Appreciating Marc Andreessen

he's certainly read a lot of books

The tech lords, that four years ago were aligned with The Narrative, have recently been lighting out for the Territory. In other words, to use the current meme from Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: the Social Consequences of Preference Falsifications, there has been “preference cascade” in Tech Land.

If Elon Musk is the crazy warrior out front challenging the other side to a one-on-one, Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen is the wise elder holding things together. And recently he was on Lex Fridman’s podcast for nearly four hours. And here’s the transcript.

I gotta say, Marc really knows his stuff, and I want to lay out what I heard so that I can get it into my brain.

He starts with a bullish economic forecast and then talks about the Indo-Europeans.

Indo-Europeans

Marc refers to The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. Coulanges writes about the ancestor civilization for the West and our culture. They were super hierarchical and super egalitarian, and they came off the steppes of Asia. Marc calls their society super-fascist and super-communist.

And so it was maximum fascism in the form of this absolute top-down control where the head of the family tribe or city could kill other members of the community at any time with no repercussions at all. So maximum hierarchy, but combined with maximum communism, which is no market economy and so everything gets shared.

Then their religion: “It was veneration of ancestors and it was veneration of nature.” But, as Christianity has declined,

[We] have basically re-evolved or fallen back on the exact same religious structure that the Indo-Europeans had, specifically ancestor worship, which is identity politics and nature worship, which is environmentalism.

So, we have basically regressed back to pre-Greek and Roman society.

Universities: Burn ‘em Down

Can we change the woke culture? Marc quotes investor Charlie Munger about trying to change General Electric when it was having problems. He was asked:

“How would you fix the culture at General Electric?” And he said, “Fix the culture at General Electric?” He said, “I couldn’t even fix the culture at a restaurant.”

So, if you want to fix the universities how would you do it? You can fire the president, but not the faculty. Who runs the universities: “The professors and the students, the professors and the feral students.” The professors know that they can outlast the reformers.

And at some point the taxpayers are just going to stop tolerating and funding the woke university.

Censorship

Marc was there on the ground floor in 1992 when he was asked to implement a “nudity filter” on an early web browser. Since then, he’s been in on censorship issues, as an investor or board member at Facebook, Twitter, Substack, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit.

[No] internet service that can have zero censorship… [and there is] no country that actually has unlimited free speech.

But then we come to 2012, 2013, and a pivot towards censorship with the woke kids coming out of college. And the Democrats realized that they could influence the tech companies and the executives and the boards were all Democrats.

It started with “hate speech” and the “N-word.” And then “hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable.”

Then “misinformation,” and that really kicked in with Trump. But who gets to decide? God? The king? Hey, I know: experts.

And so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is deeply anti-Western and deeply authoritarian.

And then came COVID and the lab-leak theory. That was when big tech realized “this has spun completely out of control.”

Then came Substack,

and I’m super proud of those guys because they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a free speech platform…And sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of speech and conversation anywhere on planet Earth. And they’ve done a great job.”…

And then obviously Elon with X was the hammer blow. And then the third one now is what Mark is doing at Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg and CEOs

Conservatives are complaining about Zuck, but Marc Andreessen has a different view. CEOs “are not kings, these are people who operate with I would say extraordinary levels of external pressure.” It’s not just taking advantage of Trump.

[Zuckerberg] has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time. And so I think what you saw are legitimate, deeply held beliefs, not some sort of just-in-the-moment thing that could change at any time.

But corporate CEOs are under enormous pressure: “it is a lonely job,” “under a tremendous amount of emotional, personal, emotional stress.” And when you are at home you are still at work with business problems in your head.

So, CEOs can deal with internal pressures, as long as the team stays together. But external pressures?

Any CEO who thinks that they’re bigger than their government, has that notion beaten out of them in short order.

And Marc believes that the pressure put on media companies has risen to criminal levels.

[B]asically the government over time and then culminating in 2020, 2021 in the last four years, just decided that the First Amendment didn’t apply to them…

And they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, just like literally arbitrarily call up companies and threaten and bully and yell and scream and threaten repercussions and force them to censor.

But censorship is not just against the Constitution; it’s against the law.

It’s Always an Oligarchy

Is democracy possible? Marc Andressen refers to the Italian Realist School — including my guy Gaetano Mosca. They are covered by James Burnham in The Machiavellians. In Political Parties, Robert Michels came up with “The Iron Law of Oligarchy.”

So the Iron Law of Oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There’s always a ruling class. There’s always a ruling elite structurally. And he said, “The reason for that is because the masses can’t organize”…

And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority.

But our Founders understood that.

They gave us a representative democracy. And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch.

DOGE: Can it Deliver?

There is hope for DOGE, because of the recent Supreme Court decisions that said that regulations unauthorized by legislation aren’t legal.

Most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress, they’re from an agency that created a regulation.

So DOGE will be doing something about unwinding programs and spending that aren’t created by legislation.

[The DOGE team] have, I would say, incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this. I know lots of former government people who 100% of them are super cynical on this topic, and they’re like, “This is impossible, this could never possibly work.” And I’m like, “Well, I can’t tell you what the secret plans are, but blow my mind.”

Blacks Need Not Apply

Marc Andreessen comes from Wisconsin. But today very few people in tech come from Wisconsin. Or the Midwest. Or the Sunbelt. Why? Because Whites Need Not Apply to university.

It’s not just whites. Asians and Jews have been discriminated against. And also, wait for it: native born blacks. Why is that? Because

half of the Black admits into a place like Harvard were not American-born Blacks, they were foreign-born Blacks, specifically Northern African, generally Nigerian or West Indian.

Imagine that! Affirmative Action helping Nigerian and West Indian blacks getting into Harvard!

Whatabout God?

Says Marc Andreessen:

I feel like I spent my first whatever, 30 years figuring out machines, and then now I’m spending 30 years figuring out people, which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. And then, I don’t know, maybe God’s the last 30 years or something.

And that’s all folks.