Many observers of the tech business are living in a constant bubble-phobia. The misadventures of the Dot.com-bubble around the millennium are still quite present in the memories of analysts, media pundits and (some) investors. People are yelling “Bubble” as soon as they see an inflated IPO or a small company being acquired by a larger one through honoring an unfathomably opulent price sticker.

But as most reasonable economists will tell you, there’s not a big sign of a bubble right now. Unlike the Dot.com bubble, this time there’s actual revenue to support the huge amount of money being thrown around. And yet, I still maintain that Silicon Valley is in a bubble. A different one. An non-financial one.

It seems that there are some pretty impenetrable glass walls around Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in California. Glass walls that distort the view of the outside world enough for some of its otherwise highly intelligent inhabitants to lose their footing in the real world. This may seem like stating the most obvious thing ever written on a QWERTY keyboard, but recently I just ran into an example of this phenomenon that took me by surprise.

I was reading one of Marc Andreessen’s rather long Twitter rants, which is something I quite enjoy doing. Even if he can’t contain himself within 140 characters, Andreessen is highly entertaining and inspiring, even if you disagree with him. Which I only do occasionally. But this particular rant struck me as peculiar.

I view Marc Andreessen as a bit of a genius, having basically built the web we know today. Yes, Tim Berners-Lee created the protocols and HTML, but it was Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina who created the first real browser, Mosaic, which brought images and text together in a user-friendly way, and later morphed into Netscape, which really started the web revolution. Since then, Andreessen has become one of Silicon Valley’s smartest investors, having been an early backer of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Zynga, Pinterest, Jawbone and many other successes.

In his rant, he was describing a techno-utopian world vision of the sort that I call bullshit on in my new book ‘Welcome to Computopia’. I want to believe in a world, where, as Andreessen put it, the means of production “are going to everyone”. I replied to him that it was true…in the West. And that in Africa, 320 million people still don’t have clean water, much less access to means of production. His reply? “Smartphones are on fire in Africa”.

Really? According to IDC, smartphones make up 18% of all cell phones on the African continent. That number is set to double over the next three to four years, taking it to 36%. Africa Telecoms Outlook has similar numbers. So yes, somewhat rapid growth. But from which level? Last year, there were roughly 650 million cell phone subscribers on the continent, which is approximately 58% of the population there. So at this moment, smartphones make up 18% of those 58%. Or in other words, only a little more than 10% of the population have smartphones. Even if that doubles over four years, it’s only going to be one in five Africans who owns a smartphone.

Add to that the question of access. Yes, there are 650 million cell phone subscribers in Africa. But as an example, only 15% of Sub-Saharan Africa is currently covered by mobile broadband. Take a look at a map. Sub-Saharan Africa is 75% of the entire continent…and only 15% of its population can even get a mobile data connection worth anything, much less afford a smartphone. The number is going to increase vastly in the next five years, but smartphones being “on fire”? Not so much.

Then consider the speeds. Where the rest of us in the west are going online from our smartphones through 4G, the expansion of mobile broadband in Africa will only be 3G far into the future. The problem is that the Internet is dominated by the west, and online services will therefore be optimized to those faster 4G speeds, leaving the entire continent of Africa at a disadvantage. And finally, when you look at a map of the submarine cables that criss-cross the planet, Africa has about 9 backbone connections. There are more than 400 between the US and Europe. So even if Africa could get enough smartphones to be on a par with the West, even if their mobile data coverage miraculously became ultrafast, they still wouldn’t be able to get to Internet destinations across continents at a reasonable speed.

So no, smartphones are not “on fire” and the means of production in the world is still squarely in the hands of the West, rather than “everyone”, as Andreessen stated. In the same conversation, he mentioned that tech had brought “billions out of poverty”. And he’s almost right. It’s more like A billion –singular — and it’s due to the fast economic growth in China and India. Here’s the problem with that: The income inequality in China is one of the worst among the world’s wealthy countries. So yeah, people have been brought out of poverty, but that still hasn’t empowered them in the way Andreessen states. And by even the most positive estimates, world poverty now stands at 21%. Think about that. If you’re in a room with 4 other people, one of you lives in poverty — statistically. Of course, that’s not the case, because you, like Marc Andreessen, probably live in a wealthy part of the world.

And that’s exactly the point.