It's alarming to see this particular blend of ideas without any historical acknowledgment. The mix of Nietzsche's ideas about the superman, a messianic belief in the transformative power of industry, and a paranoid fear and hatred of "wreckers" who would deny and destroy greatness all have an awfully dark history.
The part that gets me is the insistence on technology-as-purely-good-and-beneficial and an obsession with population growth (if you’ve not read to the end: yes, the population-growth stuff drops off a little in the middle, but by the end “obsession” is definitely a fair characterization) without ever addressing that technology is the reason population growth is leveling off.
I disagree with basically all of what he was getting at with those things, but the pointed failure to even note the tension there was downright funny by the end. Putting aside my material disagreements with the whole thrust of that argument, it’s just comically inept on its own terms.
“Technology is one of three ways to increase production, and another is population growth… uh, actually, I just noticed, as the alert reader may have, that that whole bit was dumb, it’s just technology… also population growth especially is very good… what do you mean, ‘and why is population growth declining’?”
What's funny about this is that another way to increase production is to improve conditions for working class people - free college, free medical care, protections against speculation on housing to allow for affordable housing, better transit options and urban design... these political choices would dramatically improve our operational abilities as a country, but wealthy people like Andreessen tend to oppose measures like this in favor of laissez faire policies. This ultimately limits his ability to serve as the visionary he clearly would like to be.
Yeah to be honest I think approvingly quoting the author of "The Fascist Manifesto" probably well exceeds the cutoff for "dogwhistle." At this point the only thing left is for a16z to start a youth brigade and invade Ethiopia.
Marc did a podcast chatting about tv shows with fascist and white supremamcist Richard Hanania, so maybe I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to see that.
This is very troubling, because Hanania is a genuine white supremacist.
But it turns out he hid it well, and that HuffPost expose only came out two years after the Andreessen podcast, so it's reasonable to think he didn't know.
And on the podcast Andreessen makes a pretty strong criticism of the Right (as well as the left):
> And the main principle of the right is that it hates the left. This is the old Buckley thing: the role of conservatism is to stand athwart history yelling stop. Which from the right you view as all social change happening around us is from the left, driving things further to the left. They’re all leading societies in directions the left thinks they should go, and that those things are bad because they’re against tradition, history, the way things have always worked and things that have been proven.
> So I think technology kind of gets trapped up in this dynamic. To your point, the left hates technology because they hate capitalism because they hate markets because they’re anti-egalitarian, we kind of slot naturally into that critique. And the right hates technology because it seems like technology is a tool of the left.
I wasn't sure if this audience would recognize the term ‘accelerationist', but yes. Of those on HN who do recognize the term, I wonder how many would consider that a good thing.
Back in the day we had another word for accelerationist groups: apocalyptic cults.
