Me in The Nation: Marc Andreessen’s Dangerously Unexamined Life
Hey! My latest piece in The Nation is about Marc Andreessen's war on introspection and how it conveniently absolves him from accountability for some of his, er, more problematic investments in the startup sector of the military industrial complex.
Here's the lede, which should hopefully inspire you to go read the whole thing:
Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz, the chief polemicist of the tech right, and a man with an impossibly large head, has a confession to make: He engages in “zero” introspection, or at least “as little as possible,” as he proudly announced on a recent podcast. The whole idea of self-examination, he explained, is basically a Freudian fad— an invention dating from around 1910 that serious people have no business indulging. “If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” he explained cheerfully. The podcast host congratulated him for his bold stance.
The psychology of this is certainly interesting. The politics of it are alarming.
Andreessen is not only a Brotopian – a tech billionaire with antidemocratic leanings – but a Gold Star Brotopian whose firm has invested in the sorts of so-called startup cities I talk about in this newsletter, including California Forever, a project to build a city of 400,000 in rural Solano County north of San Francisco that is limping slowly forward, very slowly, in the face of massive (and completely understandable) local resistance. I'll be writing more about its strange saga in the future.
