My Dinner with [Marc] Andreessen
prospect.org
prospect.org
We need to give credit where credit is due.
Andreesen lucked into being the first person to successfully create the world's most inevitable and obvious product. He did nothing but take a swing at the right time and get traction thanks to the taxpayer funded educational establishment he was in.
Following that luck he mismanaged the business to the point of total failure, slowing the development of the independent web and handing the reigns to Microsoft. An error we're only now truly emerging from thanks to the rise of mobile and the unmasking of Google for what it is.
In the interim he took the money he lucked into to write manifestos praising fascists as thought leaders and elevated people like Zuckerberg whose products have fueled genocide, the spreading of lies and insurrection.
Andreesen is a parasite who thinks the animal he's feeding from is dependent on him.
"he mismanaged the business to the point of total failure"
"Google for what it is"
"write manifestos praising fascists as thought leaders"
ah, right.
“do your own research”.
(also not the name i'm used to)
I certainly loved Netscape 3 back in the day.
> I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
> And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
> “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
Prague or Seattle, or, villages hours away from each.
(Email in bio if you ever want to have a tea, or beer)
Only a "perhaps unfairly"?
Is it impossible that two people simply met, fell in love, and got married, or that parents wouldn't want to marry their kids to other people of like passions and values?
Also - using soylent, oculus and crypto to paint Andreesen as a bad investor (0 for 3 as he says) is a weird take. Come on - do better if your going to try and take my time.
FWIW I am impartial to VC and A16z but if your going to take a shot, you can do much better than that.
I agree, I stopped reading after this.
However Andreessens habit of pumping and dumping shitcoins to retail investors would need closer scrutinity.
Capitalism and ethics sometimes come into conflict with each other, and Marc is certainly an unscrupulous capitalist. Be that as it may, I try not to lose sleep over what Marc does, because doing so would be a waste of my time.
> I rang the bell; an Asian man in khakis and a sweater answered. I snapped into guest mode, introducing myself enthusiastically. He responded with an odd coldness. Then I realized he was not a fellow guest but, I guess you’d say, the butler. A hundred years ago, he might have been referred to as “houseboy” and greeted me in a tux.
A butler has always been a person of authority, expertise, and responsibility. Why "houseboy"? Because he's Asian?
> I reflected, perhaps unfairly, that marrying off their daughters to young men of talent and fortune is often how such families institutionalize their power.
The couple were in their late 30s when they married, and it is unclear why she would have no agency (or other value) here.
And many other snide remarks designed to show how blasé the author finds any rich person. He himself has brains and a soul, and they don't.
I do give small towns and communities far more credit than Andreessen does, let alone his guest's dreadful comment.
It's hard to miss the racist overtones of the article.
You bring up a good point that I don't think I was able to finger what bothered me: "And many other snide remarks designed to show how blasé the author finds any rich person. He himself has brains and a soul, and they don't."
I think small towns have their place and community - I also can understand how you might despise small towns if you were intelligent and relentlessly victimized growing up (don't know if thats the case for Marc). It isn't easy being intelligent in places where intelligence isn't valued or is even victimized.
FWIW - I'm not saying that comment is justified at all if it is even accurate.
facepalm
The author describes Marc Andreessen's Gilded Age slash Roaring 20s lifestyle and attitudes, and then suggests that a hundred years ago, this person may have been referred to as "houseboy".
Marc Andreessen is the hypothetical person from a hundred years ago. It's a scathing criticism of Marc Andreessen.
But a hundred years ago, a houseboy and a butler were still very different people. To say that a hundred years ago this highly competent professional would have been a houseboy is, in effect, to call him one now: a no less scathing (and unintended) criticism of the butler.
And they are rated as "Strong Left category of bias and as Mixed Reliability/Opinion OR Other Issues in terms of reliability" (https://adfontesmedia.com/the-american-prospect-bias-and-rel...).
This explains the tone / bias throughout the article.
If I submit a post, and the submit button takes me to that post already having been submitted... currently HN counts that as an auto-upvote.
However, as in this case, the post was already flagged by users. I have vouch permissions, but now that I have auto-upvoted it, I cannot vouch for it.
It would make a lot more sense to auto-vouch, not auto-upvote the post, if I have that permission.
Thanks, and sorry if I have misunderstood any of the magic. Always appreciate the site, and your guys' work.
Personally, and not related to your feature comment, I think this piece was correctly flagged and I flagged it myself. I'm a big fan of Perlstein's work but this piece is a fragment of some three part thing and in its current unfinished form is just the right combination of fluffy and spiky to produce mostly reflexive, grumpy comments - which you can see in thread.
As far as your flag, fair enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20527986
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_banners/1154160128381181952/15...
aside: In my fuzzy memory, I had confused you for Scott, the other mod(?) mentioned in the New Yorker story, whose handle I never picked up.
I was vaguely aware of Andreessen as the guy who invented the first web browser, a socially useful accomplishment by any measure and a story I had long kept in the back of my mind as an outstanding proof text that useful invention often flourishes best when government subsidizes it, socialism-style—given that Andreessen had created it while a student at a public institution, the University of Illinois. Then I boned up on what he was up to now, courtesy of a gargantuan 13,000-word profile from two years earlier in The New Yorker.Are there plutocrats in the room now?
There's a certain kind of absolutist banner-waving people use to communicate with ingroups that is obviously foul to someone hearing it out of context.
That last manifesto he wrote was funny to me and an excellent example.
As someone who had been in LLMs/AI art since 2020, it came across as Marc wanted to signal their appreciation for the biggest in-group during the start of the first Eternal Summer of AI. (e/acc)
The way it went overboard repeating hardcore edgy ideas, untempered by any reality because they came from 200 follower anons, suffered heavily from that in-group absolutist communication leading to out-group confusion.
And it is all too much peering into eachother's minds for my taste. At the end of the day, guy wrote blog post because he was excited.