Political journalism that meets the moment
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

View this email in your browser

??

My Dinner With Andreessen

Billionaires I have known: Part One of a three-part series

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.

It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book

**Nixonland**with his book club, which also happened to be Marc
Andreessen's book club. They offered a free flight and hotel; I
accepted. We met in that house. I was vaguely aware of Andreessen as the
guy who invented the first web browser, a socially useful accomplishment
by any measure and a story I had long kept in the back of my mind as an
outstanding proof text that useful invention often flourishes best when
government subsidizes it, socialism-style-given that Andreessen had
created it while a student at a public institution
, the University of
Illinois. Then I boned up on what he was up to now, courtesy of a
gargantuan 13,000-word profile

from two years earlier in The New Yorker.

Andreessen, I learned, was "Tomorrow's Advance Man." He superintended
the "newest and most unusual" venture capital firm on Menlo Park's
Sand Hill Road. He "seethes with beliefs" and is "afire to reorder life
as we know it." His enthusiasms included replacing money with
cryptocurrency; replacing cooked food with a scheme called, yes,
"Soylent," and boosting the now-invisible Oculus virtual reality
headset.

Zero for three when it comes to picking useful inventions to reorder
life as we know it, that is to say, though at no apparent cost to his
power or net worth, now pegged at an estimated $1.7 billion. Along the
way, I also learned he was a major stockholder in Facebook and a member
of the civilian board that helped oversee the Central Intelligence
Agency. Much later, it was in a tweet of his that I first saw the phrase
"woke mind virus." (He's not a fan.)

Last year, a manifesto
he published on the website of his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz got a
good deal of attention. It includes lines like "Technology is the glory
of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the
realization of our potential." (The residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
might once have wished to disagree.) "For hundreds of years, we properly
glorified this-until recently." (Really? I only wish I could escape
the glorification for one goddamned day.) "We believe everything good is
downstream of growth." (

**Everything**?) And "there is no material problem-whether created by
nature or by technology-that cannot be solved with more technology."

The big idea: "Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle." Normal people
define that as the imperative of seeking to prevent and contain certain
potentially civilization-ending potentialities like nuclear holocaust
and pandemic. Andreessen, conversely, calls precaution "perhaps the most
catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime ...

**deeply**immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice."

What ought be embraced in its stead, naturally, is

**markets**, because "they divert people who otherwise would raise
armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits." (The
opening of markets, as all students know, having everywhere
and always
been
the most peaceful pursuit known to humanity.)

What stands in the way of the recognition of this so self-evident truth?
Ideas like "sustainability," "stakeholder capitalism," "social
responsibility," "tech ethics," "trust and safety," and "risk
management," which must be eliminated-"with extreme prejudice."
According to the logic of the piece, I suppose, this must happen in
order to nip in the bud the

**armies** we can expect the avatars of ethics and responsibility to
raise any day now.

Basically, the manifesto is an argument, dressed up in the raiment of
morality, about power: Andreessen and people like him should get to make
decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference from anyone
else. Which will be quite relevant to know for the saga ahead, once you
see the style of moral judgment this most powerful of human actors
displays behind closed doors.

[link removed]

IT WAS A NICE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA DAY. I saw from the map that a
rideshare trip from San Francisco to Atherton would be a good bit
cheaper if I embarked from a freeway entrance a mile or so from where I
was. I set off on one of those glorious walks that remind you why you
can't help loving cities, in all their unplanned and unplannable
charm. I strolled across one of the remaining shabby

****parts of San Francisco, untouched by the gentrifiers, and my stops
included a glorious junk shop stuffed stem to stern with ghosts of San
Francisco past, including a pile of wooden chairs tangled from floor to
ceiling like they came from some ancient Gold Rush; and a street corner
where a clutch of elderly Black men were singing doo-wop.

I arrived at my destination in a good mood, electric with a writer's
observant curiosity. The first detail I noted in Atherton was the gate
where I was dropped off; it informed me that an armed guard was on duty
24 hours a day. The second was the hulking object standing by the front
door: a sculpture by the French modernist master Jean Dubuffet
(1901-1985), a smaller version of a massive, beloved downtown public
monument Chicagoans call "Snoopy in a Blender
."

That certainly made an impression: not the sort of thing one usually
finds on front lawns.

I rang the bell; an Asian man in khakis and a sweater answered. I
snapped into guest mode, introducing myself enthusiastically. He
responded with an odd coldness. Then I realized he was not a fellow
guest but, I guess you'd say, the butler

**.**A hundred years ago, he might have been referred to as "houseboy"
and greeted me in a tux.

I met Andreessen's wife. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is the daughter of
a sharp fellow who began scooping up commercial real estate in the
bedraggled lands around Stanford University that became Silicon Valley,
becoming its pre-eminent landowner, which is kind of how aristocracies
start in the dim mists of time. I reflected, perhaps unfairly, that
marrying off their daughters to young men of talent and fortune is often
how such families institutionalize their power.

She showed me around her art collection. I tried not to gawk, and
failed. "That's an Agnes Martin! ... A Claes Oldenburg maquette!
He's one of my favorites!" And so on. I later learned that
Arrillaga-Andreessen made a project of classing up the "cultural desert"
of Silicon Valley-the "pop-up gallery
"
she organized with a Manhattan powerhouse art dealer at her father's
Tesla dealership was covered in the art press as something like a
philanthropic venture. But progress was apparently sluggish;
Arrillaga-Andreessen seemed absurdly grateful to finally have a guest
who knew who these artists were. Quietly, I reflected upon how odd it is
that people who claim to love art, and sharing it with the world, would
lock masterpieces away for only themselves and their guests to enjoy.
Among aristocrats, I suppose, it has ever been thus.

There were also lots of books on many subjects, piled up in
skyscraper-like stacks. Andreessen, you see, is an

**intellectual**. That was why I was there.

Andreessen wasn't, yet. I waited at the dining room table. A chef in
starched whites (was there a toque?) served me something delicious. Then
arrived in the room a "cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you
can't help but think of words like 'jumbo' and 'Grade A'" (The
New Yorker's words, not mine); and, one by one, his guests. My first
impression of them came of their response to my small-talk description
of my delightful afternoon. Jaws practically dropped, like I had dared
an unaccompanied, unarmed stroll through Baghdad's Sadr City
in the spring of
2004.

I had been told, via email, a little about the people I would meet:
mostly fellow investment magnates, but also an extra person added at the
last minute. She was a woman researching life extension, something that,
at the time, the world was just learning was a Valley plutocrat
obsession. A

**woman**, it was subtly emphasized.

**The times we're living in**:

**you know**

**.**

I can be slow, but I got it. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was enmeshed in a
scandal over endemic sexism
,
and it had suddenly seemed imperative to de-bro-ify the local culture a
bit. Thus, this late-breaking ringer. She was young, very pretty, and
seemed to have practically no spoken English.

The chef served us a lovely meal. I couldn't help but notice that he
was treated rather like a pizza delivery guy.

I see from a follow-up email that among the things discussed were David
Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
, on the geographic
patterns of American political culture and their persistence; the
anti-Enlightenment philosopher Julius Evola (I had just begun exploring
the explicit anti-liberalism of those close to Trump, like Steve
Bannon); 1970s New Left historiography on regulatory capture; Corey
Robin's

**The Reactionary Mind**; Jimmy Carter's embrace of austerity; the
magnificent volume Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st
Century

****(I was hard at work then on my book about the 1976-1980 period);
and Jonathan Haidt on personality type and ideology (someone else must
have brought him up; I can't stand him). I don't remember much of
the discussion at all. But certain telling sociological details will
always stick with me. My close friends have frequently heard me tell the
tale.

[link removed]

ONE PARTICIPANT WAS A BRITISH FORMER JOURNALIST become computer tycoon
who had been awarded a lordship. He proclaimed that the Chinese middle
class doesn't care about democracy or civil liberties. I was treated
as a sentimental na??f for questioning his blanket confidence.

Another attendee seemed to see politics as a collection of engineering
problems. He kept setting up strange thought experiments, which I did
not understand. I recall thinking it was like talking to a creature
visiting from another solar system that did not have humans in it. I
later conveyed my recollection of this guy to an acquaintance who once
taught history at Stanford. He noted a similarity to a student of his
who insisted that all the age-old problems historians worried over would
soon obviously be solved by better computers, and thus considered the
entire humanistic enterprise faintly ridiculous.

I also remember I raised an objection to Silicon Valley's fetish for
"disruption" as the highest human value, noting that healthy societies
also recognize the value of

**preserving**core values and institutions, and feeling gaslit in return
when the group came back heatedly that, no, Silicon Valley didn't
fetishize disruption at all.

The subject of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came up. They rose up in
thunderous hatred at her for blocking potential "innovation in the
banking sector." (She'll make a similar cameo in Part Two of this
series.) I suffered an epic case of l'esprit d'escalier

****at that.

I thought it was pretty much universally understood by then that the
fetish for "innovation in the banking sector" was what collapsed the
world economy in 2008. Had I not been stunned into silence, I could have
quoted Paul Volcker

that the last useful innovation in banking was the automatic teller
machine, and pointed out that it was only by strangling "innovation in
the banking sector" that (as Elizabeth Warren always points out) the New
Deal ushered in the longest period of financial stability in American
history, and the golden age of global capitalism to boot. It was only
when deregulation broke down banking's vaunted "3-6-3" rule (take
deposits at 3 percent, lend them at 6 percent, and be on the golf course
by 3 o'clock in the afternoon) that financial collapses returned as a
regular feature of our lives. Silicon Valley, alas, would never learn
.

Anyhoo.

The evening progressed. The man with or without the toque cleared the
plates. This is when, as I've learned at hyper-elite confabs I've
attended, things tend to get down to brass tacks. Come with me, then,
inside that $33 million manse and hear what this extraordinarily
powerful individual who helped oversee the CIA and one of the most
powerful instruments of communication in human history (Facebook, whose
decisions the previous year had helped make Donald Trump president) said
when the subject turned to rural America. It was like the first scene in
an episode of

**Black Mirror**.

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.

______________________________________________________________________

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you'd like to see
answered in a future column? Send them to [email protected]
.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

Follow Rick Perlstein on Twitter ,
Facebook , or Instagram

Click to Share this Newsletter

[link removed]

??

[link removed]

??

[link removed]

??

[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2024 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.

To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here
.
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here
.
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters,
click here
.

CLICK HERE TO OPT OUT OF THIS NEWSLETTER SERIES