- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now, after years of accumulating wealth, he seems to have finally found his life’s next calling: he will be a bold revolutionary—a kind of capitalist Che Guevara—in the struggle to push technological innovation to its utmost breaking point.
Those ideas apparently include anything related to “tech ethics,” “trust and safety,” “sustainability,” “social responsibility,” “existential risk” or any other regimen that suggests corporate America shouldn’t spend all its time trying to optimize profits.
It is these ideas, along with the dangers of “Communists” and “central planning”—which Andreessen spends a weird amount of time complaining about—that are threatening the future in which we, as a society, achieve the goal of limitless “growth” that accelerationists desire.
It’s also, undoubtedly, the same belief that has animated Andreessen’s own quixotic ventures—from trying to “disrupt” healthcare and housing to even trying to create a new city in California that is wholly funded by “private sector money.” Those first two efforts haven’t netted much results.
These days, if you’re not vampirically using your teenage son’s blood to regenerate your own aging body, or torturing monkeys to death in the hopes of creating the Matrix, or trying to get a belligerent reality TV star elected president, you’re just not winning.
This makes it all the more ironic that Andreessen names as one of his so-called “enemies” those who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Frankly, there’s no better description of the “techno-optimist” crowd—a gaggle of out-of-touch tech bros who think their wealth gives them license to chart a future nobody else wants.
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