5 am. Day 4 of executive plant medicine retreat. The venture capital tech bro sits on a metaverse mountaintop, immersed in deep meditation. He hears a hum—a vibration from the great beyond. A mantra rises up like kundalini gas bubbles just in front of his spine: techno-capital machine.
Today we dissect Marc Andreessen’s anarcho-capitalist attempt at a Silicon Valley religious doctrine, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.
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Show Notes
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
The Ben & Marc Show: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
What the Techno-Billionaire Missed About Techno-Optimism
When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person?
The Futurist Manifesto
Marc Andreessen Is the Buyer of Serge Azria’s Malibu Home
The Billionaire’s Dilemma
The Summer of NIMBY in Silicon Valley’s Poshest Town
37.9 million Americans are living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census. But the problem could be far worse.
Why American wages haven’t grown despite increases in productivity
Post-pandemic poverty is rising in America’s suburbs
The Federal Reserve says Taylor Swift's Eras Tour boosted the economy. One market research firm estimates she could add $5 billion
The Surprising Poverty Levels Across the U.S.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today we should add to that tagline, where we read the revealed scripture of our new tech overlords.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and of course you can access our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
You can also access them and much more at Patreon.
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5 a.m., day 4 of executive plant medicine retreat.
The venture capital tech bro sits on a metaverse mountaintop, immersed in deep meditation.
He hears a hum, a vibration from the great beyond.
The drone opens and rolls and quivers into bits of code and then vowels with shape and rhythm that hint at words, powerful words.
But he can't quite grasp them, so he sips some more brain-optimizing Soma from his investor's swag mug and deepens his concentration.
Slowly, the words crystallize into a divine call, wrathful and promising, filled with sublime condescension.
A mantra rises up like Kundalini gas bubbles just in front of his spine.
Techno capital machine.
He shivers and begins to speak the Silicon Valley Veda into his transcription bot.
Lies.
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.
We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.
We're told to be pessimistic.
The myth of Prometheus, in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator, haunts our nightmares.
We're told to denounce our birthright, our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.
We're told to be miserable about the future.
Truth.
Our civilization was built on technology.
Our civilization is built on technology.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this.
Until recently.
I'm here to bring the good news.
We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being.
We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.
We have the will.
It is time once again to raise the technology flag.
It's time to be techno-optimists.
That's the opening of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, written by Mark Andreessen and published on his blog to great tech world fanfare on October 16th.
So today we're gonna break this 5,000 word post down to expose its roots in conspiracism, pseudo-intellectualism, ecological erasure, Trickle-down philanthropic self-congratulation and class war.
And I think that more and more it seems we're living in a time, as Foucault said, in which power just doesn't conceal itself.
In which the powerful tell us exactly what they are doing, sometimes on Instagram.
Hey guys, just hopping on a livestream here.
In a few weeks, we'll be examining another manifesto, albeit it's very different in tone.
It's Project 2025.
It's a 900-page, very wonky policy blueprint put out by right-wing think tanks to lay the groundwork for long-term reactionary governance.
So, Derek, it was your idea to link these two episodes up under the theme of Mask Off.
So, what's your thinking there?
Well, in general, the concept is that People are no longer trying to code or hide their intentions and their words.
I'll get to that a little bit more with this particular manifesto.
Project 2025 is completely open and blatant, but we should know a little bit more about Marc Andreessen.
So he's been interested in tech for a very long time.
As his origin story goes, as told in a book about his life and the founding of Netscape, he was born in Iowa, raised in a working class neighborhood in the small town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin, which is a hub for dairy farming about an hour and a half northeast of the capital city of Madison.
His father worked for a seed company and mother worked for the Midwest clothing manufacturer Land's End, and apparently he found his hometown boring and taught himself computer programming.
Should note too, Wisconsin is very famous for unions and labor, so the fact that he comes from there is going to say a lot as we progress here.
So Andresa went on to get a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Where he interned at IBM, and after college, he was on a team that created the Mosaic web browser in 1993.
So in this sense, he's part of early internet royalty, and he's helping to bring the burgeoning technology to a mainstream audience.
Okay, so as the tech guy here, Derek, can you explain how foundational that browser is?
Without it, what doesn't happen?
How central is it to where we are right now?
Well, we don't see each other right now without the browser to being able to do the podcast, so it helped us create a business.
It would have happened with or without him.
My father actually started working in computers in the late 1960s.
He worked for the chemical company DuPont for 44 years, and his role was in networking and maintaining his company's intranet.
So that everyone at the plant that he worked at in New Jersey could talk to one another.
So the browser for a mainstream audience had been in development for a long time, and Driessen was just part of the crew that figured out how to scale it beyond company intranets.
So really important work, obviously, but not entirely novel for what was going on at the time.
Yeah, so I guess there's a lot of guys like your dad who are doing ground-level development work back in the day, but, you know, only a very few of them are going to win the capitalism lottery and become venture titans, right?
My father did not win the capitalism lottery, no.
That is correct.
So, very few of them did.
That is right.
So, Andreessen moved to Silicon Valley after he graduated from college in 93, and he helped to create the Netscape browser, which was really what everyone was using back in that day.
In fact, in 1995, Time Magazine put him on the cover, and that set off his star trajectory.
Let's cut to 2005, and Mark joined up with a longtime friend and coworker named Ben Horowitz to invest in dozens of startups.
And that project became Andreessen Horowitz, which was formally founded in 2009.
So as of the recording of this episode, it is the number one VC firm in terms of assets under management, and that's $20.2 billion in assets.
Wow.
And that nets Andreessen an estimated net worth of $1.8 billion, according to Forbes.
And these guys were early investors in Facebook and Twitter, which I want to note as it will play in our discussion of today's focus.
It's, I think, part of the reason Andreessen thinks that his intellectual and social prowess is outsized and steps far beyond what he is actually capable of.
But I've worked for two Andreessen Horowitz-funded companies, both of which have now failed.
I was let go from both during downsizing.
But I say that because I know a bit about the firm and the broader Silicon Valley culture in which it operates.
And while I've worked with a lot of great people, some leaders, and some including Andreessen, they think very highly of themselves.
They exhibit qualities that you're going to hear all over this manifesto.
They think that a little bit of knowledge goes a long, long way.
That's why a guy who helped create a browser then feels qualified to pontificate over mythology, ancient economics, and evolutionary biology.
He reads a few books, or with some of the people I've dealt with, they read a few quotes and memes and then they make the assumption That they've reviewed the pertinent scholarship on a topic to riff and cram it into the argument they want to make.
We're going to get very into that when we're talking about Hayek in a few minutes.
I've seen it happen often, and we're going to see it when we start reviewing this post in more depth.
Now, you've mentioned, I think, that this isn't just in blogs, but this kind of riffing is built into staff meetings and the water cooler culture of the scene and just like how people talk with each other.
Is that right?
From my experience, it's also baked into the HR intro.
Here's your job.
Let's now introduce you to the company culture.
Yes.
And again, I want to be very clear.
We've been going back and forth on this, you and I, Matthew, for days.
Technology is very broad politically.
There's a lot of varied people within it, but I really want to drill down that we're really talking about a specific cohort of tech leaders here that tend to suck all the oxygen out of the room because they dominate the news cycles, right?
So, we're focusing on the techno-optimist manifesto, but Andreessen has long used the Andreessen Horowitz blog to share his big picture ideas.
So in 2011, he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal, which he then posted on that blog, and it's called, Why Software is Eating the World.
It became highly influential in Silicon Valley circles, and it pays homage to capitalism.
That's what it does.
The post focuses on how much money tech companies are making.
So in the post, he writes, instead of constantly questioning their, the tech companies, valuations, Let's seek to understand how the new generation of technology companies are doing what they do.
Now this is important because that's basically shorthand for, don't ask questions, just love what we're giving you.
And that's pretty relevant for where we're going today.
Now, Andreessen thinks quite highly of his thoughts.
He actually recently just replaced Andreessen Horowitz's homepage with his manifesto.
So, right before it, he was showing what the company does, how many assets they have, some of the companies, and now you go there and it's just this manifesto.
The whole thing has created a real uproar where a lot of people in the space are championing it, but then a lot of the journalists are saying, wait, what's going on here?
Kara Swisher came out hard against it, and TechCrunch actually asked, when was the last time Andreessen talked to a poor person?
Now, in a long video on the Manifesto, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz answer that question, and I'll clip from it in a bit.
Their answer is pretty enlightening about where they land, but let me preempt that by stating Horowitz drills down on Andreessen's humble roots, even saying he went to some of the worst public schools in the country.
I'm all for a rags-to-riches story about self-made hard workers, but what you do when you become a billionaire can often negate your origins.
So as we move into the manifesto and Andreessen's claim that the trickle-down economics of technological progress mostly benefits poor people...
I think we're going to find out something very different.
Oh, boy.
So, he really positions himself as this prophet.
He actually says that in the video.
But let's look a little bit about his personal life.
He married his wife, Laura, in 2006.
She's the daughter of a Silicon Valley real estate billionaire.
And they set a record in 2021 by buying a $177 million property in Malibu,
which is not their primary residence.
They just don't live there.
Somewhere else, right?
Wait, that's a record for the most expensive house?
Sold in California, yes.
Okay.
Yeah, so their actual primary residence is in Atherton, which is a small suburb in Silicon Valley with a population of under 7,000 people.
It's also the nation's most expensive zip code.
In 2022, developers wanted to add 131 multifamily housing units to Atherton, and Mark and Laura filed an all-caps complaint to the California Department of Housing and Community Development demanding that Atherton remain free of multifamily housing zoning.
Now, what do you mean all-caps complaint?
They typed it in all-caps?
What?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought that was like a, I thought that was a filing category.
Like we're going to put this in the all caps file.
No, they actually, they, they typed it in all caps.
Not the entire thing, but certain sentences.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's, that's the level we're dealing with here.
Uh, they went on to write that every house in Atherton should be built on at least one acre of property.
Uh, now recent, but before that, Andreessen had argued that California needs to increase its housing supply.
Not in his backyard though.
Exactly.
They read NIMBY.
NIMBY, as an acronym, is all capitals.
They thought if they wanted to do a NIMBY complaint, it had to all be in capitals, right?
Well, they accomplished it, yeah.
So the notion that Andreessen would say one thing and then act in a completely opposite manner is well known to people in the industry.
Like many billionaires, he's viewed as a bit of a prophet simply because he's made a lot of money.
And while betting on Facebook and Twitter early on took some risk, something quasi-religious happens in these tech spaces.
And in fact, as we'll get to, I view this manifesto as an attempt at a sort of religious doctrine for the tech-minded.
And he's got enough of a following to allow that to happen, but he also has critics.
One that I saw is Dustin Moskowitz, who is a Facebook co-founder who left to start Asana, which is a great project management tool.
I've used it for years in various companies.
He posted an honest appraisal of Andreessen's investment style on threads, which is often to pick competing startups against one another.
Now, overlapping interests are not uncommon in VC portfolios, but this tracks with something I experienced working for a different Andreessen Horowitz-funded company, that the firm would fund direct competitors earlier than most VC firms would and basically let those companies just have
at each other gladiator style.
Now this is a very different approach from diversifying your portfolio which is common
with slightly later stage VCs and I'm glad Moskovitz pointed this out.
Okay so the real significance here is that Andreessen is presenting himself as we'll
hear in this manifesto as a benevolent tech profit whose ventures will save humanity when
in fact like his money might really come from acting like a tech money parasite or something
Yeah, 100%.
Absolutely.
You're also describing a venture capital approach that's sort of based in social Darwinism, right?
Oh, absolutely.
If you're funding competitors in their seed rounds, that is 100% what they're doing.
Yeah, it's evolution, bro.
It's all good.
It's the way it should be.
Like I said, most of the journalists have come out and either laughed at it or wrote some really good pieces.
Julian, you shared one in Wired that was excellent.
I know you'll quote from it.
But in Silicon Valley and with engineers and with tech leaders and some other people, it's being treated as a founding doctrine, which is what he wanted.
It's because it lines up with a lot of the rhetoric we're seeing from conspiritualist spaces, but especially from the perspective of this masks-off idea that you cited a few minutes ago, Matthew.
And it's basically this.
For a very long time, authoritarian, religious, and capitalist agendas have been presented in a sort of coded language, and I really feel that Donald Trump changed that.
He seems to have empowered a lot of people to say the quiet parts out loud.
Yeah, and this is an example of that.
But it also makes me think of people like, you know, Chris Rufo, who's this propagandist who has openly gloated on Twitter in 2021.
We've successfully frozen their brand, Critical Race Theory, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.
So he's just very mask off about, hey, here's what our strategy is attempting to do.
More recently, he said this in the wake of what's going on in the world.
Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas BLM, DSA, and academic decolonization in the public mind.
That's so brutal.
Right?
And then this makes me think, too, of the groomer discourse, Matt Walsh incitements to stochastic terrorism, essentially, against doctors who mutilate children's genitals, his and Ben Shapiro's open, agonizing dialogue about how gay marriage is destroying Western civilization.
And then, of course, their colleague, Michael Knowles, who we've covered, calling for the eradication of transgenderism.
You know, you cited Rufo, and I feel like Rufo also laid a sort of foundation for Project 2025, which is a straight-up Christian nationalist, anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-abortion, anti-regulation agenda that's available for anyone to download and read.
You know, and also with Andreessen, we have this anarcho-capitalist, anti-regulation blog post being marketed like a lost scripture, and the Kingmakers have no more masks to offer.
Yes, so that is Marc Andreessen.
Thanks for introducing us to his bio, that was fascinating, and his idiosyncrasies, Derek.
We're looking over the recently dried digital ink of this techno-optimist manifesto today, and I want to just underline for anyone listening who may have missed it, the very deadpan reading that I gave in lieu of our normal show notes was actually how the manifesto opens.
I was quoting directly from it, the lies and the truth.
There's a lot about this document that overlaps with the phenomenon of conspirituality as we've come to understand it, as well as the concept of diagonalism, which is newer to us and we've recently been discussing it, but even Naomi Klein's mirror world.
But let's get into all of that later.
For now, there's a couple other things I want to just say.
There's a fascinating parallel pipeline to what we study that runs from the launching back in 1968 of something called the Whole Earth Catalog.
This was an occasional publication, it wasn't every month, it was a few times a year.
It was dreamed up by someone named Stuart Brand during an acid trip on his rooftop, is this sounding familiar?
It was for free-thinking hippies interested in back-to-nature holism, but also DIY solutions, as represented by the information and the items listed.
Now, I found this interesting.
Steve Jobs, in a Stanford commencement address, called the Whole Earth catalog both the Bible and the Google of his youth.
But it's where this pipeline leads, which I think is really fascinating, because 25 years later, six of the writers for that whole Earth catalog, including Stewart Brand, would be published in 1993's first issue of something called Wired Magazine.
Now, this evolution toward what has been called the Californian ideology, and we covered this a while ago
too, by media theorists Barbrook and Cameron,
is described by them as a techno-utopianism that blends anti-establishment ideas from both the right
and the left.
And they say that this is promulgated primarily in the pages of Wired magazine.
So that's the tradition in which I situate this offering from Andreessen as I start to look at it.
Now, the second thing is, as we'll see next, and as you've already touched on, Derek, the rhetorical
style is prophetic.
It's grandiose.
It has plenty in common with writing that claims to be channeled.
Hello, Marianne Williamson, intuitive, visionary.
These are pronouncements framed as next level revelations just put out there in a declarative way.
And that makes me freshly appreciate this cultural convention of referring to people like Andreessen as tech gurus.
Yeah, I think it's especially clear when he's perfected word salad like this.
Here's another quote.
quote, we believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective
outcomes.
I mean, that's, that's almost that.
That's almost Deepak Chopra random quote generator, right?
I mean, yoga people are fond of statements like this, like, our individual spiritual journeys will lead us to collective enlightenment.
I mean, and there's no real content, but there is the kind of pleasurable friction of opposing terms, you know, like, there's no way out but through.
Let me add, you asked about the meetings before, and that idea is in the culture as well.
The analogy that I've actually heard tech leaders use is from an airplane saying you have to put on your own oxygen mask before your children's.
Sure.
And that is how they present it in terms of markets.
Like, be a billionaire and you're going to help other people by being a billionaire.
Yeah.
Now the spiritualization of technology that we're looking at here too makes me also think of how New Agers use science and tech metaphors all the time, right?
The vibrations, the frequencies of dark or enlightened forces, the deep cleansing or healing reboots of ice baths and organ cleanses, the downloads of cosmic information through astrologically auspicious portals, right, in meditation.
And then, of course, the ubiquitous mangling of quantum physics to support claims of mind over matter as a way to transcend the matrix.
But to be clear, Andreessen is not explicitly aligning himself with any of that woo, and he might scoff along with us at all of that, but the text is still just vibes all the way down, man.
So I agree with you, Julian, that in Andreessen's text, the woo is mostly absent.
It kind of reminds me of how NXIVM was built on very super obvious New Age, New Thought ideas, but Keith Raniere called each self-help banality he taught tech.
Oh, that's a good catch.
Yeah, that's really good.
There is a structural and thematic overlap, as you've started to point to, because just as the conspirituality crowd uses New Age maxims and recycled non-dualist philosophy to pretend that they are above the battlefield of worldly concerns like politics, the crowd that Andreessen seems to be writing for is used to an idealized notion of technology That their software and biohacking tools are not only ideologically and politically neutral, that they're sublime and that they'll necessarily lead us to some sort of redeemed world.
So he writes this.
We believe intelligence is an upward spiral.
First, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno capital machine Second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems, such as companies and networks.
Third, as artificial intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.
I think this is the Ray Kurzweil dream, and it definitely has the ring of some kind of divine plan.
But Andreessen goes further.
He implies that we have no choice but to let tech lead us to redemption.
Or else, actually, as we'll see from a few paranoid moments.
Like when he writes about concerns regarding the runaway development of artificial intelligence.
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 Yeah, so basically, we're running this experiment.
We can't say where it's going, but we're pretty sure it will be able to generate things like medical innovations.
So if you regulate it now, you're actually killing people in the future.
Such a douchebaggy statement.
I'm sorry.
Out of all the entire thing, that one jumped out at me being like, and you know when he wrote it, he like really self-congratulated.
He was like, I nailed it!
I got it!
Yeah, well, I mean, if you just replace AI there with nuclear technology or anything else that's sort of morally neutral and, you know, potentially dangerous, you can spot the logical fallacy.
But I want to get to some text analysis.
And for things like this, I often use concordance tools that people like Andreessen might have designed, where you, like, feed the text into a program that enumerates keywords and phrases.
And this often provides a pretty informative snapshot.
So here are the top phrases.
We believe in, appears 37 times, our enemy is, 12.
We believe the, 11.
The techno capital, 10.
We believe that, 8.
Techno capital machine, 8.
We believe markets, 7.
You get the picture, but if I go back to the top of this list, I want to just emphasize the royal we believe in because I think that's at the heart of our argument that he's trying to create a spiritual document here, a profession of faith.
And that means that when we go on to fact check him or trouble his most absurd claims, we really aren't being fair, are we guys?
I mean, do we really have the right to discriminate against this new religion at this very delicate, formative stage?
Well, it depends on which we you're talking about.
So, to that point, I mean, his unabashed confidence, it really shines in that first person plural.
And it will float between representing two groups.
Like, there's kind of everyone in the populist sense, and then there's also the techno elite for whom he's writing and who, you know, he lists at the end as kind of co-signatories of his manifesto.
So, I'll get to that.
But he's consistent in that royal we in all but one sentence, which you've All heard Julian read, I am here to bring the good news.
You might recall the good news is the common translation of gospel, so he's either John the Baptist or Jesus here.
And with a construction like that, there's all kinds of self-righteousness, which I think Andreessen imagines is under imaginary assault that flows downstream.
Julian also captured a key one with a sentence, which sounds like it hooks into the reactionary rhetorics of various types of exclusionary pride, as when the Proud Boys recite at the opening of every meeting in chorus, I am a proud Western chauvinist.
Now, the royal we gives the sense that everything in the text has been hammered out and peer reviewed by a committee of the enlightened.
It creates the impression that it couldn't just be one guy blogging.
And as if to underline the like always already true nature of the claims, he wraps up the piece with the following.
In lieu of detailed end notes and citations, read the work of these people and you too will become a techno-optimist.
Right, and then there's a list of 56 names, beginning with Jeff Bezos' Twitter handle, and followed up by a parade of Milton Friedman forebears and acolytes, globalization gurus, and the techno-mystic Ray Kurzweil.
Unsurprisingly, only seven of the 56 luminaries are women, including, you know, I think this would be a technology shoe-in, Ada Lovelace.
Yeah.
She was a Victorian mathematician.
Economists, Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist.
Deirdre McCloskey, who's an economy prof. And then the two founding mothers of libertarianism, along with Ayn Rand, the Canadian writer, Isabel Paterson, and then Rose Wilder Lane.
So, instead of backing up all of the claims that we're going to hear about, you know, the benefits of techno-capitalism with, you know, research papers or, you know, other forms of evidence, he basically lists a bunch of his friends and, you know, inspiring forebears and he says, do your own research, like read Jeff's tweets.
That list of tech lords is at the center of the royal we, but it casts the automatic shadow of an imagined they, which makes the writing conspiracist at its root.
We are being lied to.
We never find out who the liars are.
There is an enemies section, and we'll get to that in a bit.
But as I read through his Theory of Everything vision of how technology propagated through free markets and how it will obviously make everyone rich and solve every problem, I started to get this hollowed out feeling and I noticed that a few key human activities and subjects were not mentioned.
So here's a list of words that did not turn up in this text.
Public.
Commons.
Labor.
Caregiving.
Marginalized.
Regulation.
Government.
Policy.
Climate.
Global warming.
And these last two absences are like really loud for someone touting techno-optimism, I think.
And then finally, women.
I mean, he uses the old device of man for like everyone, i.e.
man was not meant to be farmed, man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.
And all of these terms, what they have in common is that they basically describe the entire world in which, you know, an atomized and singular tech lord and his innovations exist, but that they could not exist without.
The text has this irrequality to it in which the speaker sounds like a kind of cyborg who was never really part of the planet but has discovered how to exploit it efficiently while only really paying attention to itself.
It's like he's presenting technology as a kind of alien intervention into the natural world.
And I don't hear in the text any understanding that it proceeds from basic human caregiving rooted in grooming or signaling danger, that technology also must be a social project sustained through bonds and the organization of material resources, and that every innovation is built on the labor of human communities.
Like these absent terms describe like an invisible world beneath his feet.
And it reminds me of this observation about like unseen resources and labor in The Raw and the Cooked by Levi Strauss who gets at the problem of unseen labor by talking about what gets preserved in archaeology.
Like thousands of years later, we find bones, but not flesh.
We find bowls, but we don't find the soup.
We find houses, but not bedtime stories.
And so there's this focus on the hard artifacts that winds up giving us like half of a picture of what makes a culture work.
I think that's partly right, but I'm not convinced that they think it's an alien intervention.
It's more of an ignorance of anthropology, like just this glossing over reading.
So one thing I know about tech leaders is that some of them take a little bit of knowledge, as I said earlier, and they treat it as if it's the totality of evolution.
And Dreesen certainly knows that technology builds on itself, given that he helped create The browsers we're all using.
The whole idea of the singularity, and he does cite Kurzweil and you mentioned him, is of an accelerated evolution, not a foreign entity guiding it along.
So I'm kind of guessing Andreessen is a Rogan fan whose reading of evolutionary biology is extremely unsophisticated.
So I see this as more of a poor reading of anthropology.
So he's using a convenient heuristics to build a narrative.
That represents a part of the past in the hopes of creating a future that he wants to help design.
Yeah, it's really interesting too that he does that sort of presumptuous thing where he says, just go read these books and you'll have the same, you'll come to the same conclusions I have.
And yet we've been hearing, I've been hearing for at least 10 years, anyone who referenced Kurzweil as talking about like the dangers of AI and that we're heading toward this really scary singularity.
Look at the work of Ray Kurzweil.
He proves it now, you know, whatever Kurzweil's various, he's a very, you know, kind of an
eccentric idiosyncratic guys who has a lot of different opinions.
So that's interesting.
I wonder too, Matthew, if like the reason why you're not seeing any of those really,
really important words is for Andreessen, it's all downstream of, you know, this, this,
this techno capitalist success project and everything else is just going to trickle down.
It's this trickle down philanthropism where as long as we just keep moving in the right direction, it's going to solve all of these problems.
So why would I bother myself with listing any of them?
That's perhaps going to start to get negative, right?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
You're flipping it.
You're saying... So, I'm saying that he's painting a world that kind of emerges technologically out of nothing, like ex naquilo.
And you're saying he might not be missing that world.
He might simply think that it's a world of problems and relationships that will, as you said, just resolve themselves once we get on board with the actual plan.
There's an over-focus on all of these problems in a way that makes us feel negative about capitalism and tech.
But if we can get past that mistake, then all of those things will be solved through this kind of trickle-down effect.
And I just want to say, Matthew, I didn't want to cut you off.
He's not citing Jeff Bezos.
He's citing based Beth Jezos, which is a cryptocurrency influencer and anonymous accounts.
Oh man.
So just a fact check on that because he is not giving any accolades to Jeff Bezos.
It's a different account.
So the text, as we've said, is an unabashed hymn to the wonders of capitalism and the free market.
So choice quotes include... Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.
We believe markets lift people out of poverty.
In fact, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of people out of poverty.
And always have been.
Even in totalitarian regimes, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people and their ability to produce and trade leads to rapidly rising incomes and standards of living.
Lift the boot a little more, even better.
Take the boot off entirely, who knows how rich everyone can get.
Jesus.
So he lives in the most expensive zip code in the country.
Yeah.
It's utter bullshit because the free market of our healthcare system has helped directly create the opioid and fentanyl crisis.
So the idea that it prevents monopolies and cartels is just completely short-sighted and makes absolutely no sense.
You're not taking a long enough view, Derek.
It's just innovation and the curve will correct itself over time.
The glaring thing here is that he's comparing regulatory measures aimed at preventing human exploitation and environmental destruction to the boot of an authoritarian.
And if you take the boot of regulation off.
Right.
The truth is Robert Ballarins are then free to rape and pillage, as we just said, as the example you just gave illustrated, Derek.
And he's also saying, even under authoritarianism, if you have enough of a free market system, it's better for everyone all around.
I mean, I... We'll get to that.
Yeah.
Well, he goes on.
We believe a market sets wages as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker.
Therefore, technology, which raises productivity, drives wages up, not down.
Wow.
This is perhaps the most counterintuitive idea in all of economics.
Yeah, I suppose.
But it's true, and we have 300 years of history that prove it.
Yeah, but no citations.
This is like, I proved it so hard, I don't need to back it up.
So he also hates UBI.
We believe a universal basic income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.
Man was not meant to be farmed.
Man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.
Yeah, I mean, if you take proud out of useful, productive, and proud, it kind of sounds like farming anyway.
What's the leap?
The leap between the zoo and the farming metaphor is kind of perplexing to me as well.
But anyway.
Yeah, I mean, we're going to get to the specifically religious claims later, but also man was meant to be really sounds like, you know, divine will statement.
And it's pretty clear what the God here is like, that he wants you to work.
He probably doesn't like disabled people.
Yeah, I mean on first reading this really turned my stomach because it has this blend of paranoid anti-state conspiracism, right?
It's like an Alex Jones level kind of image, as well as disdain for the poor.
And then through this whole section I see this kind of sadistic rejection of social safety nets.
Right.
Man was meant to be fodder and food for lions and bears, and we just figured some things out to avoid that.
So that's where our destiny lies.
But dudes like this loathe free money.
We'll get into that in a moment.
Well, it's weird because interest and like passive income behave and feel very much like free money, I think, for the people that have it.
But yeah, I mean, according to Andreessen, the growth doesn't ever need to stop.
At one point he mentions limits on natural resources, but then at another point he goes into like just pure sci-fi.
We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.
Yeah, it just reminds me of Coruscant in Star Wars, which is that like planet-sized Megacity.
It swallowed up every bit of soil.
It's built in towering layers.
Population two trillion.
So it's the Ecumenopolis concept, which I think most people understand would just collapse itself under its own footprint.
Yeah, we can't even really house and shelter and feed eight billion right now.
Like this idea that we can, sure we can, but people like Andreessen need to start giving up some of their money to pay more taxes if that was ever going to happen.
And again, as you referenced, there's that pesky data that gets in the way, which I want to start to get into now.
So sometimes Mark co-hosts a podcast with Horowitz, and they decided to cut an episode answering questions about this manifesto, and I feel like this is a good entry point.
into this conversation about capitalism, because you'll hear Ben ask a reader's question, then launch into an answer.
Mark ends up agreeing and he takes it to another place, but these 75 seconds we're going to clip right now are so insightful for understanding how they think.
How can we distribute transformative philosophies like yours to marginalized communities where a culture of despair and victimization predominates?
Yeah, so this is a really interesting question for me because I think that it does get to the heart of, like, one of the reasons why victimization predominates is because it's a techno-pessimistic world in those communities, in the marginalized communities.
You know, there have been some very kind of interesting and successful leaders.
Marcus Garvey comes to mind.
And I think it starts with, you know, something that he really, really was heavily behind, which is this idea of self-determination.
That in an individual can change their own lives, change their own circumstances.
And then, you know, he had this idea at the turn of the 18th and 1900s, you know, which was a kind of much more difficult time to do that, particularly for kind of black people in America.
But, you know, he himself succeeded at it greatly.
And I think it really starts with that mindset where if you don't believe that you can be successful in life or with the new technology or with kind of moving the world, Oh, I see.
It's all mindset then.
Say it, believe it, achieve it, or we could say manifest it.
This is all part of Andreessen's trickle-down ideology, right?
Forget social safety nets or financial aid.
Teach poor people to believe in themselves as entrepreneurs like Marcus Garvey did.
I mean, isn't he most well known for a failed project to repatriate black people around the world back to Africa?
I know he's a hero to Rastafarians.
I've heard him, you know, mentioned in glowing terms in some songs, but he's also an inspiration to the nation of Islam and the black Israelites.
Is that right?
Yeah, he's a Pan-Africanist.
He was one of the original to really, to bring that.
He was huge in Jamaica, being Jamaican.
He's a Jamaican political activist, black separationist.
He actually worked with the KKK to help promote the idea of racial separation.
There are many reggae songs and references dedicated to him.
Most notably, Burning Spear has a great song called Marcus Garvey.
Now, regardless, he was a polarizing figure in Jamaica, in Africa, around the world, and he was a black nationalist.
He was widely influential to his circles, and to use him as a figure for the American Republican Libertarian Pull Yourself Up by the Bootstraps crew, and to equate him in any way for a technology and free market argument is ludicrous, And it points out how poor these men's reading of and understanding of history really is, to continue from the previous discussion about anthropology.
Yeah, I like it when you start to get into that tone, Derek.
Tell us how you really feel, for sure.
For sure.
I mean, for me, this is what I was referring to earlier.
I think we're most clearly into mirror world territory here, to use Naomi Klein's term.
Because this is actually an elitist, exploitive, callous ideology that presents itself as a force for social good while advocating for more aggressive deregulated capitalism and then cheerleading can-do bootstrapping for the historically marginalized.
And then, as we'll see, you get this hand-waving about there's going to be this trickle-down philanthropy that'll solve everything.
But Derek, what are the chances that Horowitz is just throwing out this reference based on, like, seeing a meme or reading a quote on quotables?
Like, did Garvey have much to say about technology, or is Horowitz just, like, focusing in on the sort of economic separatism?
I mean, Garvey was anti-socialist, as I understand.
Yeah, I can't speak to Horowitz's pedigree in this sense.
It's very possible.
I don't think he has either a deep understanding of Garvey.
He does try to say, you know, black people kind of had it worse then, but that is no way of going about using him to make this argument.
The fact that his brain would go to him is a As a comparison, it's crazy to me.
And I don't think Ben is really thinking about the specifics of Garvey's economic or political beliefs.
So Ben is effectively co-opting one small piece of Garvey's long activism career to boost his own ideas, and as soon as you tease it apart, it all falls apart.
But this is also what they're doing with Frederick Hayek, Who is and was an Australian-British economist, and his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, has become an inspirational treatise for American conservatives.
And it's funny because Hayek believed himself to be a classical liberal, but conservatives have embraced him because of his critique of socialism.
So let's expand on that a little bit, because this really lies at the heart of this manifesto.
We often say that conspiritualists are not wrong.
We have a book chapter called that.
And that conspiracy theories often start with a correct premise.
So Hayek was warning Europe about the dangers of letting the state run everything.
He pulled from an example in Vienna of a governmental program that had to do with subsidized housing.
It started with good intentions, but it resulted in negative, unforeseen consequences.
Basically, that because the government limited the amount of money that the landlords could actually make from it, the landlord stopped upkeep of the property and the people who live there suffered from it, and there were also consequences to the valuations of housing in those neighborhoods.
So, in economics, this is called an externality.
The unforeseen consequences, usually the third parties of some sort of legislation.
Hayek believed that free markets solved this problem by getting restrictive state regulations out of the way.
So Andreessen starts with this premise.
State control of resources stifles competition, and so the best minds in those industries won't want to partake in that industry, so you lose out on the best minds competing in the marketplace.
Now, we can argue about all that, but he's right that state control of business would likely limit some innovation and potentially give too much power to the state.
Hayek was talking specifically about Nazi Germany and other forms of early communism in the early 20th century.
He also believed that the market was more important than democracy.
OK, but so what does that mean?
I mean, that democracy is fine until it threatens the real source of freedom, which is the market, because I mean, his argument is that people couldn't possibly really want to vote for redistribution?
More of the fact of the market itself is this god-like gift that has come around that when you just let people have at it, that the market decides the prices, and it creates the best innovations and ideas, and because the best ideas win, Everyone will benefit from it.
So it's basically, I don't think he's really thinking it through as deeply as you are.
Dresden definitely isn't.
But this is really codified scripture for libertarians.
And it is also why we see this authoritarian impulse appear in tech CEOs.
The free market is the shrine, but it's also the grail.
And here's where Hayek enters Silicon Valley.
You might be surprised to learn that Fred Koch, the patriarch of what would become Koch Industries and also the co-founder of the John Birch Society, was a big fan of Hayek's free market principles, as were his sons.
So in the book, Kochland, the journalist Christopher Leonard writes, And if markets were Hayek's religion, then entrepreneurs were his saints.
He saw entrepreneurs as the lifeblood of adaptation and efficiency.
They were the ones who spotted new ways of doing things.
They were the ones who created new products, created new technology, established new orders when it was time for the old orders to decay.
And so you hear Hayek all over Andreessen's manifesto.
But what Hayek, Koch, and Andreessen all miss, or they just don't want to admit, is that there are externalities in the free market as well.
They treat it as a solution to socialism instead of another ideology with its own collateral damage.
So it's no coincidence that free market champions decry critical race theory, for example.
They would never want to confront the fact that unfettered capitalism hits minority populations hardest through discriminatory practices like redlining.
It doesn't free them.
It further reduces their capacity to earn a quality of life appropriate for all the hard work they do.
Yeah, I mean, the thing that's jumping out at me here too is, you know, when we talk
to Quinn Slobodian, one of the things I got from his book, Globalism, is his idea that
neoliberalism is essentially a strategy for protecting capitalism from democracy. That's
really what it's about. And all of this kind of posturing about how, you know, we've got
to keep government regulation out of technology, it sort of feeds into this conspiracy theory
that the Democrats and, you know, anyone who's on the left is trying to usher in some kind
of socialist revolution that would be really, really bad for business.
But what they're actually railing against underneath that facade is environmental regulation.
It's like trying to be careful with AI.
It's saying to tech billionaires like you actually have a responsibility to the commons, right?
Yeah, and some things really should be controlled by the states.
Yeah, my Patreon bonus episode this Monday is about the fact that I have spent one month trying to get a flu shot and a COVID booster and have been unable to because of The insurance company and the pharmacies here.
I'll get into more of that, but I completely think socialized medicine should be a reality.
Matthew, you have it.
I would very much like it.
I think the airlines should be regulated and controlled by the government, power companies, high-speed internet companies, because all those industries are horrible and in many regions they effectively run like monopolies anyway.
So, the state should have some control over resources, but people like Andreessen will claim that's one step closer to authoritarianism, when really, authoritarianism is an externality of the free market.
Boom.
That's a great line.
Boom.
He's advocating for as much deregulation as possible, because fewer regulations means more control and profit for people like him.
And if he can keep the focus on the scary state not controlling any businesses, well, Regulations are either further downstream so the public doesn't have to think much about them, or they conflate, and this is the point, total state control with limited regulatory power that actually benefits the citizens.
This conflation suits Andreessen's trickle-down agenda.
So, this Galaxy Brain Manifesto is thin on content, but heavy on his personal philosophy, which is rooted in completely unregulated capitalism.
So get a little wonky for a moment, but I think it's important to understand where they're coming from.
He claims that we're all, everyone on Earth, is living better now than in the past, but the data he uses to support that message is tailored to state that message.
So earlier this year, it came out that 37.9 million Americans currently live in poverty, and that's 11.6% of the population.
Problem is, this research is measured by calculating pre-tax income against three times the cost of the minimum food diet based on a threshold that was set in 1963.
Okay, so wait a minute.
So this model tries to count the number of people living in poverty by using just minimum food requirements as a measurement.
So it doesn't account for housing costs, let's say.
Yes.
It's all factored based on income, the minimum food diet threshold, and family size.
So it has to be two or more people in a family to be in that measure.
They also take into account... Anyone who knows anything about economics or has ever run a business or ever received a paycheck knows that gross income before taxes deducted is not really a reflection of what you might like it to be.
Yeah, and they also consider the geographic region that people live in.
But that's the measurement someone like Andreessen will use instead of, for example, real workers' wages, which have effectively stagnated in America since the 1970s, even though our productivity levels have tripled.
There's that pesky data you referenced earlier about productivity, Matthew.
Because productivity is 3x, wages are stagnant.
So in reality, the poverty level has increased in America over the last few years.
It's really funny because he says explicitly that increased productivity through technology actually raises wages.
Which is completely false because increased productivity that creates the technology then results in more people losing their jobs.
I think we have a few strikes going on right now in America that reflect exactly that point.
But Andreessen isn't looking at cost of living expenses versus actual earning power.
He'll say, look, more people own cell phones than ever before, so the economy must be rocking.
And we have headlines like this.
So we just in America had the largest GDP bump last quarter in quite a while.
It was 4.9% and it was all based on consumer spending.
No, but incredibly, the government admitted that a big reason for this was Taylor Swift and her concert tickets.
And one firm actually calculated that Taylor Swift is adding $5 billion to the American economy.
Yeah, Swifties aside, I don't get it.
Hey, good for her.
I don't like her music.
But anyway, that does not support Andreessen's belief that techno-optimism predominantly helps the people with the least amount of money, which is the whole point he's trying to say in this manifesto.
The opposite is true.
The U.S.
poverty rate had its largest single-year increase in history from 2022 to 2023, and child poverty doubled during that time.
Now this is in part because pandemic-era safety nets were allowed to expire, hello Republicans, and that had the effect of pushing more people into poverty than existed in 2019 before the pandemic began.
Now meanwhile, as we all know, the pandemic brought in record profits for billionaires.
the same billionaires like Andreessen who want to deregulate everything and cut even
more social safety nets.
So we heard Ben Horowitz say something something about Marcus Garvey.
In the manifesto itself, Andreessen, as we've seen, he doesn't provide footnotes, but he does quote or at least flick at four figures that I'd like to just pause on.
And the first appearance comes in a section called Becoming Technological Superman, if you can believe that, and it tags Joseph Campbell, but also futurism.
Yeah, I mean, this whole thing about Superman, that's never been problematic, has it?
Never.
Jesus.
We believe in the romance of technology, of industry, the Eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper, and the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.
We believe in adventure, Undertaking the hero's journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.
So you might've caught the Campbell reference.
We've got an old episode in the archive in which Derek fleshes out how central the hero's journey is to both new age and venture capitalist vibes, but also how they consistently leave out like the selflessness part.
So that's episode 33.
You can check that out.
Yeah, but you didn't state that Russell Brand wrote that sentence, right?
It is an amazing run-on sentence, right?
Conquering dragons.
Okay.
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.
So I recognized this, and he also notes that he's paraphrasing a manifesto of a different time and place, but he's quoting the Futurist Manifesto from 1909.
He isn't really paraphrasing it either because he's just sort of copy-pasting the most common translation from the Italian that is directly available through Google.
But it makes me think that, you know, as Mark Zuckerberg liked the axiom, move fast and break things, That vibe is really sort of soaking here, although it's softened by, I think, a culture of wellness retreats and DEI trainings.
But it also has century-old roots that intersect with fascist fetishes of charismatic leadership and fantasies of shock and awe power.
The influence here that predates both German and Italian fascism is in the futurism of Marinetti.
He lived between 1876-1944, and we've got the first few lines of his manifesto here, which By the way, goes on to inform all of the aesthetic aspects of neo-fascism that don't squeeze themselves into yoga pants.
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt.
Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber.
We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap on the blow with the fist.
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty.
The beauty of speed.
A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath.
A roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace.
It's very Whitman-esque.
Mm-hmm.
In tone, but not in content, but it's very much of that time and similar.
It has the same cadence, but just of a world that I don't want to be in.
Nice part, right here, right here.
We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap on the blow with the fist.
Even though it's like so violent, it does have that Whitman kind of cadence and feeling, yeah.
I also felt like I could, I could be Jim Morrison.
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy, right?
Like it's like this whole, we believe in the, in the systematic derangement of the senses, man.
Well, Marinetti's fetish for speed and power made him simpatico with Mussolini, and he wound up providing a lot of copy for Italian fascism, even though he didn't really like the fascist obsession for ancient institutions.
But speed was the thing.
It was in the machines, the authoritarian leadership, the blitzkrieg, and like the methamphetamine that helped German tank crews race each other to objectives in Poland and Russia on like zero sleep.
But, you know, we always have this perennial question on this podcast, which is like, do edgelords and influencers and shitposters who fancy themselves gurus know about any of this stuff?
I mean, if they do, it's gross.
If they don't, it might be worse because it simply shows how easy it is for powerful people to just instinctually reproduce really bad ideas while they think they're being helpful.
So he moves on from proto-fascist copypasta to this.
This is Andreessen again.
We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology.
Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology, both unnecessary and self-defeating.
We are not victims.
We are conquerors.
We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature.
We're not primitives cowering in fear of the lightning bolt.
We are the apex predator.
The lightning works for us.
So, I mean, we're back at the intersection of New Age spiritual bypass and libertarian coach speak here, right?
It's victim mentality that needs to be addressed, not the reality of being victimized, or the effects of trauma, or the system that perpetuates injustice and exploitation.
It's this kind of conquering hero narrative that fuses Joseph Campbell with Gordon Gekko And says, be the predator, not the prey, which is simply a naked embrace of zero-sum, contrary to like a lot of their aesthetics, right?
It's a naked embrace of zero-sum, will to power, dominator hierarchy, vision of society.
Seize the day and stop being such a loser.
Jordan Peterson might be proud, right?
I want to point out, too, that there isn't overt racism in this text, but the reference to cowering primitives is one of two references that he makes to pre-industrial indigenous life as being fundamentally naive and helpless.
And I just don't think you get to the standard rationalizations for colonialism without that kind of language turning up.
Also, it is very common for Silicon Valley leaders to say technology is not dependent on zero-sum thinking, but making $1.8 billion completely depends on zero-sum thinking.
So it's this sleight of hand that they're constantly doing with this tech.
No, everyone will win.
I'm just going to win a lot more, and you can take the scraps, is basically the sentiment.
Yeah, I'm special.
And so I have these great ideas that will help everyone.
And in the process, my specialness will also be rewarded.
But that's the law of the jungle.
I mean, here, I think I also see us reaching backwards in this characteristic way.
That's not only about what we can identify in the fascists who long for the lost golden age, but also our conspiritualists and the new age in general.
There's a more spiritual time in the past of living in accord with ancient wisdom and natural health.
But also it was a more potent time of heroic men and their traditionally feminine women.
Because we're exploring today how all of this relates to the economic and political components of this muscular poetry of futuristic technology.
I also want to ping this quote from Slobodian and Callison about diagonalism.
So this is what they say.
Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, Diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right, while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs, to express ambivalence, if not cynicism, toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.
Does that seem like that might be in place here?
Maybe just a little bit.
Okay, so we've got Joseph Campbell.
We've got Marinetti.
We've also got Andy Warhol coming up in this text.
Okay, so there's a funny reference in here that really tells me Andreessen might be a real drag at parties.
So listen to this.
We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, what's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola and you can know that the president drinks Coke.
Liz Taylor drinks Coke.
And just think, you can drink Coke too.
A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
All the Cokes are the same.
And all the Cokes are good.
Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot.
So they want to be anthropologists.
These guys want to be biohacking bro scientists.
They also, I think, want to be artists.
And I guess with the AIs, you can pretend to be an artist these days.
You can launch like an LLM to scoop up a whole discipline and then run an automated blog post from what you find.
But I don't think it's clear that chat GPT will be very good at irony.
You know, speaking of which, Andreessen takes Warhol at his word here, which is the stupidest thing you could do when you're talking about the original King of Irony.
Like, Warhol wasn't just elevating pop culture.
He wasn't just endowing Marilyn Monroe and Elvis with the status of, like, Renaissance life-drawing subjects.
He's also spoofing The flattening of passions and identity via corporate consumerism.
He's saying that the uniqueness of artistry and even personality is irrelevant in the age of endlessly reproduced images and parasocial identifications with celebrities.
So, I mean, Warhol is implying that capitalism turns the Campbell's soup can into a sublime object despite its banality, maybe even because of its banality, and also because it is life-sustaining.
It may look like he's talking about egalitarianism in this quote, but he's also talking about the erosion of aesthetic meaning and class distinctions.
But he's an artist, and so his register is ambivalent.
He's not charging ahead like Andreessen with, you know, Bible-thumping assertions.
So, just as an example, here's another take from Warhol that Andreessen might consider.
It's quoted in Art in America, volume 50, number 1, 1962.
My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and the brash, materialistic objects on which America is built today.
It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.
Yeah, and if you feel happy hearing that, instead of a little bit hollow.
No, no, no, that's what's great about America, Matthew.
This is what's great about America.
So then we come to Nietzsche.
As you do.
And I think here we have the weirdest, weirdest quote of all, because it's the longest in Andreessen's text.
It's the most, it's the bit that he's committed to the most.
He quotes At length, thus spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche is describing the two different responses to the challenges of modernity.
And at first, he describes the fawning response of what he calls the last man, the person who has not mobilized his passions and instrumentalized his death drive, and how he is going to become the ultimate cuck of the state.
So, Andreessen writes... Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche's last man.
I tell you, one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
I tell you, you have still chaos in yourselves.
Alas, there comes a time when man will no longer give birth to any star.
Alas, there comes the time of the most despicable man who can no longer despise himself.
What is love?
What is creation?
What is longing?
What is a star?
So asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.
His species is ineradicable as the flea.
The last man lives longest.
One still works, for work is pastime, but one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
One no longer becomes poor or rich, both are too burdensome.
No shepherd and one herd.
Everyone wants the same.
Everyone is the same.
He who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
Formerly, all the world was insane, says the subtlest of them.
and they blink. They are clever and know all that has happened so there is no end to their derision.
We have discovered happiness, say the last men, and they blink." So Andreesen concludes,
"...our enemy is that. We aspire to be not that." In other words, and Andreesen doesn't say it,
and I think that's really important, he aspires to be the Übermensch, the overman, the man who
has transcended all modern ideals of democracy and egalitarianism.
But to me, it's really strange that he leans so hard into the melancholy of the last man description, as if it's more compelling than the description of the Übermensch, but also, what, more polite, more subtle.
The last man is Andreessen's enemy.
And it was Zarathustra's enemy.
And so, the Ubermensch, who is to defeat the last man, is pointed to both directly and silently.
And all of this leads us right to the mask-off heart of the manifesto, which is the section on enemies.
I also couldn't help but hear Jordan Peterson is in a quote that's used all the time from him,
where he says, you must become a monster.
Right.
Men, that men must embrace the monster inside themselves, recognize the monstrous things
they could do, and then learn how to channel that.
into doing good in the world. It just feels like it's in this whole
manosphere kind of thing of what it means to be someone who is, you know, who's riding that intense
pride and aggression towards making the forces of the unknown bow down before us.
So here's Andreessen on enemies.
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, 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, Degrowth, The Limits of Growth.
So, everything since the 1960s, in other words.
And what's amazing about this is that it follows this very typical neoliberal but also neoconservative line that ignores that they actually won.
Yeah, exactly.
Thatcher, Mulroney, Milton Friedman, they transformed the world to the point
that Fukuyama could dream about, like, the end of history.
Yeah, exactly. And it's why, despite claiming that some of his compatriots are really on the left,
the manifesto is reactionary.
He's explicitly listing efforts to protect the environment, create ethical guardrails, and protect people from exploitation and discrimination as being weak and fearful victim consciousness bugbears that prevent the arising of the ubermensch.
Yeah, it was a really funny line in the piece.
We are not necessarily left-wing, although some of us are.
We are not necessarily right-wing, although some of us are.
But there isn't a single left-wing influence in his references list.
I think we should send him the diagonals and paper.
But the thing about the mask-off moment is that I think the tycoon is not only revealed, but then stands a chance of maybe also seeing himself more clearly.
But this can lead to some real mirror world orgasms in the category of like every accusation is actually a confession, like this gem here.
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional.
Does that sound familiar?
I mean, what is more of an ivory tower than the head offices of a company worth $28 billion?
What's more abstract than believing the world can support 50 billion people?
Who's more unaccountable than the venture capitalist?
And I also know that He's turning to the top of the top for his general partners to go out and do business.
It's not like he's just taking anyone.
He wants people with an extreme pedigree if you go through the list of who the partners are there.
So again, it's just like, do as I say, not as I do.
So for me, the unelected Dog whistle really jumps out here.
I mean, this is something that RFK Jr.
uses, too.
It's part of the Bannon shtick as well about deconstructing the administrative state because it is unelected experts who head up these supposedly corrupt agencies that are getting in the way of profits and power with their expert in positions of environmental protections, supplement regulation, public health policy.
I mean, when you say what could be more unaccountable than the venture capitalist, these folks yell Anthony Fauci.
Finishing up, we have a section called Technology as Spirituality.
And do you guys remember how in their conspirituality paper, Warden Vos talked about how spirituality can offer a soothing balm for the cynicism and even nihilism of conspiratorial thought?
And Dreesen, I think, has that instinct here as well, because the vision of techno-capitalism he offers is unyielding, it's dominant.
I think it's also thrilling to him.
But is that really the Silicon Valley vibe?
I mean, we know that this culture goes on wellness retreats, they dose and trip, they biohack and optimize, they learn to meditate.
I mean, Derek, you've been close to this crowd.
Would you say that it's important to them to convey the impression that they're chilled out, that they're self-regulated, they have their eyes on that zen horizon?
I don't think there's an industry standard.
Like I said earlier, technology, like any industry, brings in a diverse crowd, but some are openly type A, and that's fine.
There's always also the always-on productivity bros who scoff at Jack Dorsey's meditation practice, for example.
But there's certainly a subset of tech leaders who want the spiritual and, in this sense, more religious credibility.
Andreessen isn't as blatant as Dorsey about his sort of self-wellness practices in any capacity.
I kind of feel like he'd rather be seen as a rabbinical scholar that's translating divine text and delivering it to his commune, rather than talking about life hacks all day.
Yeah, I get that feeling.
Dead on.
I mean, like a monk in the scriptorium with the sunlight pouring in.
And I think that sunlight allows the mask-off language to soften a bit.
So, let's finish up with a few quotes from the last section he writes, which is called The Future.
Techno-optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.
I mean, okay, so...
I'd like to know the difference.
Anyway, go on.
We are materially focused, Matthew, for a reason.
To open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid material abundance.
My apertures are opening.
A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us.
This is undoubtedly true, yet more than offset by the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.
I'm sorry.
Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, for choices of how to live socially and individually.
Yeah, so often it sounds like he's saying markets and tech are like nature itself, predating everything else,
allowing everything else to happen.
But here he includes religion explicitly, and it's kind of weird because earlier he actually says,
quote, we believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies
and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.
So of course, because free market societies don't raise armies, they're not religious, right?
I mean, I think he meant to say that sports maybe do that.
I mean, sports are kind of an outlet for tribal aggressions and religious kind of energies.
But yeah, does more stockbrokers equal less crime, war and religion?
I don't think so.
Michael Hobbes says this often, like how we focus on crime as, you know, petty crime, for example, when we don't talk about the crime that happens on Wall Street.
And I think that's very fitting here because someone like Andreessen is going to look at San Francisco and say these numbers and the last If Books Could Kill episode is fantastic on Yeah, so a few social media videos constitute a mass phenomenon that America's going to hell.
up. Organized crime is not actually a thing. Organized retail crime is not a thing. But
Andreessen will focus on that crime, but not the crime of what, Matthew, what you hinted
at before of the fact of how much passive income they're making off of wherever they
put their money.
Yeah, so a few social media videos like constitute a mass phenomenon that America's going to
hell. He continues, we believe technology is liberatory.
Liberatory of human potential.
Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit.
Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.
We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human.
Yeah, okay.
So guys, they're just opening the space.
It's open, and anyone can do anything in open space.
I think you guys could both use some open space.
I mean, you're podcasting, for fuck's sake.
I need some space.
Why be so skeptical?
I mean, do you know how hard it is to have a vision and to be the change you wanna see in the world?
Do you even code, bros?
It's simple.
Close your eyes, get centered, take a deep breath, Thank you everyone for joining us for another episode of Conspiratuality.
