The World Eaters
Marc Andreessen is making a terrible mistake.
In 2011, surveying the ascent of software-enabled companies like Amazon and Facebook, Marc Andreessen gave us one of the great lines of the 21st Century:
“Software is eating the world.”
Seriously – that is just fantastic literary work. Software, in reality, is weightless and unseen. But Andreessen’s line transforms it, not merely into something physical but into something doing the most physical of things. And the “world” that software was devouring wasn’t really our world, of course, but just a bunch of old, big, sluggish companies, and who is immune to the schadenfreude of seeing an old, big, sluggish company get its comeuppance? It is irony with a side of more irony and the whole thing is just – to stretch the metaphor – delicious.
Or, at least, it was. For the same Marc Andreessen has announced his intention to make it all literal, writing:
We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.
and then following through on that announcement by stating that he would exercise his one vote and his billion dollar fortune on behalf of Donald Trump. Marc Andreesen has decided to feed the world to software.
Because that is, of course, how one-issue voting works. We don’t get to vote for issues; instead, we vote for candidates. And so, whatever issues matter to us, we must translate them into a vote for or against a particular candidate. And a lot can happen in the course of that translation, because, when we vote for a particular candidate, we are necessarily and irrevocably voting for everything that candidate has done and everything that candidate will do. We have to take the entire package.
To Andreessen’s credit, he shows his work – you can read all about his reasoning in his article, titled “Little Tech Agenda'' and in his podcast, which manages to be titled both “2024 Election: Time to Choose!” and “The Little Tech Agenda: Why We Support Trump.” And further to Andreessen’s credit, he believes in and can make a good argument for how technology is a lever that we can use to lift all of humanity to a better future. But his arguments also tend to be about what conditions will help the companies in which he has invested, and he tends to conflate saving humanity with optimizing his investments.
For example, the Little Tech Agenda – and, for that matter, Andreessen’s earlier Techno-Optimist Manifesto – feels like it gets a lot right when it is talking in the broadest generalizations about the importance of technology and the dangers of government capture by incumbent market participants. But when you boil it down to the actual things that have tipped Andreessen toward supporting Trump, all of the “save humanity” shine rubs off pretty quickly. Andreessen’s complaints are:
The SEC is using aggressive and unpredictable means to mis-regulate crypto companies.
The Biden administration issued an executive order that mis-regulates the development of AI.
The Biden administration proposed a new tax rule that would tax unrealized gains by individuals with more than $100 million in assets.
There is a reasonable discussion that one could have about the wisdom of each of these actions, but there isn’t a limb in the world strong enough to support you if you want to get out there to argue that humanity’s future rests on any of this. It is far, far easier to see how these actions would impose financial costs on Marc Andreesson.
And, look, I’m not saying that Andreesson shouldn’t disagree with and work to oppose the idea that his crypto company portfolio would be regulated in a way that he thinks is wrong or the idea that his AI portfolio would be regulated in a way that he thinks is wrong or the idea that his billion dollar fortune would be taxed in a way that he thinks is wrong.
What I am saying is that, by deciding that Trump wins his support in exchange for a dinner together (literally how this endorsement came about and an amazing bit of unintentional irony), Marc Andreessen has decided that this is the only thing that matters – everything else, everyone else, all the world gets tossed into the maws of software and swallowed.
It is either a uniquely unfortunate misunderstanding about what it means to vote for a candidate or it is an unfortunately all too familiar case of a person with power rationalizing a decision that prioritizes preserving that power.
In either case, we should not allow Andreessen – or the host of others who have found their way toward an accommodation with Trump because of one issue or the other – to hide the reality that they are supporting all of Trump:
Marc Andreessen supports the candidate who took babies out of the arms of their mothers in order to look tough at the border.
Marc Andreessen supports the candidate who tried to convince the country that Covid was no big deal because he was afraid that a bad economy would hurt his re-election chances.
Marc Andreessen supports the candidate who wants to destroy NATO and idolizes Putin.
Marc Andreessen supports the candidate who tried to overthrow an election and whose supporters killed police officers and vandalized the capitol to try to do the same.
Marc Andreessen supports every single act that Donald Trump has taken and would take to denigrate and destroy the values that I believe Marc Andreessen himself holds.
It is not the manifesto that Marc Andreessen wants to write, but it is the one that he is writing.