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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.