Marc Andreessen’s Crude and Nuanced Tech Cynicism
Criticism is hard
On Saturday night, serial-tweet-lover Marc Andreessen started a list.
Andreessen ought to know tech cynicism — he’s been around for awhile. Indeed as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, his career more or less spans the life of the web as we know it.
Today, Andreessen is a venture capitalist. He’s half of the name of Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose holdings represent a range of successful tech start-ups. They put money into Skype, Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, and Instagram. They also put money into Groupon and Zynga, but you can win ‘em all (actually, since both companies IPO’d, their stocks falling to 1/3 of peak valuation doesn’t really matter to Andreessen Horowitz — the exit is the win).
In short, Andreessen has seen some shit.
Embedded tweets take up too much space, so I’m gonna go ahead and paste in the rest of his list by hand.
3/Normal people will use it, but it’s trivial. 4/It will never replace [legacy]. 5/It will replace [legacy], which is why the world is going to hell. 6/Yes, fine, but just wait until [big company] does it. 7/Yes, fine, but just wait until [hypothetical better version that doesn’t actually exist] does it. 8/I can’t believe how much money those kids made from that. 9/It’s a clear and obvious bubble. 10/Whatever, innovation is dead.
That’s it. That’s the list.
Marc Andreessen thinks “Whatever, innovation is dead” is the most nuanced form of tech cynicism available.
You know, it happens. Andreessen is a busy man, what with all the innovation and disruption he’s got to fund and then exit from. When your days are that packed, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. If you have to spend all your time immersed in the promise of tech, your cynic muscles can atrophy and even the crudest cynicism might seem nuanced.
But we can do better. Here are a some additions.
11/ Normal people will use it, and then they’ll stop because it is a fad.
12/ It is as vulnerable to the logic of disruption as [legacy].
13/ It will prioritize speed of implementation over security, offering users’ personal data to hackers, advertisers, and spies on a silver platter.
14/ It will succeed long enough for a successful exit, then crash and burn, enriching VCs but doing little to improve the world as a whole.
15/ Although it preaches revolution, it will end up reproducing and empowering the structures of injustice that dominate today.
16/ It will intensify the growing concentration of wealth and power that appears to be endemic to economies which take advantage of network effects.
17/ Because it is being implemented in a country where food and healthcare are treated as luxuries rather than basic human rights, its success will multiply the misery in the world as it lays waste to [legacy].
18/ It is being created and sold to a tiny cadre of wealthy inter-connected players who are so convinced of their own intelligence that it doesn’t occur to them to ask around and find out the needs of other people.
19/ It will be powered by ads.
20/ It will do nothing to slow the headlong rush of global civilization into any number of catastrophes which would in turn render it irrelevant.
21/ It preys on and amplifies human weakness.
22/ It will have unintended consequences.
23/ It will do nothing to mitigate the chaos it leaves in its wake.
