Marc Andreessen should need no introduction, but I’ll do one anyway. He helped code the first widely used graphical web browser, Mosaic, which as I see it makes him one of the inventors of the internet. He co-founded Netscape and various other companies. He also co-founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (with Ben Horowitz), also known as A16Z, one of the country’s
No Gish Gallop can be answered completely except at book length, so I'll just mention a few of the worst points.
* The left-wing, right-wing tech dichotomy.
* The emphasis on government holding back business. Damn that government keeping us from making slavery more profitable!
* "Our public sector hates our private sector and wants to destroy it..." Yeah, right.
* The absence of discussion of problems of power, monopoly and externalities. Such as the dominance of the big information companies.
* Wow, we have supercomputers in our pockets! But that doesn't solve the big social issues or solve the stranglehold of control over our lives by plutocrats or autocrats: if anything, it makes them stronger.
* Crypto is not needed for any sort of incentive system except maybe illegal ones.
* "we should build in the next decade new technologies, businesses, and industries that break these price curves", as opposed to the anti-NIMBY and other policy solutions Noah is fond of.
On the bright side:
* I agree with his view of risks of Chinese technical dominance.
The "gish gallop" is just the interview format. I sent him 10 questions in a batch instead of going back-and-forth like I usually do.
The left-wing/right-wing dichotomy is wrong IMO. He's probably thinking of AI as Project Cybersyn or something; I don't think it works like that. Meanwhile, leftist activism is highly decentralized.
He's partly right about government holding business back; I think he's too deregulatory, but I do think often we put the *wrong* regulations in place.
I think he clearly does recognize the problem of monopoly and power, as evidenced by his line about "a Navy who acts like pirates".
As for crypto, it's up in the air, but I wouldn't bet against it!
> The left-wing/right-wing dichotomy is wrong IMO. He's probably thinking of AI as Project Cybersyn or something; I don't think it works like that. Meanwhile, leftist activism is highly decentralized.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that AI tends to support centralization & crypto tends to support decentralization, but centralization currently tends to favor the left more than decentralization does, due to tech companies being predominantly progressive.
Maybe next interview, you can start by asking "What's your most important idea, and let's delve into it." Otherwise people like him naturally expand into a Gish gallop. On the other hand, who am I to give you interview advice? I like almost everything you've done.
Of course government holds business back. Otherwise we'd all be microchipped slaves. It's an essential function to limit the depredations that capitalism would otherwise commit because they are profitable. It doesn't matter if 50% of regulations are wrong, as long as the most important ones are right.
The navy/pirate trope is ridiculously sloppy: but you notice he doesn't suggest ANYTHING to stop the navy from acting like pirates. I suspect that like most businessmen, he views monopoly as personal opportunity and doesn't care about the problems for others.
And to reiterate, Crypto is not needed for any sort of incentive system except maybe illegal ones.
Hi Mike, You clearly seem to have a better alternative to decentralise computing, gaming, digitial assets, real-estate, everything unfragmentable yet. Is it something you prefer over blockchain/crypto ? Also, there are some other narratives to crypto other than incentivisation (although its one of the exclusive and important ones). Do you consider them to be reasonable ?
If 50% of the regulations are wrong, we're probably getting out-competed by adversaries. Also, you're just as unbalanced in favor of state dominance as he is in favor of private dominance. It's naive to pretend the will of the state completely aligns with the will of the people, because different people will different things; China is a perfect example of that. Strong government is great.....if you're Han. Likewise if you're in the favored voting blocs of America (coastal professionals if you're blue, southern laborer if you're red).
Crypto is necessary if you're not in those groups.
Marc has never struck me as a great thinker, quite the opposite, so I was surprised at Noah's praise.
The software parts are ok, but nothing new.
I do like that he supports remote work and understands it can be effective. Too many voices are calling for getting back to the office based on nothing more than wanting people in the office because of "culture" or "effective coffee breaks" or similar claptrap.
It's quite obvious that far from all work can be done remotely, a lot of work must be local. Physically building things, logistics etc. But most if not all of the local work is outside of an office location. Offices aren't really needed that much anymore.
This is an equally warped view of government regulation and its role in providing protection without even mentioning the cost. The private sector will continue to take on greater and greater responsibility for the societal well being without being coerced by the government. Meanwhile the public sector will continue to grow at greater cost producing inefficient at best and harmful at worst "goods"
Considering that I didn't state my view, it looks to me as if you are attempting to use some mysterious superpower to plumb the depths of my psyche.
In the mean time, please cite some historical examples of the private sector taking on responsibility for the societal well being, and why we are so badly off despite this benificence. (As long as you avoid Manichean "it's government's fault for all evil conspiracy theories.)
Corporations have taken an entirely different posture on these issues in recent times. I'm sure all thanks to you and NY times readers blanket cynicism regarding their behavior. Truly a driving force for us.
Posture doesn't heal the sick, build roads or keep schools open. Government does.
Corporations have done everything they can to reduce their costs by not paying taxes, paying starvation wages and not taking responsibility for anything outside of their companies. In fact it has been their creed they aren't responsible.
It's nice they talk about change but unless they actually do something it doesn't matter.
What they should do as a step one is to not oppose but promote new fair tax laws for corporations and then pay their taxes. They aren't doing that. They still lobby to kill these changes.
I completely agree. He breezed right past the idea of happiness with a shrug. That's not a minor issue. Putting aside questions of a "higher good", it also has implications for how things will play out on the ground.
When will you develop sufficient reading comprehension to realize that I was criticizing the interviewee (not Noah himself). And I do at times disagree with Noah, and tell him so. I'm not a sycophant.
“Yeah right” is all the rebuttal needed for such a stupid conspiracy theory.
I’ll note that nowhere in this discussion of technooptimism does he address the fundamental flaw of technology, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power. Virtually every internet company agglomerates success at a scale virtually unheard of in the analog world other than yesteryear’s imperial trading companies.
His skipping over the idea of valuing happiness in product development is similar in mindset to skipping over the idea of whether the fruits of this growth have actually benefitted society. He speaks glowingly about the opportunities for knowledge workers but ignores the existence of the much larger economically stagnant pool of service workers on whom their lives depend. Government is something holding back tech giants from achieving even greater success instead of restraining companies’ socially irresponsible practices.
Finally, there is the nod to the capacity of software to impact the experience and function of the material world, but not the acceptance of market failures such as the gravitation of the world’s greatest minds to finance and apps’ attention economy rather than climate. I’d love to hear someone be challenged on why Bezos and Musk think space travel is where to put their legacy rather than securing a safe planet for their descendants. How can tech improve our future in a capitalist incentive structure if the greatest money making opportunities - like crypto - are orthogonal to our well-being?
This is what I think every time I hear these arguments. Either you can live in an environment that gives you value based on how much value you provide, or you can live in an environment that rewards you value based on the will of who controls the environment.
MA has encouragingly identified the most important factor in areas of unreasonably rising costs - inadequate/dysfunctional IT in: health care, higher ed, pharma, real estate/construction. One suspects that the next-largest factor is waste and over-compensation (euphemistically-speaking!)
I am a Japanese college student, and I love startups.
I just read this post and learned a lot of things.
As a Japanese who loves startups, I'd like to let Japanese people know more about this blog. So, could you please give me permission to translate your blog into Japanese and publish it?
Re: "a Navy that acts like a pirate", that's not too far from "a police force that acts like a gang", as vividly illustrated in The Wire, and fairly regularly in our modern news reports.
Several non-fans of MA in the comments here, but I personally like his style. Simplistic in parts, but a techno-optimism that I identify with wholeheartedly. Thanks NS for the interview.
One comment on Substack - I agree that the model has created an explosion of writer creativity, but I think it might be short-lived. Frontrunners like NS and Matt Y may be raking it in, but soon there will be so many people on Substack that readers will begin to balk at the $10/mo everyone wants for their newsletter. Some sort of consolidation is bound to happen. Noah lucked out on this one IMO, or was prescient enough to grab it while he could.
Matt Taibbi branded his substack as a news site. While he's good enough to do it by himself (he writes best-selling books too) and that'sthe main content right now, his goal seems to be to bring in other writers/creators under his banner.
Which would kinda turn things back to the old subscription newspaper model without the ads. (?)
Do most Substack writers actually expect to make substantial money from it? As you say, there is a limited demand for those blogs which are mostly or entirely paywalled, and most people expecting to make money by writing these will be disappointed, but this should already be well-known. People who aren't expecting or requiring much money (either leaving their blog entirely free or paywalling only a few posts) wouldn't be subject to this, & I don't see why their efforts would decline much faster than those of previous, free bloggers.
"the systematic failure of virtually all public sector entities around the world (the formerly high functioning Asian nations are failing to vaccinate quickly) ... both political parties and their elected representatives are busily savaging the US technology industry every way they possibly can"
Conflating the technology industry at large with big tech monopolists in such an inaccurate way is disappointing. Marc seems very angry at government, and I can't figure out why. Is he being denied regulatory approval for one or more projects? It seems very personal in the way he describes the public sector as failing.
Which sector has been and will likely to continue to place housing, education, and healthcare out of reach of more and more people? It's not the public sector buying up housing units and keeping them unoccupied as investments. We let the market set the salaries of university administrators, not bureaucrats working to optimize budget allocations, and healthcare is a prime example of such corrupt regulatory capture that we take it as a given that insurance clerks who didn't go to medical school are given the power of life and death over medical doctors when deciding whether or not to approve their claims.
Those are private sector failings indicating the need for more policy and regulation, not less.
"Marc seems very angry at government, and I can't figure out why."
That is a standard business and investor's attitude: check any Chamber of Commerce. It is obvious to most businessmen that they'd be able to save money on workers, on safety requirements, on taxes if only "government would get out of the way". For example, that pesky government says they cannot have slaves any more! And they can't dump into rivers and oceans nor pollute the air. His big fear would be that beyond externalities in the physical world, there would be externalities in the financial and software worlds (which also have commons) that government will need to regulate.
Marc - "government does bad stuff and limits being able to good stuff"
Mike - "business does bad stuff and fights governments being able to do good stuff"
Me - you're both right - Anyone who has worked with either businesses or the government will know that organizations of all types are capricious, frustrating to work with, and often limit the good others do for personal and petty gain.
Human nature in a rival civilization, but how is human nature in a non rival civilization? The rival civilization force and then money forced the kind of ego economy that we have today, but collaboration of millions or billions of people now it's possible and an eco glocal civilization may be emerging from this shift.
Now we can monetize open source technology and mobilize a global ecosystem without trust, that is without corruptible people that amazed huge amounts of power by the topology of the systems we designed last centuries, like centralized banking, centralized government, etc. It's a failure of imagination to think that it is impossible to break from the rival civilization pattern, the is a lot to rethink for an eco future, a new scientific paradigm is emerging in front of our eyes, that means new cosmology and new social structures that originate from the "new" "truth" or better said the new and updated version of mitology. New things seems that are old thinks well forgotten.
Human nature as we know in our civilization is a fraction of possible concius states.
So I agree with Marc, the world needs to be rebuilt and regenerated, that as monarchical system was disrupted by the reduction on cost of producing and distributing writings in large scale that came from the invention of them press, effectively democratizing that technology, or political system comes from it, in there next 30 years we will need to rethink our political system as the whole of our economy. Next generations will expect full transparency now that we have the technology, blockchain, and yes they are educating themselves and freeing themselves from institutionalized dogma that creates a non thinking mass of people. Interesting times coming!!!
Marc needs to be challenged on his firm's usage of deception and gaslighting to promote cryptocurrency and the significant harms this has done.
The latest balderdash is the claim by Katie Haun, one of his partners, that China is going all in on cryptocurrency. This is false. The central bank digital currency is nothing at all like cryptocurrency. Earlier examples include claims implying greater efficiency than other payment mechanisms.
"Our public sector hates our private sector and wants to destroy it" I think this is unfair. I don't see a lot of public sector actors motivate by the hate of the public sector. I certainly see the public sector worried about ceding too much power to private actors, especially those with behaviors that lean monopolistic, but that line just came off as libertarian hyperbole. I would argue that China's public sector hates it's private sector in that the Chinese authorities retain the right and the means to subsidize (or straight up own), influence, control and shut down its private sector in a way that US regulator can't. It's not like China is going to give that power up anytime soon, and while I'm sure there are champions of regulation that would like a lot more power to influence and even shutdown industries they see as problematic, our inherent federalism and rights due process keep that urge in check just fine. The "love" the Chinese public sector has for its private sector is mostly institutionalized cronyism and structural control.
That being said, the interview is a great glimpse into the thinking of a towering figure in tech, and I enjoyed it.
This is just brilliant. If all the tech leaders were like Mark we would be parsecs away from where we now. We would not be in a situation where part of people impose something on others just because they do not like what those others do. Instead, we would end up with people just helping other people achieve what they really want.
I don’t buy the Bay Area vs East Coast thing anymore.
I’m sure back in the 90s the Bay was great and very very different than besuited East Coast. But the cultural difference is much less distinct now, and also the Bay Area is much worse to live in.
It’s not like there aren’t a bunch of hackers in Cambridge or New York. Facebook has the main part of their AI research in NYC. CMU is very strong and so is Pittsburgh. Etc etc. East Coast elite college graduates now consider founding a startup or working for Big Tech to be legitimate prestige career choices.
I don’t claim that East Coast cities are beating the Bay Area on tech (yet) just that there’s no longer this huge gap in attitudes and opportunities.
The lack of self-awareness or historical knowledge of these princelings no longer surprises me. I think he peaked when he argued the Windows was just a set of buggy device drivers: in hindsight I wish he hadn't said it so loud, as it woke MSFT up.
Maybe it's the interview format, but to me this reads like a Gish Gallop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop) of ideas by a libertarian huckster.
No Gish Gallop can be answered completely except at book length, so I'll just mention a few of the worst points.
* The left-wing, right-wing tech dichotomy.
* The emphasis on government holding back business. Damn that government keeping us from making slavery more profitable!
* "Our public sector hates our private sector and wants to destroy it..." Yeah, right.
* The absence of discussion of problems of power, monopoly and externalities. Such as the dominance of the big information companies.
* Wow, we have supercomputers in our pockets! But that doesn't solve the big social issues or solve the stranglehold of control over our lives by plutocrats or autocrats: if anything, it makes them stronger.
* Crypto is not needed for any sort of incentive system except maybe illegal ones.
* "we should build in the next decade new technologies, businesses, and industries that break these price curves", as opposed to the anti-NIMBY and other policy solutions Noah is fond of.
On the bright side:
* I agree with his view of risks of Chinese technical dominance.
The "gish gallop" is just the interview format. I sent him 10 questions in a batch instead of going back-and-forth like I usually do.
The left-wing/right-wing dichotomy is wrong IMO. He's probably thinking of AI as Project Cybersyn or something; I don't think it works like that. Meanwhile, leftist activism is highly decentralized.
He's partly right about government holding business back; I think he's too deregulatory, but I do think often we put the *wrong* regulations in place.
I think he clearly does recognize the problem of monopoly and power, as evidenced by his line about "a Navy who acts like pirates".
As for crypto, it's up in the air, but I wouldn't bet against it!
> The left-wing/right-wing dichotomy is wrong IMO. He's probably thinking of AI as Project Cybersyn or something; I don't think it works like that. Meanwhile, leftist activism is highly decentralized.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that AI tends to support centralization & crypto tends to support decentralization, but centralization currently tends to favor the left more than decentralization does, due to tech companies being predominantly progressive.
Maybe next interview, you can start by asking "What's your most important idea, and let's delve into it." Otherwise people like him naturally expand into a Gish gallop. On the other hand, who am I to give you interview advice? I like almost everything you've done.
Of course government holds business back. Otherwise we'd all be microchipped slaves. It's an essential function to limit the depredations that capitalism would otherwise commit because they are profitable. It doesn't matter if 50% of regulations are wrong, as long as the most important ones are right.
The navy/pirate trope is ridiculously sloppy: but you notice he doesn't suggest ANYTHING to stop the navy from acting like pirates. I suspect that like most businessmen, he views monopoly as personal opportunity and doesn't care about the problems for others.
And to reiterate, Crypto is not needed for any sort of incentive system except maybe illegal ones.
Well, as I noted, this was a list of questions, not a back-and-forth.
Hi Mike, You clearly seem to have a better alternative to decentralise computing, gaming, digitial assets, real-estate, everything unfragmentable yet. Is it something you prefer over blockchain/crypto ? Also, there are some other narratives to crypto other than incentivisation (although its one of the exclusive and important ones). Do you consider them to be reasonable ?
If 50% of the regulations are wrong, we're probably getting out-competed by adversaries. Also, you're just as unbalanced in favor of state dominance as he is in favor of private dominance. It's naive to pretend the will of the state completely aligns with the will of the people, because different people will different things; China is a perfect example of that. Strong government is great.....if you're Han. Likewise if you're in the favored voting blocs of America (coastal professionals if you're blue, southern laborer if you're red).
Crypto is necessary if you're not in those groups.
Is there some reason why you think our adversaries are getting their regulations (or lack) right more often than we are?
If I oppose him I must be just as unbalanced? Where do you get that brilliant insight from?
Your other claims are just as speculative or irrelevant.
Couldn't agree more.
Marc has never struck me as a great thinker, quite the opposite, so I was surprised at Noah's praise.
The software parts are ok, but nothing new.
I do like that he supports remote work and understands it can be effective. Too many voices are calling for getting back to the office based on nothing more than wanting people in the office because of "culture" or "effective coffee breaks" or similar claptrap.
It's quite obvious that far from all work can be done remotely, a lot of work must be local. Physically building things, logistics etc. But most if not all of the local work is outside of an office location. Offices aren't really needed that much anymore.
This is an equally warped view of government regulation and its role in providing protection without even mentioning the cost. The private sector will continue to take on greater and greater responsibility for the societal well being without being coerced by the government. Meanwhile the public sector will continue to grow at greater cost producing inefficient at best and harmful at worst "goods"
Considering that I didn't state my view, it looks to me as if you are attempting to use some mysterious superpower to plumb the depths of my psyche.
In the mean time, please cite some historical examples of the private sector taking on responsibility for the societal well being, and why we are so badly off despite this benificence. (As long as you avoid Manichean "it's government's fault for all evil conspiracy theories.)
The private sector is taking less and less of a responsibility, if any. What planet are you on?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business/business-roundtable-ceos-corporations.html
So you take CEOs saying they SHOULD take more responsibility as a fact of it happening despite the opposite actually happening in the real world?
That's cute.
Corporations have taken an entirely different posture on these issues in recent times. I'm sure all thanks to you and NY times readers blanket cynicism regarding their behavior. Truly a driving force for us.
Posture doesn't heal the sick, build roads or keep schools open. Government does.
Corporations have done everything they can to reduce their costs by not paying taxes, paying starvation wages and not taking responsibility for anything outside of their companies. In fact it has been their creed they aren't responsible.
It's nice they talk about change but unless they actually do something it doesn't matter.
What they should do as a step one is to not oppose but promote new fair tax laws for corporations and then pay their taxes. They aren't doing that. They still lobby to kill these changes.
I completely agree. He breezed right past the idea of happiness with a shrug. That's not a minor issue. Putting aside questions of a "higher good", it also has implications for how things will play out on the ground.
You know the site is literally his opinion. Which might be different than yours. Also, “yeah right” isn’t a rebuttal
When will you develop sufficient reading comprehension to realize that I was criticizing the interviewee (not Noah himself). And I do at times disagree with Noah, and tell him so. I'm not a sycophant.
“Yeah right” is all the rebuttal needed for such a stupid conspiracy theory.
My comprehension is fine. Here's the way life works. People have opinions, some of them might be different than yours.
And just as you have disagreed with me, I have disagreed with the interviewee. Not with Noah, as you suggested.
I’ll note that nowhere in this discussion of technooptimism does he address the fundamental flaw of technology, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power. Virtually every internet company agglomerates success at a scale virtually unheard of in the analog world other than yesteryear’s imperial trading companies.
His skipping over the idea of valuing happiness in product development is similar in mindset to skipping over the idea of whether the fruits of this growth have actually benefitted society. He speaks glowingly about the opportunities for knowledge workers but ignores the existence of the much larger economically stagnant pool of service workers on whom their lives depend. Government is something holding back tech giants from achieving even greater success instead of restraining companies’ socially irresponsible practices.
Finally, there is the nod to the capacity of software to impact the experience and function of the material world, but not the acceptance of market failures such as the gravitation of the world’s greatest minds to finance and apps’ attention economy rather than climate. I’d love to hear someone be challenged on why Bezos and Musk think space travel is where to put their legacy rather than securing a safe planet for their descendants. How can tech improve our future in a capitalist incentive structure if the greatest money making opportunities - like crypto - are orthogonal to our well-being?
Sounds like you would be happier if we emulated China, where the government is addressing your concerns and pursuing your list of goals.
This is what I think every time I hear these arguments. Either you can live in an environment that gives you value based on how much value you provide, or you can live in an environment that rewards you value based on the will of who controls the environment.
MA has encouragingly identified the most important factor in areas of unreasonably rising costs - inadequate/dysfunctional IT in: health care, higher ed, pharma, real estate/construction. One suspects that the next-largest factor is waste and over-compensation (euphemistically-speaking!)
Hi, Noah. My name is Tomoki Hirata.
I am a Japanese college student, and I love startups.
I just read this post and learned a lot of things.
As a Japanese who loves startups, I'd like to let Japanese people know more about this blog. So, could you please give me permission to translate your blog into Japanese and publish it?
Of course, I will link back to the original post.
Thanks for your consideration.
ぜひ、ぜひ！ありがとうございます！
FYI, I just published Japanese version! The link here. (https://startuptimez.com/marcandreesen/future)
Again, I'm grateful for your kindness.
ありがとうございます！Thank you so much!
Re: "a Navy that acts like a pirate", that's not too far from "a police force that acts like a gang", as vividly illustrated in The Wire, and fairly regularly in our modern news reports.
Definitely.
Several non-fans of MA in the comments here, but I personally like his style. Simplistic in parts, but a techno-optimism that I identify with wholeheartedly. Thanks NS for the interview.
One comment on Substack - I agree that the model has created an explosion of writer creativity, but I think it might be short-lived. Frontrunners like NS and Matt Y may be raking it in, but soon there will be so many people on Substack that readers will begin to balk at the $10/mo everyone wants for their newsletter. Some sort of consolidation is bound to happen. Noah lucked out on this one IMO, or was prescient enough to grab it while he could.
Matt Taibbi branded his substack as a news site. While he's good enough to do it by himself (he writes best-selling books too) and that'sthe main content right now, his goal seems to be to bring in other writers/creators under his banner.
Which would kinda turn things back to the old subscription newspaper model without the ads. (?)
Do most Substack writers actually expect to make substantial money from it? As you say, there is a limited demand for those blogs which are mostly or entirely paywalled, and most people expecting to make money by writing these will be disappointed, but this should already be well-known. People who aren't expecting or requiring much money (either leaving their blog entirely free or paywalling only a few posts) wouldn't be subject to this, & I don't see why their efforts would decline much faster than those of previous, free bloggers.
Great questions Noah
Thanks!!
"the systematic failure of virtually all public sector entities around the world (the formerly high functioning Asian nations are failing to vaccinate quickly) ... both political parties and their elected representatives are busily savaging the US technology industry every way they possibly can"
Conflating the technology industry at large with big tech monopolists in such an inaccurate way is disappointing. Marc seems very angry at government, and I can't figure out why. Is he being denied regulatory approval for one or more projects? It seems very personal in the way he describes the public sector as failing.
Which sector has been and will likely to continue to place housing, education, and healthcare out of reach of more and more people? It's not the public sector buying up housing units and keeping them unoccupied as investments. We let the market set the salaries of university administrators, not bureaucrats working to optimize budget allocations, and healthcare is a prime example of such corrupt regulatory capture that we take it as a given that insurance clerks who didn't go to medical school are given the power of life and death over medical doctors when deciding whether or not to approve their claims.
Those are private sector failings indicating the need for more policy and regulation, not less.
"Marc seems very angry at government, and I can't figure out why."
That is a standard business and investor's attitude: check any Chamber of Commerce. It is obvious to most businessmen that they'd be able to save money on workers, on safety requirements, on taxes if only "government would get out of the way". For example, that pesky government says they cannot have slaves any more! And they can't dump into rivers and oceans nor pollute the air. His big fear would be that beyond externalities in the physical world, there would be externalities in the financial and software worlds (which also have commons) that government will need to regulate.
Marc - "government does bad stuff and limits being able to good stuff"
Mike - "business does bad stuff and fights governments being able to do good stuff"
Me - you're both right - Anyone who has worked with either businesses or the government will know that organizations of all types are capricious, frustrating to work with, and often limit the good others do for personal and petty gain.
Welcome to human nature. :-)
Human nature in a rival civilization, but how is human nature in a non rival civilization? The rival civilization force and then money forced the kind of ego economy that we have today, but collaboration of millions or billions of people now it's possible and an eco glocal civilization may be emerging from this shift.
Now we can monetize open source technology and mobilize a global ecosystem without trust, that is without corruptible people that amazed huge amounts of power by the topology of the systems we designed last centuries, like centralized banking, centralized government, etc. It's a failure of imagination to think that it is impossible to break from the rival civilization pattern, the is a lot to rethink for an eco future, a new scientific paradigm is emerging in front of our eyes, that means new cosmology and new social structures that originate from the "new" "truth" or better said the new and updated version of mitology. New things seems that are old thinks well forgotten.
Human nature as we know in our civilization is a fraction of possible concius states.
So I agree with Marc, the world needs to be rebuilt and regenerated, that as monarchical system was disrupted by the reduction on cost of producing and distributing writings in large scale that came from the invention of them press, effectively democratizing that technology, or political system comes from it, in there next 30 years we will need to rethink our political system as the whole of our economy. Next generations will expect full transparency now that we have the technology, blockchain, and yes they are educating themselves and freeing themselves from institutionalized dogma that creates a non thinking mass of people. Interesting times coming!!!
A carpenter thinks everything can be fixed by a hammer
That is one of the most succinct and apt comments I've ever read. I like the way you think. :)
Marc needs to be challenged on his firm's usage of deception and gaslighting to promote cryptocurrency and the significant harms this has done.
The latest balderdash is the claim by Katie Haun, one of his partners, that China is going all in on cryptocurrency. This is false. The central bank digital currency is nothing at all like cryptocurrency. Earlier examples include claims implying greater efficiency than other payment mechanisms.
Is there any way to consume this magnificent piece auditorily, as podcast of sorts?
"Our public sector hates our private sector and wants to destroy it" I think this is unfair. I don't see a lot of public sector actors motivate by the hate of the public sector. I certainly see the public sector worried about ceding too much power to private actors, especially those with behaviors that lean monopolistic, but that line just came off as libertarian hyperbole. I would argue that China's public sector hates it's private sector in that the Chinese authorities retain the right and the means to subsidize (or straight up own), influence, control and shut down its private sector in a way that US regulator can't. It's not like China is going to give that power up anytime soon, and while I'm sure there are champions of regulation that would like a lot more power to influence and even shutdown industries they see as problematic, our inherent federalism and rights due process keep that urge in check just fine. The "love" the Chinese public sector has for its private sector is mostly institutionalized cronyism and structural control.
That being said, the interview is a great glimpse into the thinking of a towering figure in tech, and I enjoyed it.
This is just brilliant. If all the tech leaders were like Mark we would be parsecs away from where we now. We would not be in a situation where part of people impose something on others just because they do not like what those others do. Instead, we would end up with people just helping other people achieve what they really want.
I don’t buy the Bay Area vs East Coast thing anymore.
I’m sure back in the 90s the Bay was great and very very different than besuited East Coast. But the cultural difference is much less distinct now, and also the Bay Area is much worse to live in.
It’s not like there aren’t a bunch of hackers in Cambridge or New York. Facebook has the main part of their AI research in NYC. CMU is very strong and so is Pittsburgh. Etc etc. East Coast elite college graduates now consider founding a startup or working for Big Tech to be legitimate prestige career choices.
I don’t claim that East Coast cities are beating the Bay Area on tech (yet) just that there’s no longer this huge gap in attitudes and opportunities.
Learnt a lot from this !
Thanks for sharing! https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/amazon-primes-free-shipping-promise
Has the estate of Steve Jobs asserted a copyright claim on the pirate vs navy comparison?
https://qz.com/1719898/steve-jobs-speech-that-made-silicon-valley-obsessed-with-pirates/
The lack of self-awareness or historical knowledge of these princelings no longer surprises me. I think he peaked when he argued the Windows was just a set of buggy device drivers: in hindsight I wish he hadn't said it so loud, as it woke MSFT up.