Marc Andreessen’s new manifesto is a self-serving cry for help
Contributing columnist
The Washington Post
October 19, 2023 at 5:27 p.m. EDT
Silicon Valley is atwitter — original meaning intended — over a roughly 5,000-word pro-technology screed posted online Monday by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Rambling and at times incoherent, the document is likely to have the opposite effect of what the writer intended: It might well remind policymakers and regular citizens of the dangers of unbridled technology — and its unaccountable cheerleaders.
Dubbed “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen’s diatribe purports to be a celebration of everything that is good about technological advancement and unfettered markets. The opus — which name-checks oodles of thinkers, such as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Paul Collier and Julian Simon — doubles as an unhinged attack on some of Andreessen’s self-described enemies.
It’s a list that includes (but is not limited to) socialists, Luddites, central planners, bureaucrats and, amusingly, monopolists.
Silicon Valley-types listen to Andreessen because he is tech-industry royalty. He co-founded Netscape, maker of the first commercial web browser, and later the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose investments have included Skype, Airbnb and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. At age 52, he has been at this for three decades. And he has had a lot to say over the years, including his much-repeated theme that “software is eating the world,” a prescient observation that turned into a winning investment thesis.
Andreessen also fancies himself a public intellectual. The lobby of his Sand Hill Road complex in Menlo Park is a library of books about the tech industry. And he once spoke frequently and openly to journalists, including me, before clamming up several years ago. He has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter, for years seeming to post every thought that popped into his head, then going quiet, only to reappear again, particularly when his firm invested in Elon Musk’s acquisition of the site now known as X.
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