there’s a problem here, which is that it’s totally unclear what kind of growth Andreesen is talking about.
Growth for whom? Almost all economic growth in society for decades has been at the very top, and it’s all people who own for a living.
It’s because he’s pretending that it’s an economy where money doesn’t exist.
One of the reasons people aren’t having children is because they cannot afford a house to raise them in. Our economies are distorted - the same policies that have enriched Andreesen and other billionaires have been at financial expense of everyone else.
But there are also other ways to acheive growth that are not technology. There are other kinds of innovations: improvements in efficiency through design, or different human arrangements. Neither of those are technology. And there is lots of excellent and established technology that is not used because it is less profitable. The reason it is less profitable is that, if its patent or copyright has expired - which was protection afforded to that intellectual property’s owners provided by government.
“Markets”
In this section, Andreesen waxes eloquent on the virtues of the market, and again returns to the “we believe” - because he can’t truthfully say “we know”:
“We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy.”
Now this is one of the most remarkable statements, because in the US and around the world, every single country that became wealthy through innovation and technology, did so by being protectionist, not by free markets. Countries only turn to free trade once they’re rich.
Not some rich countries - all of them. To develop a textiles industry hundreds of years ago, the UK hired weavers from Belgium (people with name Fleming, for example) to come to the UK. They blocked imports from India. The US had tariffs of over 30% for nearly a century, into the 1930s.
The US technological and global manufacturing supremacy during and after the Second World War was funded by government. The US created an entire aerospace manufacturing industry and doubled the entire tool stock of the country by 100%, entirely at government expense.
Add to that investments in R & D and new technologies originally for military use- the jet engine, radar, electronics, computing, nuclear and medical technologies, all of which were later commercialized.
All this stuff that Andreesen writes about free markets just shows how totally ignorant he is. There has never been anything resembling a free market in tech, going back to U.S. protectionism in the early 1800s, through the development of fundamental R & D of information theory and cybernetics, both of which were advanced as part of technology and innovation funded by the US military during the Second World War.
As the economist Marianna Mazzucatto wrote in her outstanding book, “The Entrepreneurial State” which asked the question, “Why did the U.S. develop global tech companies like Google, Facebook, Youtube and Amazon, when Europe did not?”
The answer was that the development of an incredible number of key innovations - including their development at private companies - were financed through public, not private expense. That includes the famous “Xerox PARC.”
XEROX, the copying and print company, had an outfit called PARC, or the Palo Alto Research Centre. They developed a lot of key technologies that were eventually commercialized by Apple. Xerox opened PARC in 1970, hiring the greatest minds in the field to research advances in computer science. PARC innovations included a Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, windows, drag and drop interactions.
The product that turned Apple into multi-trillion dollar company was the iPhone - which was preceded by the iPod.
This is a graphic showing all of the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” (DARPA) patents that are used in the first touch-screen iPod/iPhone (and iPads to follow).
The technology and the credit for the agency that developed it:
First Generation iPod:
DRAM cache - DARPA; Click wheel - RRE, CERN; Lithium-ion batteries - Department of Energy (DOE); Signal compression - Army Research Office; Liquid crystal display - National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense; Micro hard drive - DoE / DARPA; Microprocessor (CPU)
Second Generation Ipod / iPhone
Multi-touch screen - DoE, CIA/NSF, DoD; NAVSTAR-GPS - DoD / Navy; SIRI - DARPA; HTTP/HTML - CERN (Europe); Cellular technology - US Military; Internet - DARPA
In addition, Apple had the following
Government funding. in Direct Equity Investment: Prior to IPO, Apple received $500,000 from Small Business Investment Company licensed by a U.S. Federal Agency
Access to Research funded by state or federal governments - Military, academic, private-public partnerships
Tax, trade and tech policies to support innovation for Apple or drive market share
Microprocessors, which were developed in 1950s and 60s by Bell Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, only had one customer to sell to - the U.S. Government. The only customers at first were NASA and the Air Force (for nuclear missiles).
People were shocked by the release of a Chinese AI app, Deepseek, because there there are currently export controls to China to prevent them from being able to catch up or surpass American companies on AI.
None of that is the free market. All of these is reasons Marc Andreesen and other Silicon Valley Crypto-Fascists are billionaires.
“We believe Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system.”
Now, Andreesen is making a big mistake, because this is also a major blunder of Hayek’s.
Hayek’s knowledge problem argued that the collective wisdom of crowds meant that the market would make better decisions than those of a government bureaucrat. This is misrepresentation of both the market and government.
Hayek’s belief in the wisdom of crowds was his response in a dispute with Keynes about uncertainty. Keynes argued that uncertainty should be incorporated into economics, because of the limits of our knowledge. Hayek argued that the collective knowledge of all the players in a market would effectively fill in the gaps in information.
What Hayek says seems intuitively correct, but it’s mathematically wrong. If you say you are 50% certain, or 90% certain, you’re talking about probabilities, percentages and fractions. That means if you have a crowd of 100 people who are each 90% sure, you multiply 9/10 by 100, and you get 900/1000. You multiply both the numerator and the denominator. You have to multiply the ignorance as well as the knowledge.
This is an error in multiplying fractions.
Hayek’s mistake is in thinking that real world uncertainty can be avoided. If you think of certainty as all the things you can control, consider that uncertainty is all the things you can’t control. In practical and real terms, uncertainty is inescapable. Anyone who takes an undergraduate course in philosophy that covers rationalism and empiricism would know this from reading about the skepticism of David Hume. Because human beings cannot experience perfect knowledge and we live in time, not knowing what the future will bring. If total uncertainty = zero, and total certainty = one, we cannot reach one.
Before I ever read about Hayek, I read the book Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, so when I heard about Hayek’s claims, I could not take them seriously. Also, I had read books and met humans. People are incredibly irrational. They panic, they stampede.
Saying “centralized economic system” misunderstands the purpose of government, which is associated with enforcing the rule of law. Markets, money, property and corporations themselves are all created into existence by government legislation.
There are plenty of problems with government - especially corrupt ones - but the idea that individual bureaucrats are making decisions ignores the entire machinery of government, including legislation and regulation or policies that are the consequence of a lengthy consultation with public input, statistics and studies.
The matter of whose interest is being protected is vitally important. The public interest - of one person, one vote - is not the same as the private interest, which is one dollar, one vote.
Unless there are systems to protect the public interest from predation, the public interest will be destroyed and it will just be lawless. (Andreesen later talks about being a predator). When no one can be held to account, it’s not freedom - it’s a form of corruption. It’s a breakdown in society. Governments shape and create markets, from the ground up. The law defines what property is, property rights and legal protections. Corporations exist and have rights and can make contracts because the law says they can. They were created by government.
Limited liability corporations, marked a new era for capitalism: shareholders could run up great debts and not be held personally liable if the venture didn’t succeed. They had to be legislated into existence in the 1800s.
Andreesen doesn’t understand the origins of the term “free market.”
In the 19th centiry, when political economists were writing about the “free market” they weren’t talking about freedom from government. What they wanted was for the market to be free of was from the overhead cost of the aristocracy that owned everything, and everyone else had to rent from them.
What those liberals wanted was an alternative to a government by hereditary aristocracy - serfdom, where you paid rent your entire life in support of people who always took far more than they gave back.
That meant having a government where citizens could select their representatives and, instead of paying rent to a landlord for them to improve their mansion, you would pay taxes to a government which would then make investments in education and infrastructure and projects in the public interest. A democratic government where people come together and pay taxes that are then reinvested in improving the lives of people is what was envisioned by some thinkers as “the free market” because there wouldn’t be rentiers.
Governments don’t exist to run the economy. They exist, first and foremost to organize, and also to serve as a form of court where people can have their disputes settled justly. The reason you have one law for all the land and for everyone is because without that you do not have individual freedom, period.
To have that, you have to have impartial judges, impartial laws, and a lack of corruption. That corruption ranges from being biased to being bought and paid for.
And absolutely none of what Andreesen is talking about is possible without legal innovations and advances in understanding that only happened because of public investment.
Market Discipline
This part has Andreesen talking a good game about “market discipline” which makes it sound like a game that’s all about consequences and responsibility.
“The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get.”
“Markets prevent monopolies and cartels”
I mean, you really could just substitute “Our Lord” for “Market” and you really see the faux-biblical vibe. These are statements of pure faith. because the evidence shows the opposite.
It is insane to claim that the market “disciplines” is anything but lax, given the last 30 years of economic events. In 2008-09 there was a global financial crisis. It was not caused by a lack of market discipline. It happened after regulators had dismantled New Deal regulations, and major companies were bankrupted by investment products that weren’t regulated at all. The people who caused it got bailed out and got bonuses, while millions lost their homes and jobs. There were widespread allegations of fraud and criminality, both on individual deals and industrial-scale forgery.
No discipline.
In 2020, central banks promised “unlimited” money, and printed $8-trillion to flood the market with easy money that’s been spent on real-estate, memestocks, and on plenty of corruption, all part of a massive “everything bubble” caused by Milton Friedman’s monetary policy and ideas, which still dominating central banks and governments economists and the public.
Andreesen goes on to make statements about markets lifting people out of poverty, which is false. When the industrial revolution got under way in the UK, while owners made fortunes, wages and life expectancy for many plunged. It took decades for the wealth to be shared.
What Andreesen - and, to be fair, almost everyone else - fails to realize is that the actual economics of the “extreme left” of Marxism and communism are no different than the economics of the extreme right. They are the same “laissez faire” economics as David Ricardo, because Marx didn’t come up with economic formulas, his model of the communist state was modelled on the capitalist corporation: a CEO, a board of directors (the politburo) and central planning. In Stalin’s Soviet Union under Preobrazhansky, the USSR ran Soviet trickle-down economics, where all the surplus went to the state, instead of the stockholders.
That’s why JK Galbraith - a Liberal centrist who believed in a mixed public-private economy - said “While Communism is man exploiting his fellow man, capitalism is just the opposite.” Unlike the unspoken third option: liberal democracy.
Andreesen continues with lots of bowing and scraping to virtues of markets while making claims that reflect another J K Galbraith’s statement “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic.”
OK there bud. I already made the point above that most of the actual innovation - the breakthroughs - are not happening in the private market, where “long term” means three years. Rather, the public is funding these innovations, and private market players have used them to build oligopolies and monopolies, especially in tech. The research was funded at public expense, and the actual innovators don’t make billions, the private companies who commercialize it do.
What’s more, while these tech companies get innovations funded by the public around the world (the UK, US, EU), the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act specifically shields platforms from liability for the content posted by users - a protection that only these companies enjoy. Taking someone else’s intellectual property for next to nothing, or nothing and selling it for something is an unbeatable business model, because honest businesses can’t compete with people with a U.S. government-granted license to profit from other’s work and property.
As for the claim that “society benefits” I could point out that Margaret Thatcher famously said “There’s no such thing as society.” We should at least be more accurate and point out that any society is made up of individuals, and the distribution of ownership, income and benefits among individuals varies roughly on the basis of an 80/20 power law, which was originally discovered by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian engineer and statistician.
Benoit Mandelbrot writes:
"One of Pareto's equations achieved special prominence, and controversy. He was fascinated by problems of power and wealth. How do people get it? How is it distributed around society? How do those who have it use it? The gulf between rich and poor has always been part of the human condition, but Pareto resolved to measure it. He gathered reams of data on wealth and income through different centuries, through different countries: the tax records of Basel, Switzerland, from 1454 and from Augsburg, Germany in 1471, 1498 and 1512; contemporary rental income from Paris; personal income from Britain, Prussia, Saxony, Ireland, Italy, Peru. What he found – or thought he found – was striking. When he plotted the data on graph paper, with income on one axis, and number of people with that income on the other, he saw the same picture nearly everywhere in every era. Society was not a "social pyramid" with the proportion of rich to poor sloping gently from one class to the next. Instead it was more of a "social arrow" – very fat on the bottom where the mass of men live, and very thin at the top where sit the wealthy elite. Nor was this effect by chance; the data did not remotely fit a bell curve, as one would expect if wealth were distributed randomly. "It is a social law", he wrote: something "in the nature of man".
That something, though expressed in a neat equation, is harsh and Darwinian, in Pareto’s view ... There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud ... The smarter, abler, stronger and shrewder take the lion’s share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote “compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish is prevented from eliminating toxins.”
Inflammatory stuff — and it burned Pareto’s reputation. At his death in 1923, Italian fascists were beatifying him, republicans demonizing him. British philosopher Karl Popper called him the “theoretician of totalitarianism.”
Framing the issue as “inequality” carries all sorts of political and moral expectations, because it is very clear that some people are better at some things than others.
A more accurate term is “concentration” of wealth and income, or distribution. 80% of the wealth is owned by the top 20% - and that ratio keeps applying to the population. It’s not a function of nature - it’s a function of the way rules have been written for a society where a tiny fraction of the population own for a living, because everyone is paying them monopoly rents, and this concentration of wealth keeps growing because the people with the wealth use it to rewrite the rules to their benefit, buy governments, and payoff politicians, police, and judges so the law doesn’t apply to them.
The result is not freedom and prosperity for all: it’s a mafia state run by criminal oligarchs to act as they wish because the law doesn’t apply to them. This has happened over and over throughout history, and the result isn’t innovation, it’s often mass murder in order to steal people’s property.
Andreesen goes on to cherry pick a few more ideas.
He cites Ricardo’s idea of “comparative advantage,” apparently unaware that the entire basis of it is that technology cannot change - which undermines the entire point of Andreesen’s manifesto to technology.
Ricardo was a lobbyist: his brothers were bankers who foreclosed on Greece in the 1800s, and he wanted to sell the idea that workers in different countries won’t be in competition with each other if they are producing different goods.
But they do compete, and they do produce the same goods. Global tech and global supply chains means that the head office can stay while the entire factory is shipped overseas, resulting in permanent job losses for workers and communities. There have been massive drops in incomes across the US and around the world since China entered the global market. People are making a fraction of what they did, and sometimes a fraction of what their parents or grandparents did, while the executives and shareholders have seen a massive increase in profits and wealth.
A 2013 paper found 44% of job losses in US manufacturing between 1990 and 2007 were due to Chinese competition. $1,000 in Chinese imports per worker, per year, reduced annual income by $500 per worker, but government benefits only rose $58.
What actually happens is that having promised it will make “everyone” richer, if people whose jobs communities and futures have been sacrificed in the name of higher returns for shareholders always have the rug pulled out from under them.
It’s the “Free-Market Economist Two-Step”
FME: Trade policy X will make us richer on aggregate
Other: What about winners and losers?
FME: Policy can be created to compensate the loser.
Other: Sounds good, here’s a policy we could use?
FME: Redistribution is distortionary, this cannot be allowed!
“The Techno-Capital Machine”
Here, Andreesen cites Nick Land, a supposed philosopher who coined the term the “dark enlightenment” which I guess sounds better than “Dim-bulb Douchebag Dorkfest,” or DBDBD.
Throughout history, people who have been presented to us as economists, philosophers and great thinkers were often lobbyists, propagandists, sycophants and high-end swindlers. They are not revealing profound truths: they provide philosophical justification to make theft, murder, subjugation and lies seem noble.
This line, for example:
“The techno-capital machine makes natural selection work for us in the realm of ideas.”
This is monumentally ignorant, on many levels. First, the “techno-capital machine” is a product of, and integrated into the U.S. military-industrial complex. The idea that there is a “natural selection in the realm of ideas” requires ignoring huge numbers of truly terrible ideas that have been implemented by humans over millenia, which became dominant and had to be rejected. Slavery, child labor, putting lead in gasoline, thalidomide, oxycontin.
“Intelligence”
Here, Andreesen starts going on about intelligence, and artificial intelligence. It’s worse than nonsense, it’s hysterical nonsense
“We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”
This is a bizarre kind of emotional blackmail, when AI has been proven over and over again to be incredibly unreliable. It “hallucinates.” And there are countless proven and effective ways to save lives right now that we are completely ignoring. There are people who die in the U.S. and around the world because they don’t have access to clean drink water, affordable medications, or basic life- and limb-saving health care. They don’t involve technology at all. They’re political and financial.
Does Andreesen think deaths that were preventable if the US just had universal medicare with drug coverage are a form of murder?
“Energy”
“We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment.”
Well, that’s nice, but it’s not a fact. Andreesen says that if you want to see real environmental devastation, visit a former communist country, but that’s “whatboutism” - an evasion that communists loved.
Fusion energy would be great, but the economic and environmental reality is that human beings have been consuming the environment at a rate faster than it can regenerate for 50 years. Its called “overshoot” and it’s causing extinction. All that energy we’re using for humans and machines is energy we are taking from other species and environments, by eradicating them and driving and eating them into extinction.
What Andreesen and the rest of the techno-cretinati completely ignore is that people can generate wealth through waste, exploitation and by protecting investors from the costs of failure. When people say that the U.S. system privatizes the gains, and socializes the losses, the implication is that government or taxpayers are footing the bill.
But it’s also happening entirely within the private sector and within companies themselves. It’s not just government, or taxpayers, or even workers. These companies benefit at the expense of their own workers, and by the exploitation that goes down the chain.
Silicon Valley companies were hit with a collusion lawsuit - Apple, Google and others - because they entered a “no-poaching” agreement which meant that they would not hire or recruit each others employees. It was billions of dollars in wage theft, because corporations were colluding to deny their employees opportunity and wage increases that would have happened in a free and open market!
“Abundance”
Here Andreesen says “We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.”
This is totally vacuous. There are real limits to energy, because of physics and resources, but we already have vast amounts of information, but it is not “intelligence”. It is not useful or accurate knowledge. It is junk. It may be wrong, pointless, a mistake, a delusion, but this is all another way of pretending that the economy works without money.
For example:
“We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the application of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels and quality of life into the stratosphere.”
This may sound appealing, but it’s actually one of the stupidest things you’ve ever read. If the price of everything is zero, no one can make any money. It means that the suppliers made no money, the manufacturers made no money, and the seller made no money. How is that even a capitalist economy? How will that drive incomes into the stratosphere?
There are places in the world where everything is incredibly cheap, because everyone is living in poverty.
Andreesen then goes on to quote Julian Simon, an economist who argued that for all intents and purposes, natural resources are infinite, which is patently false, and then talks about “the ultimate resource” being people.
This is a completely dehumanizing idea, that people are just property or another form of capital to be exploited.
“Not Utopia, But Close Enough”
Here, Andreesen cites noted conservative Thomas Sowell, who is really just a scold.
“We believe the Constrained Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Utopia, Communism, and Expertise – means taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices.”
This is all a truckload of shite. I don’t believe in utopia, but if Andreesen actually cared about empirical evidence, he wouldn’t have to say “I believe” all the time.
“Becoming Technological Supermen”
Here, Andreesen is starting to swerve into genuine fascism. If the “Supermen” reference wasn’t enough of a clue, he goes on to quote an actual fascist.
Andreesen writes:
“To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
This is from The Futurist Manifesto by F. T. Marinetti. The futurists were proto-fascists, and like so many fascists, are resentful that others won’t submit to their imagined superiority, when it’s because they are horrible assholes who are the last people you’d ever want to be taking orders from.
Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party, which merged with the Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, making Marinetti one of its first members.
Later, that manifesto reads
In fact, Andreesen’s attempt at poetry in this section directly echoes some of Marinetti’s writing - rhapsodizing about trains and technology. Marinetti supported the Italian Fascists until they were crushed by the Allies in 1944.
“Technological Values”
Here again, Andreesen is just reciting a bunch of empty platitudes.
To say it’s cringeworthy is an understatement. The most genuine reaction is to this is to ask “What the fuck are you talking about?” because it’s complete and utter bullshit.
“We believe in merit and achievement.
We believe in bravery, in courage.
We believe in pride, confidence, and self respect – when earned.
We believe in free thought, free speech, and free inquiry.
We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts.”
No, they don’t. Not any of it. They don’t have a fucking clue about enlightenment values. He was literally just quoting a fascist who wanted to destroy enlightenment values by destroying museums and libraries.
Freedom is about freedom for everyone, against intrusions both public and private. In the 1800s, when the British Government sought to reduce the use of child labour in textile mills, and it was argued that it was an intrusion on “freedom of contract.” Only children were small enough to crawl under the machines, and they were sometimes beheaded or lost limbs, and where people died young because they were breathing in fibres that ruined their lungs.
“In 1819 new legislation to regulate child labour, the Cotton Factories Regulation Act, was tabled in the British Parliament. The proposed regulation was an incredibly ‘light touch’ by modern standards. It would ban the employment of young children — that is, those under the age of nine. Older children (aged between ten and sixteen) would still be allowed to work, but with their working hours restricted to twelve per day... The new rules applied only to cotton factories, which were recognized to be exceptionally hazardous to workers’ health.
The proposal caused huge controversy. Opponents saw it as undermining the sanctity of freedom of contract and thus destroying the very foundation of the free market. In debating this legislation, some members of the House of Lords objected to it on the grounds that ‘labour ought to be free’. Their argument said: the children want (and need) to work, and the factory owners want to employ them; what is the problem?
There are still factories and industries like this around the world.
Andreesen writes
“We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution,”
Once again, they don’t believe in competition, because their entire industry would not exist without state investment and protection. It’s also complete misinterpretation of how evolution works. This warmed-over Social Darwinism that shows total ignorance.
There is an enormous amount of cooperation in evolution, with shared benefits within and across species. If, as a human being, you do not have cooperation, you will die. Period.
“"We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power).”
Liberal democracies depend on actually having the rule of law enforced and free and fair elections. Their strength depends on them not being drenched in corruption.
“The Enemy”
Here, Andreesen is really completely full of shit.
As a communicator and as a politician, I was careful to avoid using the word “enemy” because it is always dehumanizes people.
“We have enemies.
Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
A “mass demoralization campaign for six decades”? Run by whom? The people who have been making these arguments were crushed back in the 1970s!
“Tech ethics” and “stakeholder capitalism” “trust and safety” and “risk management” are the enemy of technology and life? This is complete horseshit.
Shareholder capitalism, has been described as “the dumbest idea in the world” by GE CEO Jack Welch - who used it, and hollowed out his company doing so.
The Patron Saints
Finally, the list of “Patron Saints” just shows how pathetically shallow Andreesen’s knowledge is.
One of the Patron Saints is the fascist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Andreesen names a string of economists, mostly libertarian, like Hayek and Friedman, who are renowned for their rejection of facts and evidence. He cites Adam Smith, which requires a total misreading of his work. Aside from Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote another work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which argued that humans depended on sympathy and empathy.
Paul Romer is also mentioned. Romer, yet another fake Nobel Prize for Economics winner, did write a very insightful paper in 2016, “The trouble with macroeconomics” in which he pointed out that not only had there been no progress in his discipline in 30 years, but that it had been intellectual regress, with no empirical basis for many of its claims. Milton Friedman’s policies, when put in place, have consistently failed.
Douglas Engelbart, an engineering innovator, was funded by DARPA.
Andreesen cites true intellectual giants - Adam Smith, Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynmann by relying on a couple of quotations, while ignoring all of their work, while also selecting a string of truly mediocre thinkers, propagandists and outright fascists who spent their lives undermining and lying and having paranoid delusions about liberal democracy and the enlightenment. All while using the noblest terms to justify theft, corruption, self-dealing and criminal negligence causing death.
What’s lacking from all of this is the single most important characteristic for true greatness, which is humility - which is in opposition not just to arrogance, but to hypocrisy and corruption.
Humility is essential to progress, to advances in knowledge and technology, to free inquiry and free speech the rule of law, and to justice, because it is an admission of the central fact that we don’t know everything. It’s opposite is not just pride, or arrogance, but the belief that we are exempt from the rules that apply to others. That is what is corrupting about power: impunity. It’s why absolute power corrupts absolutely. And plenty of stupidity is clearly an accelerant.
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Wonderful article and written with surgical precision.
'It’s not the technology that’s the problem: it’s the horrible, horrible assholes who own it.' With few exceptions this is the norm. The billionaires are made rich by 'farms' of programmers. The bigger the 'farm' the more programming and development can occur. Andreesen reaps the benefits of the work of his programmers. He didn't and never will inherit their intelligence.
Yep. Good Read and Rational Argument.