He also comes off as a really stupid man. He was trolled by..I can’t remember the details.. and I can no longer access New Yorker’s one free article.
Anyway Nicholas Carr skewered him here (which is where I read about that):
https://www.roughtype.com/?p=9020
I like to think of Marc Andreessen as the metaverse’s Statue of Liberty. He stands just outside the virtual world’s golden door, illuminating the surrounding darkness with a holographic torch, welcoming the downtrodden to a new and better life.
You might remember the colorful interview Andreessen gave to trickster Niccolo Soldo last spring. At one point in the exchange, the high-browed venture capitalist sketches out his vision of the metaverse and makes a passionate case for its superiority to what he calls “the quote-unquote real world.” His words have taken on new weight now, in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook is changing its name to Meta and embarking on the construction of an all-encompassing virtual world. Andreessen, an early Facebook investor and one of its directors since 2008, is a pal of Zuckerberg’s and has long had the entrepreneur’s ear. He is, it’s been said, “something of an Obi-Wan to Zuckerberg’s Luke Skywalker.”
Andreessen’s vision is far darker and far more radical, eschatological even. He believes the metaverse is where the vast majority of humanity will end up, and should end up. If the metaverse Zuckerberg presents for public consumption seems like a tricked-out open-world videogame, Andreessen’s metaverse comes off as a cross between an amusement park and a concentration camp.
But I should let him explain it. When Soldo asks, “Are we TOO connected these days?,” Andreessen responds:
Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege. … A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.
The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build — and we are building — online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as just more bad craziness from Big Tech’s fiercely adolescent mind. But that would be a mistake. For one thing, Andreessen is revealing his worldview and his ultimate goals here, and he has the influence and the resources to, if not create the future, at least push the future in the direction he prefers. As Tad Friend pointed out in “Tomorrow’s Advance Man,” a 2015 New Yorker profile of Andreessen, power in Silicon Valley accrues to those who can “not just see the future but summon it.” That’s a very small group, and Andreessen is in it. For another thing, Big Tech’s bad craziness has a tendency, as we’ve seen over the past twenty-odd years, to migrate into our everyday lives. We ignore it at our eventual peril.
(That sounds about right-some sort of loathesome open world game or a cross between a concentration camp and an amusement park. Current Affairs writer Stephen Prager had a piece about the type of mentality behind this:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-sick-world-of-prison-tycoon-games)
Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read as is the Tad Friend article if you can access it. Carr is one of the very rare tech critics coming out of that cottage industry of tech criticism whom I respect aside from Yasha Levine. Most others are basically Si Valley plants and shills:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
(I still use my IPhone since on the whole Apple is less creepy than Google, but it’s not enthusiastically/delusionally. That sounds like a faux curmudgeonly ad. It’s just that in the hostage situation that is the relationship with modern tech, I’d rather Apple didn’t do a “Boom!” with my dull data).
Levine who has pretty good instincts about bullshitters also skewered this creep Shahid Buttar (who is also a sexual harasser) when he was challenging Pelosi from the “left”. Levine is actual left. He probably would not fit DU rules so I don’t link to him directly. But he is an honest person and not a Russian plant or something. He really does attack all sides:
https://artistrightswatch.com/tag/yasha-levine/
The only good thing I have heard about the EFF is that they represented DU in some lawsuit. That aside they are basically libertarians who focus on the less important tech criticisms and attack the state more than the private sector.
This professor David Golumbia had a good piece about that in Medium. About how tech critics like Joy Buohlewimini focus only on the problems with the state never the private sector and this was before Trump turned the state into a joke/authoritarian one. He said that it’s specifically democratic states that critics like those sneakily attack. Can’t find it now but it was on Medium I think.
I like to boost these pieces because lousy tech criticism confuses the brain.
One day hopefully if we ever come to our senses as a species we will look back at the technocreeps and techno leeches/their enablers of this era and be shocked by the jokey front hiding such a dark interior.
That was actually the alt right strategy throughout. This fun and games vibe that confuses the head with this really dark underlying contract. Seriously..fuck those guys and their enablers. There is nothing funny or cute about any of it.
Nowadays, I exploit gallows humor because gallows humor is the “privilege” of the screwed over not of these nightmarish creeps. Cant stand a humorless life anyway..which is why I find the bleak, brainless faux humor of the alt right so dumb.
The left can..if not meme (never thought that shit was funny)…exploit humor. Most comedians are liberal/left leaning..and the ones that’s aren’t aren’t very funny. Hard to kick down and look cool and funny.
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