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Interview with Marc Andreessen on Silicon Valley and US politics
Link information
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- Title
- Opinion | How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump's Arms
- Published
- Jan 17 2025
- Word count
- 10 668 words
His take on what we all think about at dinner parties is hilarious:
He literally thinks the only reason anybody has a problem with CEOs and capitalism and consumerism and climate change is because the NYT told them so. We're all brainwashed zombies, and he's the one who's really awake to the Real World where Real CEOs make Real Decisions that are Very Very Hard so their compensation is totally fair and they definitely don't prioritize profits at the expense of everything else in society.
Look, on one hand I get it; the Democrats have failed, our government is unable to take care of people and ensure basic staples like housing, healthcare, and food, regardless of how much we collect in taxes (not that that ever really mattered except as a disincentive, since the govt can print money anyway). The elite Silicon Valley class doesn't need the political left on their side any more because they don't want to pay any shares of their dragon hoards into the public welfare. But boy, it's wild to see someone go from mindlessly following MSNBC and NYT's positions for social status to... mindlessly going along with Trump for money. I guess that's what happens to you when you believe in nothing besides the dollar and your moral core was scooped out of your body years ago by your vast hoard of wealth?
EDIT: Finally got around to finishing the last few exchanges and thinking about this on a deeper level. Highlights:
On a much higher level of abstraction, it's clear that this human being is a piece of trash. They care only about running ramshod over the government to expand their business; that's why they stopped supporting democrats, because antitrust became a thing (never mind that started under Trump 1.0, but apparently that wasn't really Trump, that was just the left subtly controlling everything behind the scenes). When asked about health policy, the social safety net, education, etc, they have no stance. They think Elon's DOGE is doing a great job and can't understand why anyone would support Al Gore's efforts to streamline the govt in the 90s but not Doge today, because Elon is Very Smart and all of us fools just don't understand.
Pure unadulterated privilege and evil. It makes me sad to realize people like this exist, let alone that they have twisted the tech industry into a horrifying factory farm of psychological torture and emotional manipulation. Praying for a solar flare to wipe out this bastard's bank account, destroy his home security system, and for his smart home to malfunction and starve him to death inside.
I think you misunderstood that first quote. He’s saying that the people he saw at dinner parties were not the heartless profit-maximizers as caricatured by some. That is, anti-capitalists didn’t really understand the Silicon Valley management class.
Later, he broke from that, but I don’t think he was misrepresenting the non-Trumpist managers around him, who were concerned about Trump like everyone else.
But yeah, the rest of that is nonsense.
No, I think that's an extremely uncharitable reading. Just because people are concerned about what they read in New York Times doesn't make them "muppets" or incapable of independent thought, and it doesn't mean they became Trumpists like Andreessen did.
Why do you even write like that? Is this just trolling?
I don't think it's possible to be "too harsh" on Andreessen.
https://archive.is/rVUAf
Note: I don't agree with Andreessen on politics, but the way he describes the vibe in Silicon Valley up through the end of the Obama administration is roughly how I remember it. (I retired not long after that.) So I thought this would be interesting to share just for the older history.
He made a big U-turn during the Biden administration and I don't know how accurate anything he said about that is. For example, I believe there was widespread skepticism about cryptocurrency in Silicon Valley, but I guess he took the other side. If you want to read about "debanking" and cryptocurrency, there are better things to read.
And it gets crazier from there. Douthat pushes back a little on the nonsense. Not much point reading further unless you want to know how a Silicon Valley Trumpist thinks.
Well, it’s not like you didn’t warn me…
I didn’t know what I expected, up until now I had pretty much only heard the name and obviously about his VC, certainly not any more recent news/political takes, but this seems like tinfoil-level of thinking.
I’m not quite through with the interview yet, but he genuinely seems to think it’s places and institutions like Harvard and the NYT making people* “Marxist” – I’d be horrified to hear what he thinks of political parties and governments outside of the U.S. then, lmao.
*Which also, of course, is to mean 100% of the “young person who’s attended a college since 2012” demographic, apparently.
Selection bias leading to delusions of grandeur.
It seems a common fallacy that wild success in one arena so inflates some individuals that they mistake their luck/skill in one arena as universal genius that applies to all. And these are many of the people who drive the world's economy. They got lucky once and then leveraged that time and again.
Mark me down for noise, but I'm not reading anything that Andreessen has to say, particularly when it's filtered by Douthat. There's already plenty of Nazi thoughts floating around in the States.
Douthat is one of the worst pundits - on the one hand he spends years shaming queer people for the morality of same sex marriage and then this month tells "both the left and the right" to have more cold-eyed realism about Gaza. If he were morally consistent on the Catholic theology on topics beyond queer people and abortion I could at least respect him.
I don't, mind you. This was a "safe" interview for a eugenicist
That blog post seems to be all about expressing the author’s own disgust? They don’t really quote Andreesson enough to understand what he believes about eugenics. I gather that Andreesson wants smart people to have more kids and the author thinks that’s very bad.
What you gathered is called eugenics.
The author's qualifications since it's also a "blog post"
Issues with the "long-termist" ideology he supports financially
He's got a bunch of other bad ideas, including that anything inhibiting AI development is murder
Oh and
So yeah, the guy that believes in "supermen" is a eugenicist.
Man, I was so disappointed in france24 when I read this:
It's such an uncharitable take. :(
It's not even factually correct. He's not known for Harry Potter fan fiction or promoting polyamory. I know about him, mostly because of less wrong and the weird cults it's spawned, and his writings on AI alignment. I didn't know he wrote Harry Potter fan fiction at all. I would imagine most people don't.
While I think they lost the plot with that description, he's the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It was reviewed in the Atlantic and the Washington Post. It's one of the best known HP fanfics and has been translated into multiple languages.
I have no way to figure out how many people have read it, but for folks not directly involved in the tech/rationalist world my guess is they'd be most likely to know HPMOR rather than whatever else he'd done at that point
I feel like fanfic isn't quite the right term, but I've also got nothing better and technically it meets the definition, so... Yeah.
He explicitly refused to pull a "Fifty Shades" and rewrite his
TwilightHP fanfic into a separate series so he could sell it.But the story is literally a rewrite of Harry Potter, fanfic seems correct to me, can you explain what doesnt work about that?
I'd call it fanfic, but it's clearly used as a diminuitive there. If you don't want to invoke images of amateur "highschool dropout" writers borrowing existing properties--often primarily for self-gratification or shipping purposes-- there are plenty of ways of avoiding that..
You might call Atwood's The Penelopiad fanfic, or Wide Sargasso Sea fanfic of Jane Eyre but calling them literary retellings feels more respectul or accurate. Ecclesiastes is fanfic in the Christverse but wisdom literature better explains it.
Oh as I said, I agree their description was not good, it was definitely intended to be dismissive. I'm only talking about the use of the term to describe HPMOR in general.
As he was publishing it on fanfiction.net I don't think he would be surprised by the characterization of the work. I think you certainly could call the Penelopiad fanfic if you wanted, but he literally couldn't publish HPMOR due to copyright so there's definitely a line somewhere.
Fanfic has always been by/for fans of the original work since long before slashfic took the Star Trek fandom by storm. But tbh I think assuming fanfic = trash or just for the purpose of shipping is a problem with the reader, not the term. Many professional authors wrote or write fanfic, and I don't mean the ones that publish their fanfic with the serial numbers off, I mean prolific authors of multiple novels.
Anyway, as I said, my question was to the previous poster about the use of the term in my post, not being fine with french24's framing.
I've read a fair bit of Harry Potter fan fiction. The writers are often very aware of the flaws in the original and use that for comedic effect. (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality does that too.) It's similar to the appeal of Galaxy Quest for Star Trek fans.
I don't know what motivates people to write fiction, but I imagine writing a brand new story from scratch can be pretty intimidating, and it's easier to come up with interesting spins on characters and settings that people already know. And it's nice having a ready-made audience, rather than having to try to find interested readers from scratch.
Edit: I also suspect that Harry Potter being very popular but decidedly mediocre is part of the attraction for aspiring writers. They see the obvious flaws and think they could do a better job. Sometimes they're right.
I think that unless something is in public domain it mostly has to exist in a fanfic realm - since it's not legal to earn money off of it in the meantime. And maybe functionally that's where the difference lies between literary works and fanfic, mixed some with the typical derisiveness for genre (SF, Fantasy, Horror, Romance) works in literary spheres.
The things you're listing in more of a "literary retelling" are mostly in professional authors examining works that are themselves considered literary fiction or historically relevant and outside of copyright.
I did find a book called "Fic" that may have more history but I haven't read it.
Said better than I could.
Thank you for posting this. It was interesting and a good view in to Andreesen's viewpoints, which I wouldn't otherwise spend much time reading about.