My Dinner With Marc Andreessen

My Dinner With Andreessen
=========================
Billionaires I have known: Part One of a three-part series

by Rick Perlstein
April 24, 2024

Marc Andreessen and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen arrive at the tenth
Breakthrough Prize Ceremony on April 13, 2024, at the Academy Museum
of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

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.

<https://www.businessinsider.com/see-inside-investor-marc-andreessens-
33-million-house-for-sale-2024-3>

<https://traded.co/deals/california/single-family-residence/sale/
27724-pacific-coast-highway/>

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.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator>

<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man>

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."

<https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/>

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.)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts>

<https://asiapacificcurriculum.ca/learning-module/opium-wars-china>

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.

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."

<https://blockclubchicago.org/2023/07/25/snoopy-in-a-blender-
sculpture-moving-from-thompson-center-to-art-institute>

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.

<https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pace+gallery%22
+tesla+Arrillaga-Andreessen>

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.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sadr_City>

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.

<https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-reckless-rise-and-fall-of-
ubers-ceo-travis-kalanick-sml9p3q2k>

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.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed>

<https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Rebels-1979-Birth-Century-ebook/
dp/B00H6UMGVI>

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 naïf 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.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier>

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.

<https://nypost.com/2009/12/13/the-only-thing-useful-banks-have-
invented-in-20-years-is-the-atm/>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Bank#Collapse>

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.

From: <https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/>