Imagine having a net worth of a couple billion dollars give or take and still being as angry as the likes of tech-lord, venture capitalist and cartoonish kidney bean head, Marc Andreessen.
Why you so angry, bro?
Seriously.
Why is it that all the tech bros seem so angry?
By almost every measure, these guys, and it’s pretty much exclusively guys, this Angry Billionaires Boys Club, are doing alright, thank you very much. They want for nothing. Yet, still, they want more.
What exactly is that, do you think?
According to Andreessen’s 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, all they’re really after is the meeting of humanity’s infinite wants and needs.
“We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.”
Anything less is weak sauce, a failure of imagination by ‘Communists and Luddites’. Start squeezing the Techno-Optimist likes of Andreessen et al, and you’re stifling innovation, growth, progress, and pretty soon we’ll be back, living in mud huts and foraging for our foods.
Not on Marc Andreessen’s watch, you’re not.
“… people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force,” Andreessen writes, quoting amateur economist David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, don’t you know. “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” That one’s Buckminster Fuller. Unfettered technology and its kissin’ cousin, the unfettered free market, lead only in one spiraling direction, upward, always spiraling upward, Andreessen reasons, forever increasing productivity and forever decreasing prices to virtually nothing eventually, therefore meeting everyone’s wants and needs, freeing us all up to follow our dreams and inclinations in pursuit of a higher purpose which is mostly about developing and building even better technology.
Spiraling, spiraling upward, accelerating out toward the stars and beyond. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” Yeats wrote. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” That’s OK, according to Andreessen. “The center,” he writes, “knows nothing.” Margins are where it’s at, where it’s happening. “We believe change only happens on the margin,” he declares, “but a lot of change across a very large margin can lead to big outcomes.”
Somehow, Andreessen, a billionaire with the ear of the president, imagines himself and his ilk to be out on the margins. An outsider, fighting off the evils and constraints being levied upon him by dark, centralized forces, through the imposition of higher taxes, more stringent regulations and forceful oversight. An imposition that will lead to worse o
“Who gets more value from a new technology,” Andreessen writes in his manifesto, “the single company that makes it, or the millions or billions of people who use it to improve their lives? QED.”
You’re welcome.
That we’re so ungrateful, that the governments we elect continue to plague our Marc Andreessens, has 2023 ‘Not Utopia, But Close Enough’ Marc Andreessen 2025 angry and pitchfork-y.
“Raze it to the ground and start over,” he allegedly typed out during a WhatsApp group chat, moderated by Sriram Krishnan, ‘a White House senior policy adviser on AI’ and former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in April.
Raze what exactly?
Well, for starters, the National Science Foundation.
Why would Marc Andreessen want to do something like that?
Because, the NSF, ‘a major funder of university science and tech labs’ had ‘backed projects that led to online censorship of American citizens’, according to Andreessen (according to two of the group members).
Huh?
“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal.”
Oh, that.
“When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”
Do you think 2025 Marc Andreessen even knows the 2023 Techno-Optimist Marc Andreessen who wrote way back then in the ‘Technological Values’ section of his manifesto:
“We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.”
That’s a mighty sweeping 180-degree U-turn in an awfully short period of time, going from techno-optimistic universalism to flat out Trump level America First! in a couple years. What could have possibly caused such an about-face in such a short period of time?
From the Washington Post’s Natasha Tiku on July 12th:
“My cohort of citizens,” he [Andreessen] wrote, had once been willing to accept diversity policies as the cost of prior bigotry in American society, “even though the discrimination was now aimed at us,” according to the [WhatsApp] screenshots.
His ‘cohort of citizens’? Who exactly is this ‘cohort of citizens’ Marc Andreessen refers to here?
His billionaire class?
Probably a little of that, for sure.
But the reference to ‘the cost of prior bigotry in American society’ suggests a wider cohort of citizens, a whiter cohort.
“The insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020, totally shredded that complacency,” Andreessen added, apparently referring to protests and discussion of diversity after the death of Floyd. “And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore,” he wrote.
Could it actually be that what billionaire techno-optimists like Marc Andreessen really wants isn’t so much the betterment of all mankind so much as a future where he doesn’t have to hide his racism anymore?
I’m sure it’s mere coincidence that earlier this year his VC firm hired vigilante killer Daniel Penny, a white ex-Marine, just a couple months after he was acquitted in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a black man with a history of mental health problems, in a New York City subway car back in 2023. “He will learn the business of investing and he will work to support our portfolio,” [Andreessen Horowitz partner David] Ulevitch wrote, adding that Penny will help strengthen the firm’s relationships with the Department of Defense and public safety sector.”
And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore.
Ah yes.
Marc Andreessen’s people. Daniel Penny.
In the section of his Techno-Optimist Manifesto titled ‘Becoming Technological Supermen’, Andreessen cites one F. T. Marinetti and his 1909 Futurist Manifesto:
“Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
Andreessen dubs Marinetti a ‘Patron Saint of Techno-Optimism’. Marinetti, a poet, novelist and playwright, was also a ground floor fascist who helped give shape to Benito Mussolini’s totalitarian state. He too, like Marc Andreessen, believed new technology would forge an exciting new future unbound by nothing other than those who mastered the technology, forced it to bow before them, those who got with the program.
So is it that unbridled enthusiasts for technology, and its forging of an always spiraling upward future also have a certain affinity for cold steel fascism? 
Or maybe that’s giving techno-optimists like Marc Andreessen too much credit.
Maybe the fascism is just the flipside of the racism.