Wow, what a terrible interview. It was so bad I thought it must be satire, but apparently it’s real. Andreessen comes across as mind bogglingly ignorant. Who could possibly care what this guy has to say about anything?
> Two of your latest investments are in highly successful ventures: Substack and Clubhouse.
Why does it have to start with a gross, misogynistic dig at Taylor Lorenz? Comes off as petty and gives me absolutely no appetite to read the rest of it.
yeah WTF, struggled to read that paragraph and then just closed this.
Dunno who this guy is (Nicollo) or why should care but can we stop sharing these lame ass substack newsletters like they're decent content? They're newsletters silo'd away so these people and their readers can stay hidden away from the rest of us.
Niccolo's entire brand is irony-poisoned shitposting from (what Americans would perceive as) a far-right perspective. If you want to take anything he writes seriously, you must simultaneously take nothing he writes seriously.
It's bait. Certain people were probably never going to give the interview a honest read anyhow, but here you are giving it free advertising and also putting on demonstration one of its theses (tendency of the WEIRD to insist on hyperconformity)
Perhaps he is referring to the false accusations wrongfully leveled at Marc Andreessen (he never used the word retard in Clubhouse which was the appropriation term of reddit group wallstreetbets) by Taylor Lorenz:
After the first couple questions he really dropped a lot of wisdom.
For instance, the story about the US's fear of the Japanese owning the flat screen tech in the 90's.
and...
"Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%."
"We've lived in a cultural and intellectual space just as much as we've lived in a physical space for thousands of years."
much like the internet itself, you gotta read through lots of hay to find those golden needles.
The comments from folks about how bad the interview was, probably stopped reading after the first couple of paragraphs and missed the meat of the interview.
Percentage of household products manufactured in china is irrelevant, he's talking about spending (excluding investments)
so music, movies, television, video games, internet, cellphones plans, healthcare, schooling, food, gas, sporting events are all included in this equation. So importing Chinese goods isn't that much money when factoring the entire US consumption. That's a novel idea, that I never thought about before reading that article.
> The comments from folks about how bad the interview was, probably stopped reading after the first couple of paragraphs and missed the meat of the interview
Seems like a super effective way to filter modern, oversocialized hypersensitives out of your community.
It seems like a great way to filter out any functional adult who doesn’t want to read junior high, 4chan style edge lord rantings. I have far better things to do with my time then listen to a billionaire say “retard” because he thinks it makes him rebellious (when it really just makes him look like an ignorant and immature fool).
It wasn’t worth reading the first time and it is definitely not worth reading again. It’s LiveJournal level writing and philosophy.
It’s also quite possibly the most banal thing I’ve ever read. I can think of nothing more predictable than Marc Andreessen trying to be edgy. This could have been authored by GPT-3.
I honestly did wonder if it was done for that reason.
It's a fascinating interview with any number of interesting topics to discuss. But it seems like the interviewer went out of his way to offend up front. I figure that's mostly his brand or something (I have no clue who he is), but based on the comments here it certainly did filter people out.
> "Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%."
What sort of evidence does he cite for those numbers?
The denominator in a percentage matters. Once you take out housing, food, fuel, insurance, education, etc. -- how much of our remaining expenditures are goods (mostly) made in China?
While less than 3% of my household expenditures are electronic goods, the vast majority of those goods are made in China -- this despite a concerted effort to buy domestic products.
From the article: “Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%. Most of any national economy, including ours, is domestic; you can't import a haircut, a house, or a hospital visit. So global trade is probably overblown as an issue generally. Which isn't good news; it's just to say that, as usual, most of our problems are our own.”
You seem to have forgotten the core expenditures of a household: Shelter, Food, Personal Care and Entertainment.
Very little in there is coming from China. Certainly not food and most likely basic goods like stationery, toys, electronics, furniture and clothes. Seems reasonable to think that chinese goods fit the 3% figure based on the expenditure in those categories.
This means that raising housing costs, interest rates and debt, taxes, and medical costs reduce his figure for foreign imports as a percentage of spending. That increasing the amount spent on those things is “good news” regarding trade deficits.
Unless he is using these numbers to suggest we need to prioritize driving down land prices and rentier practices etc more than worrying about trade imbalance. But this certainly does not seem like his intent.
At any rate, the numbers 11% and 3% are as fictional as the Taylor Lorenz quote but the amount of skepticism differs greatly. This hints more of ideology based beliefs than fact based.
For those who aren't aware, the interviewer is a founder of Salo Forum, which is an...interesting community. A sort of highbrow version of 4chan /pol/ with a posting style that feels very SomethingAwful.
Yeah, its pretty repugnant. If I take a moment to unpack the dissonance here, it reminds me if a quote from a man smarter than I, Trevor Noah: "In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony poke at another's expense. But because, I am englightened by my own kindness."
For example, the people in the other threads, here, who say that they can't read past the first few paragraphs. The author is using diction to intentionally exclude those people.
By intentionally being a massive arsehole they exclude people who won't tolerate arseholes so that they don't have to expose themselves to criticism from anyone with any sense of self-worth or intelligence.
The goal of "Software is going to eat the world", Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat", Thiel's "Competition is for Losers" is to sound profound. Any inherit wisdom is accidental.
WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic:
I find this thesis enormously compelling and largely optimistic. I predict that we -- the West -- are going to WEIRDify the entire world, within the next 50 years, the next two generations. We will do this not by converting non-WEIRD people to WEIRD, but by getting their kids. Their kids, and their kids' kids, are going to grow up on the Internet at least as much as they grow up in the real world, and the pull of WEIRD culture will overwhelm all existing non-WEIRD cultures. I realize this is a very strong claim, but this process is already underway; at this point I think it's inevitable.
I think he is about 5 years behind on this. While WEIRD culture has definitely been influential worldwide since ~the collapse of the USSR, I think it has reached its local peak. American culture is increasingly seen as something entertaining or strange, not as an aspirational role model. Democracy is losing its prestige and other nation states are starting to construct their own Great Firewalls to keep WEIRD out.
Instead, I think we will see something more akin to the Middle Ages. Distributed authorities and sources of power, each with its own internally developing cultures. There will be connections between them, but not the universalizing homogenization he claims.
Just my opinion as an American that has been living abroad for the last ~6 years.
Yeah, this sounds like a very early 90s post-Soviet perspective, i.e. at least 30 years late. I'm a Fukuyamaist when it comes to historical development, but even Fukuyama has argued that the long-term trend towards liberal democracy may be upset by authoritarian backsliding in the short term.
Could it be you've been interacting with the "parents" generation which supplies the internet for the kids but does not get WEIRDed. Kids soaking in YouTube, gaming - it's creating a geek monoculture. There are backlashes, sure, but I don't know how well they can keep the tide at bay.
Anyway as a parent of 11 and 13 year olds this is the vibe I get. They are much more familiar with memes and internet "things" than anything I would call 'traditional' culture in my country (Finland). Of course we are in the west, so not sure what the situation is elsewhere. But it sure looks like getting more WEIRD (I mean rural folk not speaking english creating youtube channels to present their traditions to a global audience - how can you hold it back (unless you are a large authoritarian nation state).
No, I wouldn’t say I’m only interacting with the parents generation. While the kids are definitely “online”, I don’t think this will trend toward them necessarily being more Western or Democratic.
Andreessen’s mistake seems similar to the one pundits made about China in the 80s and 90s. “Once they adopt markets and our communications technology, they’ll inevitably think like us.”
I have to agree with you, as someone who lived in the US for 10 years and moved back to my home country, I see the influence of Western culture from TV and the internet, but in my absence the local culture also tweaked itself and started exporting it to neighbouring countries also via the same internet.
There will be influence of the West for a while, but I think other countries are using these mediums also to push their own thought simultaneously. I have watched more spanish TV shows via netflix that I ever would if there was only cable (for example)
It's also a double edged sword - a lot of nationalist discourse, not very democratic, is spreading from America in a confused mess of mixed messages.
I live in Hong Kong when up to recently I found people Americanized, at least per my definition (Im French, I dislike Americanization): but since Trump and the protest, it seems this american influence made people more violent, enraged, nationalist and totally counter productive.
We were able to compete quite a lot in the world before, but now we have to be tamed by the country because we went too far in the "violent uprising / get freedom with weapon" bullcrap american culture seem to promote here. There's a net negative in following western tactics in asian contexts which I think young people forgot, while elder raise their hands at the sky lamenting the years of compromise, discussion and cross border exchange they patiently built around the city.
Because in Andreesens world the baddies are the guys who point out he’s investing in projects to enable fascist, not the actual fascists. The worst thing you can be in Andreesens world is Kara Swisher asking “do you feel responsible for sexist bullying on the platforms you fund” - because Marc Andreesens personal hero is Marc Andreesen.
For people wondering about the tone of the interview, the interviewer Niccolo is a far-right ultranationalist and fascist Croatian based in Toronto and Europe named Darko Peric. His whole shtick is to use irony for plausible deniability.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] thread> Two of your latest investments are in highly successful ventures: Substack and Clubhouse.
Yeah, citation needed on that one.
He means brands. And that says enough about the intellectual depth of the interviewing.
Dunno who this guy is (Nicollo) or why should care but can we stop sharing these lame ass substack newsletters like they're decent content? They're newsletters silo'd away so these people and their readers can stay hidden away from the rest of us.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1358463935771516928?la...
For instance, the story about the US's fear of the Japanese owning the flat screen tech in the 90's.
and...
"Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%."
"We've lived in a cultural and intellectual space just as much as we've lived in a physical space for thousands of years."
much like the internet itself, you gotta read through lots of hay to find those golden needles.
The comments from folks about how bad the interview was, probably stopped reading after the first couple of paragraphs and missed the meat of the interview.
so music, movies, television, video games, internet, cellphones plans, healthcare, schooling, food, gas, sporting events are all included in this equation. So importing Chinese goods isn't that much money when factoring the entire US consumption. That's a novel idea, that I never thought about before reading that article.
Seems like a super effective way to filter modern, oversocialized hypersensitives out of your community.
Read the start of the article again. Slow down a little this time.
It’s also quite possibly the most banal thing I’ve ever read. I can think of nothing more predictable than Marc Andreessen trying to be edgy. This could have been authored by GPT-3.
It's a fascinating interview with any number of interesting topics to discuss. But it seems like the interviewer went out of his way to offend up front. I figure that's mostly his brand or something (I have no clue who he is), but based on the comments here it certainly did filter people out.
What sort of evidence does he cite for those numbers?
The denominator in a percentage matters. Once you take out housing, food, fuel, insurance, education, etc. -- how much of our remaining expenditures are goods (mostly) made in China?
While less than 3% of my household expenditures are electronic goods, the vast majority of those goods are made in China -- this despite a concerted effort to buy domestic products.
You seem to have forgotten the core expenditures of a household: Shelter, Food, Personal Care and Entertainment.
Very little in there is coming from China. Certainly not food and most likely basic goods like stationery, toys, electronics, furniture and clothes. Seems reasonable to think that chinese goods fit the 3% figure based on the expenditure in those categories.
Unless he is using these numbers to suggest we need to prioritize driving down land prices and rentier practices etc more than worrying about trade imbalance. But this certainly does not seem like his intent.
At any rate, the numbers 11% and 3% are as fictional as the Taylor Lorenz quote but the amount of skepticism differs greatly. This hints more of ideology based beliefs than fact based.
They literally spend paragraphs saying “retard” as much as possible. Total edgelord stuff.
At some point a metric doesn't really make any sense anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Social_Republic
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
I find this thesis enormously compelling and largely optimistic. I predict that we -- the West -- are going to WEIRDify the entire world, within the next 50 years, the next two generations. We will do this not by converting non-WEIRD people to WEIRD, but by getting their kids. Their kids, and their kids' kids, are going to grow up on the Internet at least as much as they grow up in the real world, and the pull of WEIRD culture will overwhelm all existing non-WEIRD cultures. I realize this is a very strong claim, but this process is already underway; at this point I think it's inevitable.
I think he is about 5 years behind on this. While WEIRD culture has definitely been influential worldwide since ~the collapse of the USSR, I think it has reached its local peak. American culture is increasingly seen as something entertaining or strange, not as an aspirational role model. Democracy is losing its prestige and other nation states are starting to construct their own Great Firewalls to keep WEIRD out.
Instead, I think we will see something more akin to the Middle Ages. Distributed authorities and sources of power, each with its own internally developing cultures. There will be connections between them, but not the universalizing homogenization he claims.
Just my opinion as an American that has been living abroad for the last ~6 years.
Anyway as a parent of 11 and 13 year olds this is the vibe I get. They are much more familiar with memes and internet "things" than anything I would call 'traditional' culture in my country (Finland). Of course we are in the west, so not sure what the situation is elsewhere. But it sure looks like getting more WEIRD (I mean rural folk not speaking english creating youtube channels to present their traditions to a global audience - how can you hold it back (unless you are a large authoritarian nation state).
Andreessen’s mistake seems similar to the one pundits made about China in the 80s and 90s. “Once they adopt markets and our communications technology, they’ll inevitably think like us.”
There will be influence of the West for a while, but I think other countries are using these mediums also to push their own thought simultaneously. I have watched more spanish TV shows via netflix that I ever would if there was only cable (for example)
This is true.
But the USA isn't the only WEIRD nation.
Other WEIRD nations think of the USA as over its zenith too.
I live in Hong Kong when up to recently I found people Americanized, at least per my definition (Im French, I dislike Americanization): but since Trump and the protest, it seems this american influence made people more violent, enraged, nationalist and totally counter productive.
We were able to compete quite a lot in the world before, but now we have to be tamed by the country because we went too far in the "violent uprising / get freedom with weapon" bullcrap american culture seem to promote here. There's a net negative in following western tactics in asian contexts which I think young people forgot, while elder raise their hands at the sky lamenting the years of compromise, discussion and cross border exchange they patiently built around the city.
I'm not sure why Andreeseen would associate publicly with someone like that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Social_Republic#In_p...