Video by Sean Morrow and Anthony Mascorro
Marc Andreessen blasts regulation — yet government cash built his fortune and antitrust laws saved his company.
His fairy tale promises abundance for all, but returns only flow upward.
TRANSCRIPT
SEAN MORROW, MORE PERFECT UNION: There’s a new powerhouse of political spending in town — bigger than the Koch brothers, than Elon Musk, George Soros, or Sam Altman, and without the name recognition of any of those, and it isn’t even a person, it’s a company: Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.
By May, they’d already put $115.5 million into political spending. a16z is led by Ben Horowitz, and this guy: Marc Andreessen.
CLIP: INTERVIEWER, TO MARC ANDREESSEN, CO-FOUNDER OF ANDREESSEEN HOROWITZ: You don’t have any levels of introspection
ANDREESSEN: Yes, zero. As little as possible
MORROW: Andreessen is an investor, so we should examine his political spending like an investor. What does he hope to get as a return on this investment? Because his ideal future is a bit… concerning.
CLIP: LEX FRIDMAN, PODCASTER, TO ANDREESSEN: Lay out your vision for the best possible scenario trajectory for America.
Marc Andreessen: The roaring ‘20s.
MORROW: Which is, of course, a period immediately followed by a decade of economic depression and destitution. And he told us how he wants to build it, in a now pretty famous blogpost manifesto that lays out his bad guys, his good guys, and the ideal world he says he wants to build; his very own happy ending, almost like… a fairy tale.
It’s called “The Techno Optimist Manifesto,” and it promises a future of ‘abundance’ spurred by technology. And like any great fairy tale, it involves a battle between good and evil, heroes and “enemies.” Really, there’s literally a section called “The Enemy.”
Those enemies include: “sustainability, stakeholder capitalism” — that’s when companies take into consideration everyone they affect, not just shareholders — “risk management, ethics, the limits of growth, collectivism” — that’s just when society works together, and you care about other people — “social responsibility, and safety.”
Andreessen says these enemies are ideas, not people, but they’re all pro-people ideas, right? And we’ll get to that.
But there are some enemies that we can agree on: “corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels, playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences, speech control and thought control.”
I’m totally on board. That’s big bad wolf stuff we can all agree should be vanquished by a knight in shining armor. But is Andreessen, and the plan he outlines in his little fairy tale, the knight we need?
Can someone deeply linked to the modern privatized surveillance state really have a problem with using 1984 as an instruction manual?
So, let’s start this fairy tale at the end…
