🤷🏾♀️About my Marc Andreessen story...🤷🏾♀️
let me confess about the story that lit up Twitter
💖Motivation Meows💖
It’s Christmas Eve, and I hope everyone is relaxed and ready to enjoy the holiday.
This is the first edition of the paid part of my newsletter, where I will share spicer content that may or may not get me doxxed online. I most often will not be promoting these publicly, but feel free to forward and share these stories. The majority of my newsletter content will remain free, so you need not worry.
Thank you to all who have supported my newsletter since its launch a few weeks ago, and as always, I can’t wait for you to see what else is to come! But for now, let’s chat.
💢From the Chatterbox💢
Two months ago, I co-wrote a piece with my colleagues that set Tech Twitter aflame.
It was entitled, “When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person?” and was in response to the billionaire’s weird “techno-optimism” manifesto he wrote. I specifically wrote the part responding to where he called the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) an enemy of technology. Now note those goals include things like ensuring access to clean water and supporting life above and below land. I just couldn’t believe that anyone who claimed to be pro-innovation could write something so anti-life. How the hell is wanting clean water an enemy of technology? The climate sector is booming once more, with rapid tech to help address the very real issues that people who don’t live in Bay Area mansions are facing. Flint, Michigan, still does not have clean water, and Jackson, Mississippi, is still dealing with a clean water crisis. The harmful impacts of climate change disproportionately impact black and brown communities, which are the most in need of innovation in the space. The SDGs are not an enemy of technology; they are a catalyst for it.
Alas, I was wrong to assume that a man who voted against affordable housing in his wealthy Atherton neighborhood (despite saying he was all for new housing) would be for anything that could help the common man. That was only the least jarring part of the manifesto. He called out developed countries for dwindling in their population and then said he wanted some of us to colonize space. He also said Universal Basic Income “would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” When I read all of this, it just sounded like a rallying cry for white tech bros to take and conquer all at the expense of everyone, especially the poor and presumably the Black and brown. My colleague wrote that his manifesto was a “contemporary rehashing of trickle-down economics,” which has routinely been debunked. I have to assume by now that he knows this economic theory does not work, and he actually means what he says. And with that, I figured I, too, could opine. So I did.
I wrote that his writing was a coded way to say something I am still trying to grasp. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was just emptiness where humanity should be between each line. We wrote about that, too, how the manifesto made no note of how to take care of people, how to care for them. It doesn’t talk about how tech caused much happiness but also did nothing to fix the pain. The move-fast-and-break-thing ethos does not work when it comes to building societies because we are humans, not corporate machines. Uber made it easy to get around, but some of those drivers live in their cars. San Francisco is a liberal, innovative haven, an easy place to go to when you are white and want to raise $1 million. This liberal co-op of trickle-down economics is an offensive test of intelligence but is perhaps of no surprise given the imperialist mindset some investors have in wanting their companies to take over the world.
In a 2015 New Yorker profile entitled "The Mind of Marc Andreessen,” he himself actually kind of addressed this point. A young programmer named Alex Payne wrote the investor a letter saying how the concentration of wealth and technology in the hands of a few would scare people, compounding "lingering structural unemployment and an accumulation of capital at the top of the economic pyramid.”
The magazine reported Marc’s response to the letter:
[ Andreessen] raised counter-arguments, then dismissed them: technology would solve any environmental crisis hastened by an expanding economy, and as for the notion that, as he said, “ ‘You American imperialist asshole, not everyone wants all that technology’—well, bullshit! Go to a Chinese village and ask them.” Technology gives us superpowers, makes us smarter, more powerful, happier. “Would the world be a better place if there were fifty Silicon Valleys?” he said. “Obviously, yes. Over the past thirty years, the level of income throughout the developing world is rising, the number of people in poverty is shrinking, health outcomes are improving, birth rates are falling. And it’ll be even better in ten years. Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism—it’s the Eden-collapse myth over and over again—and then you look at G.D.P. per capita worldwide, and it’s up and to the right. If this is collapse, let’s have more of it!”
Well, it’s almost ten years since this profile dropped, and the SF homelessness and drug crisis is one of the worst in the nation. I don’t need to rehash the problems of America here, but you, by now, know that tech was not the saving grace in fixing the systemic day-to-day hardships and complexities of modern life. I just wanted more techies to recognize that, to see that they spend all their time talking about the failings of governments and the liberation of technology without also looking inward to see how they are also not helping the crisis this nation faces. I wish to have technology as a supplement, not a replacement, for what it means to exist. Surely tech doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach?
He wrote that artificial intelligence was the “alchemy” and best thought of as a “universal problem solver.” This, I guess, is supposed to weave the interwoven fabrics between tech, policy, and people. There could be an argument for that here, but we would need ethicists philosophers, and all those experts to retrain current AI models. And then, once that happens, we need to figure out what — or who — can hold AI accountable. This gave way to another problem I had with the manifesto.
Tech and its barons have not made the case for why I should trust them to run the world. We use slaves in the Congo to build our renewable batteries. It is clear that in the tech-optimist future, the build-at-all-cost will come at the expense of someone whom these barons already deem lesser and that someone will pay the price — as many already are — for the hyper-development and supremacy the West seeks to take. As a Black person, a permanent second-class citizen in the West, I can already see the fate of my future in a world like that. As he is so against “universal basic income,” it was clear we would be on our own if the riches he promises tech will bring fail to arrive. He had big, big ideas for the world, but people like me are always left on the ground. I wasn’t going to fall for it. He said in that 2015 New Yorker profile that “technological progress is precisely what makes strong, rigorous social safety net affordable.”
The money is here now for a nice social safety net, and we still do not have it. Believing his statement on social nets would be assuming that tech barons are more trustworthy in providing us with our needs than the system we have now. That could be true, except there is little difference in how tech barons get their power and money verses how it is extracted now. Fellow tech journalist Edward Ongweso Jr. wrote about this for The Nation. He wrote:
We live in an anemic period of capitalism in which excessive returns are hard to come by unless you engage in exploitative labor practices, self-dealing among friends, frenzied lobbying aimed at shredding regulations, political projects aiming to privatize what’s left of the commons, or geopolitical strategies that aim to protect a dying empire’s dominance from ascendant powers.
Whatever benefits venture capitalism may provide are ancillary to the proliferation of socially odious technology deployed to extract, surveil, and exploit. But this model of financing isn’t an iron law of history. It comes to us from a long series of weird personalities, lobbying, legal reforms, political projects, compromises, geopolitics, self-dealing and self-interest, discrimination, a good bit of corruption, various ideological movements, and much more.
Thinking more about it, I probably land somewhere in the middle of the tech-optimist spectrum. In a perfect world, yes, I think if we had accessible tech that addressed real needs and investors that reflected the diverse nation we live in, then maybe there could have been a slight decrease in economic equality, more jobs, and practical innovation. That’s a big maybe, though. We would have to restructure some systems and socioeconomic frameworks and a whole bunch of other stuff that sociologists, economists, engineers, and politicians should work together to achieve — a world designed by the people, not billionaires and only those whom they deem worthy.
Of course, none of this is happening, which is what prompted my response in the first place. I also took issue with the perception that the answer to everything is to keep building. I think it’s good to keep building, but also imperative to keep refining, redoing, and tearing down so that we can have systems that match the intricate frameworks of life. Anything without this into account is hollow. Not to mention the fact that all these tech barons have the money to fund Black founders and they don’t. In the tech-optimist future, it’s safe to assume that technological innovation will be funded and built by our existing ruling class. I stopped there in my critique to save myself the tedious task of explaining line-for-line why I simply had a different opinion on the manifesto.
My colleagues and I published the piece, and then we waited.
As one might have expected, the libertarian tech bubble did not like our seemingly socialist and humanist views on this topic (in fact, we still get hate messages about this piece). Someone took a LinkedIn photo of me and put it alongside my colleagues, calling us “anti-tech,” saying we had taken over TechCrunch. I got blocked by a bunch of people, including the president of a certain accelerator program and a certain felon who went to jail and price gaugued insulin now follows me on Twitter, but only after he weight-shamed my colleague online to let vicious Twitter trolls come after her. I’ve told people that the president of a certain accelerator program blocked me, and it’s always so funny because the response is, "Oh, but he’s usually a supporter of diversity.” Everyone supports everything as long as it is in the framework in which they want it to be. Everyone supports whatever they want, as long as it is presented and operates in a way that pleases them. Everyone supports freedom as long as they have equity in what it costs. (Although I do wonder how much of this drama is just online fodder).
I like to think we embarrassed that billionaire by writing that piece, and it also didn’t help him that nearly every other outlet piled on, too.
What is fascinating is that he helped pioneer the era of investors as public-facing influencers and with that, thrusting this once-shrouded industry into the spotlight of fame, fortune, heightened ego, and accountability. He bull-rushes the stage and gets mad when the audience throws tomatoes. He then has heard of sheep that follow suit off a cliff and into their own pot of tomato sauce.
I actually started to think hard about the little bubbles these guys put themselves into — silencing people who disagree with them and just blocking them from their views. Tech people often bemoan how the press has turned against them, but I was not a working journalist during that time. I am here now, and indeed, the time is different. I just think there is a vast ideological difference between us and them; between the people and those attempting to sequester power. Tech and its players in the 2010s were mostly written about and purported unquestionably. The media is doing its job now (mostly) — asking a lot more questions, parsing from surveillance to labor rights — what does it all mean to live in a tech utopia? He has tried to fund a new era of media, including Substack, Clubhouse, and his own blog, but still cannot escape the tomatoes.
When Marc wrote his 2011 essay in The Wall Street Journal about how software was eating the world, he was hailed as an intellectual; with this latest manifesto, he just seemed out of touch. During the pandemic, he wrote “IT’S TIME TO BUILD,” where he spoke of how unprepared our institutions were for the virus and how there was a “widespread inability to build.” In a 2021 New Yorker piece, Anna Wiener revisited Marc’s words. “Taken seriously, the essay seemed to be suggesting an entirely new version of Silicon Valley: a movement away from making software to support existing institutions and toward creating the institutions themselves.” In hindsight, it seems that he is laying the groundwork for this right here. I would argue a trial run is that new California city that Marc and his fellow billionaire buddies have pitched in to build, with the hopes of creating a “bustling metropolis,” as the New York Times reported. They want jobs and walkability, and I cannot wait to see how they make that happen without just a little bit of socialism, but luckily they have the portfolio companies to at least provide the infrastructure. “The era of the builder may also be the era of the Silicon Valley political actor,” Weiner wrote in her New Yorker piece.
Those guys aren’t alone, either. Google, Facebook, Elon Musk, Disney, and Universal are all building homes and developments — an era of “company towns.” We are beyond the latest stage of capitalism, but it seems the tech barons are serious about building a world within our nation. At least we can all agree that something is fundamentally broken in how America runs today, right? How to fix and prepare for what happens as a result of this brokenness… well… good question! That’s where the tech barons have me beat; while I was at brunch, they crafted a plan.
I must admit, I still have trouble understanding the power we give billionaires here in this country. They are like a fourth form of government that legions of people have parasocial relationships with. We might not have a ceremonial constitutional monarchy to represent us on stage, but I find it hard to believe that some of these guys are any better. They can travel to other countries and just have cozy secret meetings with world leaders. Decisions are made in their little power bubbles, on those breezy yachts, in those dark rooms in compounds somewhere shrouded by trees. We see them but can’t touch them or talk to them. We just know that when they leave those rooms, our lives are never truly the same. The stark power indifference has never been clearer — why does society insist on blurring the lines as if we were ever all the same?
(Editor’s Note: If any Black founders and women have any fun stories as to what it was like pitching their companies to the-bald-investor-who-shall-not-be-named-here, please, my DMs are open. Views in this piece reflect only my thoughts, not necessarily those of my co-authors.)