The problem is not that some people are terrible, delusional bullies, the problem is that they have so much money and power right now: the bulli-archy. It is important to understand their narrative, so I am commenting on some quotes from the extremely powerful Marc Andreesen of a16z, a VC fund worth USD45bn (that is nine zeros), from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html
For him, the 1990s were great because we had “American economic and technological supremacy”, and he hates tech workers.
More in this 🧵 :
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Andreesen wants tech workers with a servile mindset, not values: “And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “[...] and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.
By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.””
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He thinks that tech workers wanted to sabotage their workplaces and captured them: “[...] where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.””
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He considers people with an awareness of the effects of technology “radical left-wing” who constrained what CEOs could do. Well done, tech workers! ✊
“But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.”
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When politics no longer served businesses so well because they implemented some tech regulation, tech bros just decided to “get involved” in politics - i.e. capture, buy, and extort power:
“But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. [as to crypto] that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.”
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I struggle to constructively comment on this pure delusion:
“You could say over the last 200 years, the left, over time, has won most of the fights or even all the fights. I’m just telling you, notwithstanding, for the day-to-day reality that I live in and for the time horizon I can deal with, which is a decade at a time. This last decade? No more of that. What happened in this last decade and this last five years, with everything that we talked about — this is not going to happen again.”
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He misses the times under Gore and Clinton: "Basically it was the pro-business Democratic Party. It was the pro-tech Democratic Party. It was the pro-start-up Democratic Party."
It seems difficult to engage with his points because they are built on mostly absurd interpretations of reality. We cannot trust tech not to become more evil, because they can, they are allowed to.
Let's restrain their power. My preferred mix: competition policy, regulation and sabotage.
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