Marc Andreessen as Avatar for Societal Decay
How one venture capitalist represents everything wrong with social media
This weekend, billionaire venture capitalist and professional conehead cosplayer Marc Andreessen got into a fight with the pope. The pope posted an incredibly inflammatory tweet that said “Technology sure can be cool! But you should, perhaps, consider ethics and morality and stuff as you develop it!”, and Andreessen took exception, ridiculing the pope with a meme response:
Surprisingly, mocking the worldwide leader of the Catholic Church wasn’t a popular sentiment. Lots of folks took exception, even people deep inside tech world. But Andreessen doubled down on criticism from accounts like ‘growing_daniel’ with the same mocking meme format:
Others expressed confusion about why Marc would be upset in the first place - the pope’s message was literally just “think carefully about how you develop technology, because it impacts a lot of people”. Daniel ventured a theory in response to Andreessen’s mockery, posting “Marc primarily funds gambling apps, cheating apps, and bot farms. He does not want you to build things that are actually good for society.” Maybe he thought the pope was going after people like him? Marc wasn’t done yet though - take a guess how he responded to this latest criticism.
After he posted the same meme response a half-dozen times, virtually all of tech twitter proceeded to bully Andreessen relentlessly until he eventually deleted all the posts in shame.
Now, I don’t want to say that Marc Andreessen is single-handedly causing the collapse of society. That would be a slight exaggeration. But I do believe this one incident shows that Andreessen is at the nexus of all the ways society is decaying. He’s not responsible. He’s just representative. He’s the mascot of decay, the guy who’s always there when the negative trends accelerate, cheering them on and pushing things downhill faster.
What types of decay are we talking about? Let’s get specific.
Everything is Gambling
A few weeks ago, in a post titled Does the Social Contract Even Exist Any More?, we talked about how every startup these days seems to be designed to undermine the social contract. One of those startups was ‘Coverd’, an app that allows you to gamble on your credit card charges. Another was ‘Cheddr’1, which says it aims to be the ‘TikTok of sports wagering’. Both are funded by Andreessen’s venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Nothing says “building the future” quite like being able to play roulette to determine whether or not you’ll have to pay that OnlyFans charge.
Antisocial uses of AI
That post also mentioned another startup called DoubleSpeed, which allows you to control thousands of social media AI bots at once and uses the tagline ‘Never pay a human again’. Charming! It’s funded by Andreessen. You may have heard some online controversy about another startup named Cluely, which claims it will develop an AI interface to help you ‘cheat on anything’ - tests, interviews, blind dates, etc. Guess who Cluely just raised $15 million in seed funding from? Andreessen.
Every time there’s a startup with incredibly obvious negative consequences for society - another useless crypto ecosystem, some new part of life to turn into a sportsbook, a new way to use AI to undermine human trust - Andreessen seems to be the man funding it. Perhaps that really is why he felt the need to attack the pope. Any call for decency in the development of new technology is clearly not something he believes in. But even the method of his response reveals something about him.
Everyone’s brain is fried by social media
Andreessen clearly reads too much Twitter and follows social media too closely. The founding thesis of this blog is that posting is the most powerful force in the universe, and that even billionaires can have their brains deeply poisoned by the infinite scroll if they’re not careful. Andreessen seems to be no exception.
When the pope posts a generic message about morality, he takes it as a personal attack. And when Andreessen responded to mock the pope (and then later, mock his critics) he used a meme of a recent Sydney Sweeney interview. This is because March is far too online, because he processes current events through the filter of memes, and also because:
Everything is now culture war bullshit
Andreessen, in recent years, is perhaps best known for his essay It’s Time to Build, in which he bemoans our inability to build new things quickly and efficiently. The essay is a spiritual precursor to the abundance movement, and it’s very good. I am deeply on Marc Andreessen’s side when he makes the basic point that society should aim to build more things like vaccines, housing, manufacturing, and new technologies.
Andreessen has, over the past few years, been engaged in a battle with people he calls ‘decels’, the enemies of growth.2 He’s also a supporter of Donald Trump. But Trump’s actual policies are killing manufacturing in America, slashing scientific research, and lowering economic growth, and Andreessen has almost nothing to say about it for two reasons. First, because he’s benefited greatly from the crony capitalist move of Trump gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help his sketchy fintech companies out. But just as importantly, because like many tech billionaires, the root of his pro-Trump sentiment is cultural, not economic. He’s tired of being lectured.
It’s not an accident that the meme he’s responding with comes from a viral interview where Sydney Sweeney was asked to address the ‘good genes/jeans’ controversy. That was the political right’s favorite culture war battle this year. Marc is so steeped in the culture war and so terminally online that he now thinks in terms of ragebait memeslop. Everything comes back to the wokes vs. the anti-wokes.
Vice Signaling and the end of virtue
Yet another topic we’ve explored here in depth - where prominent celebrities used to signal their virtue, they’ve now switched signaling their vice. Virtue is dead, morality is for pussies, long live the worst shit imaginable.
Sympathetically, Andreessen and others like him are simply reacting to years of being yelled at by overly woke progressives. They’re just refusing to be lectured any further. But in that refusal, they’ve started making an equal and opposite error. They now assume that any idea that’s transgressive, that’s edgy, or that pisses off the morality police must be good. It’s the nihilistic idea that anything that makes the woke gatekeepers mad must be based and worth defending. No criticism can ever have a legitimate point.
This is how you get JD Vance defending the “I love Hitler” crowd and it’s why Andreessen reacted so viscerally to the pope’s idea that morality should be a part of developing new technologies. It’s the attitude that says ‘Because someone gave me an annoying, moralizing lecture, I don’t have to pay attention to morality’.
NIMBYism
This one isn’t really relevant to the topic at hand, but I can’t help but point out that Marc “It’s time to build” Andreessen is a massive hypocrite who personally appeals to his local government to stop housing from being built. It’s funny how the worst people always end up being NIMBYs.
Technology is at its best when it helps us be more human. Technology can help connect us to more people, do more beautiful things, accomplish more, and be greater than what we previously were. It should enable the average person to lead a fuller, richer, freer life. But tech doesn’t automatically do that. It can also hurt people, isolate people, promote extremism and harm the social fabric. And Andreessen just doesn’t seem to give a shit. Caring about negative consequences is cringe. Morality is for wimps. The number went up, so what’s your problem bro?
I talk about a lot of different things on this blog. The rise of gambling in every part of society, increasing tribalism, constructive vs destructive uses of AI, the way that social media can poison your brain, the anti-morality of vice signaling, how political echo chambers form, and the dominance of petty culture war content.
Sometimes I feel a bit crazy, trying to connect the dots and convince my audience that all these topics are related. But Marc has done me the great favor of wrapping them all together. This single online slap fight touches nearly every concept we talk about here, effortlessly cycling through every negative thing social media can do to our society and our discourse, like an ouroboros made entirely of shit.
Marc Andreessen isn’t the cause of our collective societal decay.3 But he is on decay’s side. The deep irony of the situation is that I am, in the larger picture, supposedly on Marc’s team. My politics are pro-growth politics. I desperately want society to build more housing, more clean energy, more infrastructure. I’m a techno-optimist and think that technology can do amazing things to push society forward. I think “it’s time to build” is a great message. But I’m also trying my hardest to be intellectually honest, so I’m not going to lie to my audience and tell them that the Cheating At Scale app or Army O’ Bots service or the Gamble-fy Everything business plan are good things. I’m in favor of abundance, but what we choose to build in abundance matters - and casinos are not the same as vaccines.
Marc Andreessen has become the representative of technology without a soul, technology that does not care what impact it has on humanity. Andreessen has no ultimate vision of the good, no purpose for his pro-growth politics other than to own his tribal enemies. And because he’s as internet-addicted as the rest of us he is literally incapable of self-reflection in the face of mild criticism, instead lashing out like a 4chan poster with culture war-inflected memes.
Maybe I’m just another one of the annoying woke lecturers, but I think we should expect more from the billionaires who control the future of technological innovation. Until we get it, Andreessen will stand as the egg-shaped avatar of how social media and technology are undermining the social contract all around us.
Despite all the VC funding, both apps are tragically too poor to afford a full set of vowels
For deceleration, the opposite of Andreessen’s own techno-accelerationist attitude
Or maybe he is, given that Andreessen was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and several other social media sites collectively responsible for the trends we’re seeing today.
Andressen feels like Elon without ketamine - he doesn’t swing chainsaw or anything but his brain is equally fried by social media and his deep resentment to tech employee class.
And tbh this deep divide between tech employee class (very socially liberal) and some employer class (not all fwiw) is understudied I feel.
If anything, the absurd obsession of some tech companies to layoffs even after their financial numbers started to improve (or doing better than ever) - especially Meta keeps layoff people while they continue to hire new people (esp senior + level) is really absurd
Feels like there is a pendulum swing beginning here, but it's one from a larger clock than from woke to today. Societal decay (very moralist language which I support) has been an ongoing issue since maybe the 70s (so many problems find their start there), and that decay has accelerated with social media and Andreessen figures. Even woke had strong elements of this decay in that it made victimhood a virtue and ended up with "defund the police".
The fact that we're talking in a much older moralist tone of societal decay, and, hopefully eventually, of societal rejuvenation or renaissance, is perhaps a sign the pendulum is swinging back. That a potential event marking the start of this involves the Pope against a vice promoting billionaire is just *chef kiss*.