Recently, I read about venture capitalist #Marc#Andreessen putting his 12,000-square-foot mansion in Atherton, California, which has seven fireplaces,
up for sale for $33.75 million.
This was done to spend more time, one supposes, at the $177 million home he owns in Paradise Cove, California;
or the $34 million one he bought beside it;
or the $44.5 million one in a place called Escondido Beach.
Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all a story I’ve been meaning to set down for a long time now about the time I visited that house
(the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean).
Strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Because you really need to know how deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are.
I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it.
But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject.
He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.
It’s a libertarian commonplace,
a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job:
If you don’t like it, you can leave.
If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.
I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide:
things that make human beings human beings.
I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving.
I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth;
that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
I’m taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks,
though I can’t be sure those were his exact words.
Marc, if you’re reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory.
Maybe he said “quiescent,” or “docile,” or maybe “powerless.”
Something, certainly, along those lines.
He was joking, sort of;
but he was serious
—definitely.
“Kidding on the square,” jokes like those are called.
All that talk about human potential and morality,
and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with,
for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.
There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.
"As a piece of writing, the rambling and often contradictory #manifesto has the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency."
"The argument for total acceleration of technological development is not about optimism, except in the sense that the Andreessens and Thiels and Musks are certain that they will succeed. It’s pessimism about democracy — and ultimately, humanity."
Contra o tecno-otimismo
20/10/23 · Rodrigo Ghedin @manualdousuario
(…)
“Nesta terça (17), #Andreessen publicou “O #manifesto tecno-otimista” (em inglês), uma verborragia que parece escrita por um adolescente que acabou de descobrir o #neoliberalismo e filosofia barata.”
(…)
I'm going to make everything worse now by pointing out that the #TechnoOptimism#manifesto can be shortened to TOM so technically you could refer to #Andreessen as “Uncle Tom”.
Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” borrows the format and ideas from the Futurist Manifesto. “Futurist” sounds cool until you find out that they merged with Italy’s Fascist Party and their leader, one Benito Mussolini.
I would rather call this techno-libertarian bullshit. (Even (or especially?) good ideas need control and a corrective. And no a corrective is not an enemy. That’s way too simplistic …).
@Egghat Kein Wort über die externen Kosten die von diesen technikbesoffenen Kapitalisten durch ihre mikroökonomischen feuchten Träume verursacht werden. Diese Träume hat Marc Andreessen mit 52 Jahren. Diese simple Sicht auf die Welt hatte ich zuletzt in der 4. Klasse. Vielleicht stimmt ja auch etwas mit mir nicht, wenn mir der Gedanke an 1000 allein in USA laufenden Atomkraftwerken keine gute Zukunft suggeriert.
The absolute best paragraph in that aneurysm of a post that #andreessen wrote:
"Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences."