"A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case" -- Niccolo Machiavelli
It's a self fulfilling prophecy... while us commoners, or so called "activists" or ethicists ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics... The powerful are just living an alternate life devoid of all these moral qualms and are have clearly distanced themselves from the mundane, have distanced themselves from the guilt or any kind of accountability. In their eyes, they are just capitalising on the human tendencies which have been always existed (the seven deadly sins), so the "absolve" themselves pretty quickly by saying that they are not creating new "sins", just leveraging, or allowing the people to go along those sins.
They think, why should they be the ones to not capitalise on them, if someone else might and will. It's a coordination problem of our society. No one wants to let go. They want to hedge, they invest in ozempic and invest in fast-food at the same time, there is no moral compass guiding them. It's for us commoners to debate and think about.
This is the key. Everyone wants stability in their circumstances, but you have to go to extreme lengths to sustain an extreme lifestyle, particularly if it is based on preserving a high rate of accumulation instead of accumulation itself.
Nietzsche also described it well when noting there are those who deem themselves nobles and feel they are righteously above the laws and those who derive their identity from suffering under the same laws.
Setting ethical and moral questions aside for a second:
Never pay a human again
Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
There is no end game. Short term profits are by definition not a long-term view. The family's future will be secured if I invest in plastics and robot payment mechanisms now. I won't live forever, so I won't get to rest under the shade of the trees I plant for my family. With money and influence, they will be best set up to conquer whatever comes in the future.
If a small group of people fully automated all production and controlled it, they wouldn't need anyone to buy anything anymore; they could live off of it indefinitely and produce whatever they needed to in order to protect themselves from the masses. I don't see any obvious reason why this outcome would be prevented by a purely capitalist economic system (assuming that this sort of automation ends up being possible), which in my mind is an argument in favor of some sort of upper bound for wealth consolidation.
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
I think you are interpreting the quote incorrectly. It is not that the prince should be immoral, but rather that he must understand political reality is often filled with perfidious actions and motives. He must recognize that within his principality, there will be those ready to backstab him to gain power. His duty is to the continuation of his principality and the preservation of his own power.
This is not merely selfish ambition; it becomes a duty. People depend on him to defend their city and owe him for the stability of their affairs. Therefore, he must dedicate himself to his principality and, by extension, his power, rather than acting morally like the common man who must navigate political reality.
What is incredible about the current state of the western world is that Andreessen Horowitz seem more like common men. They believe they can simply continue their profession, they are the prince's of are time and are the pinnacle of power in the west. They seem to think there are good guys and bad guys, viewing those who dislike them as bad, while those who accept their power are good. They believe people should never conspire against them.
Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
This is a luxury only afforded in most times to the common man, who can maintain false notions of morality despite his profession depending on the political stability of some sovereign. I don't hate these people; I am just perplexed by their lack of understanding that history is littered with men who worried about politics, yet still fellto fellow members of their class, mercenaries, and scions seeking more than money.
I don't think there is much good in the common people, as bitter resentment is always their. They would do well to know that money does not protect them from it. Most of what is called morality and ethics are cheap, self-serving philosophies. The only exception is true mystagogy, a beautiful flower that cannot grow in the barren American mind. It grows only through the blood of the martyrs.
> Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
They actually don't believe in capitalism and profit, because if they did, they'd recognize that extreme concentration of wealth is actually detrimental to capitalism (the system's) performance. Ricardo, Mill, and Smith all saw this dynamic, but "capitalists" like Andreessen have shown zero interest in combatting it for the health of the capitalist system as a whole.
No sarcasm: play a different game. If you play their game, of course you'll suffer. But if you play a game they're repulsed by, you can win a life they'll never have access to: one filled with people who love and respect you and an environment where your best self and life can emerge.
The parent comments are talking about how the game is negatively impacting society. Your suggestion is to check out and leave society to them. One of the many problems with that suggestion is that it's hard for your best self/life to emerge in a bleak future.
It’s not the players we should hate but the ones who make the rules of the game. Specifically not the ones who make the rules for the greater good but for themselves.
That’s a cop-out. It’s the most powerful “players” who are making the “game” what it is, and they make the rules be whatever benefits them.
It would be pretty reasonable to hate the player who brings a machine gun to a stadium, kills every opponent to start scoring and when people complain says “Nothing in the rules says we can’t kill other players to score. If I didn’t gun everyone down, the opposing team would’ve. Don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
“Also, I have no intention of acknowledging that not all people have an equal chance at winning the game, nor doing anything about it for that matter.”
> The powerful are just living an alternate life...
So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"? Personal ethics are arbitrary enough to poo-poo any job. It's just as easy to call everyone else "useful idiots".
"Us commoners" ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics, and then go out and buy whatever stock we think will go up without a second thought to any of that idle chatter.
> Lee's stated goal was to “desensitize everyone to the phrase ‘cheating.’” If you say it enough, he argues, “cheat begins to lose its meaning.” A16z praised Lee's approach as “rooted in deliberate strategy and intentionality.”
Lee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it.
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
If you see a pile of trash by the side of the road and tell yourself it is ok to dump your trash there, well, you just explained why there is a pile of trash there in the first place.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
Millions decided to reward a liar and cheater with the highest office in the country. Twice! At one point, socially attuned people are going to go that way. And even if you try to educate your children well, they see in their formative years what society rewards.
Yes, but they should be criticized all the while... obviously.
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
I disagree that tech interviews are bullshit. The biggest tech companies (MS, Google) have invested many dollars, and changed course at least once (remember MS's lateral thinking questions? How many screws in an airplane?) in looking for the most effective ways to quickly gauge whether someone is likely to be a productive SWE. They have done this because they correctly believe that there is a wide range of candidate abilities out there and it is critical to hire as few "lemons" as possible; in particular, not hiring lemons is much more important than neglecting to hire someone who would have been really good. Thinking about it from their POV makes this immediately clear.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
I know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm:
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise".
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.
But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.
Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.
>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
You gotta remember that people with money have money. Money doesn’t make you smart, gives you the ability to hire the smartest people.
But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.
It is bad for this guys business to admit it’s unethical and probably has a time limit, so he doesn’t. There’s no big mystery there. If he’s unethical to his victims/spam targets, why would you think his marketing of all things would be honest about the tradeoffs? Even “respectable” companies feel very little qualms about lying by omission in marketing.
Edot, we have footage of you stealing a car at gunpoint, then you getting out and breakdancing while turning into an elephant. Any explanation or straight to jail?
I have you now, Mr. Bond. But instead of quickly disposing of you, I shall spend a 20 minute monologue on How We Must Build Things while you inexorably escape
If you think this is morally acceptable, in which case, what you're doing is essentially trying to trick the algorithm to uprank your content. But people at Facebook/X/Youtube can just update a table row and accomplish 1000x as much as you're trying to do. Their business model is selling a less powerful version of that.
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
Probably it's a random sample of AI companies. Curing cancer is the marketing slogan, AI is not capable of doing that. But it's good enough to impress bankers and lawyers who will keep inflating the bubble for the foreseeable future.
"Curing cancer" reminds me of a specific late-70s penny-stock grift, where companies promising a vaccine for cancer (but with no product or R&D) would be pumped-and-dumped.
Sometimes when I see these comically dystopian surveillance startups, I sort of wonder what the founders were thinking when they came up with the idea?
Like, were they just watching some random documentary about China, and noticed how their surveillance state works - and said to themselves "You know, that's exactly what we need here!"
Or is it just purely greed? They see some potential cash crab, and come up with some rationalization that doesn't sound that bad ("We'll catch criminals").
I just wonder what type of founder walks up to a VC, and pitches some idea with the explicit goal of robbing everyone of their privacy even a bit more.
In my perception, VCs don't really care about goals. They care about a convincing argument "if you give me money, I'll give you back more money". Note that it doesn't matter if that statement is true; it only needs to be true in aggregate to keep the VCs behaving the way that they do.
People often forget that the world is not just US or "the West". What he is investing in is a phase that the West certainly is headed into and we will be testing the idea of creating a feedback loop that gives more and more power to people who are successful in one thing to call the shots in all other things. I would say so far those people demonstrated very low efficiency and inability to match the ranks of the China Communist party in pretty much all metrics, including the creepy stuff. One may argue that the Western way of doing dystopia is a self-correcting loop, so maybe eventually we may have more advanced and optimized dystopia than what China or Russia can achieve through centrally held power. Alternatively maybe the human nature will prevail and all this will actually lead to another run of freedom and democracy. Considering the history of Europe, both can happen as stages of a continuous loop.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
Some of the creepy things like the 'phone farm' have been done for many years in China and other locations. I follow the social media of a low-budget 'phone farm' operator in Pakistan who has about 400 phones which are used for various forms of paid "boost your post/boost your business" social media manipulation domestically in Urdu lanuguage social media.
He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same.
Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example.
You know how sometimes you're exploring a location in a post-apocalyptic video game and find a message on a 'datapad' or scrawled on the wall in blood or something, as a world building fiction exercise to inform the player how screwed up the dystopia became in its last days before everything went totally to shit? Well, now I have some new material for you...
How about an AI startup up that automatically finds companies whose stated business model is to flout existing laws, and then initiates legal proceedings.
The results of startups flouting laws though have been such that even when faced with determined opposition, in the end they are defeated. Airbnb and Uber ran roughshod over the law and faced determined taxi commissions and groups that usually beat real estate developers.
Of course, isn’t Andreessen the one who believes introspection is a waste of time, a fad from the 1900s the only outcome of which is to slow one down? Why even consider the long term consequences of your actions when they can make you billions of dollars in the short term? Introspection, like empathy, is for suckers and losers.
All investors do this, they don't really have an idea of "the future" they want to build. They just "find something they can throw money at". Their words, not mine.
One way to cope with the world going to shit is that to pretend that you want it, and thus you're somehow "winning" when the world goes to shit.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
This needs to be taught in school. I’m shocked at how many people don’t get it. I’ve believed this forever which is why I follow the “strange” including weird cultural spaces, fringe para-stuff, whatever.
What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.
If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.
It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.
You think you "cope" and are being resilient, but enough people doing that actually leads to the said bleak future, at which point it doesn't matter who's to blame.
As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.
Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.
You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character (who doesn't, right?). Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.
I think the existence of the internet as a mass-market entertainment platform used by billions of non-tech users is part of it. SV from like the 1970s/1980s seemed a much more innocent place.
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
Well, for one they had less capability to execute evil plans on a worldwide Internet scale.
Maybe some of the early 80s tech entrepreneurs very well could have become the same sort of founders that are in this list of horrid a16z things. But the reach and scale just wasn't possible.
The whole paradigm of software development, and distributing that software product to end users was completely different than what we have today.
They’ve been grooming the elderly for years to fall for right wing propaganda to keep securing the ignorant elderly vote so this is just the natural progression to keep grooming them to fall for whatever narrative Horowitz wants to peddle for his GOP overlords to get one final dickover on the country as it keeps running into the ground.
I mean a lot of successful new tech companies were about side-stepping legislation. Some that are missing here are airbnb which effectively side-stepped fairly strict hotel legislation (Though there is a case to be made that it simply improved short-term lodging), and uber which side-stepped strong taxi/private-hire legislation.
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
I’m old enough to remember the heavenly times before people repeated phrases like “the taxi cartel” as if they were original thoughts vs. cooked up by Uber’s comms team.
I remember reading about Andreessen coaching Zuckerberg, having to spoon feed him answers at trial, and apparently he was one of the masterminds behind the dual class shares/proposed third class of share
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
For me it's insane, how in this day and age, we don't conduct DSM-V / ICD tests (interviews) that screen for Cluster B personality disorders on everyone, and bar, at least those with anti-social PD, psychopathy, or extreme forms of narcissism, to work in positions of influence or power over others.
People don't like to entertain the idea that determinism could exist. Specifically, the idea that some people are just born bad, mean, or unintelligent. When people commit crimes there is endless hand-wringing about how "society" failed them. They blame it on poverty, or abuse, or inequality, or racism, or anything which absolves the individual of their agency.
For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
I'm sorry but this is such an unhelpful knee-jerk reaction.
When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.
Well that's predicated on those tests being infallible, not open to personal interpretation, and not subject to sabotage ("hey Mr. Psychiatrist evaluating Person X, we at <competitor> think X is a total sociopath, perhaps you might be convinced to see it our way"). And that's not even getting into how what the DSM labels certain things as being "mental illness" or the like is subject to change over time.
You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
The US consumer economy must grow. Regulating anything that has the potential to continue its growth is simply not a priority for the current US administration, and investors won't miss out on big tech exits as they grow more scarce. Let the gamblers gamble, let socially harmful uses of AI proliferate, let the surveillance state spread, as long as they generate revenues that do not collapse* the economy. If they produce individuals harmful to society, well, indignants can be Flocked, fined, and, if necessary, imprisoned.
Flouting the law ahead of regulators has always been a strategy in startups, only now the stakes are not "get a ride to the airport."
The guy that quoted some of the early fascists in his reactionary manifesto that included a list of enemies wants to build a bleak future? Say it ain't so!
They're also part of the same group of christian tech feudalists as Thiel and supports trump/project 2025. Seems like they all went insane because the government can still say no to them.
"A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case" -- Niccolo Machiavelli
It's a self fulfilling prophecy... while us commoners, or so called "activists" or ethicists ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics... The powerful are just living an alternate life devoid of all these moral qualms and are have clearly distanced themselves from the mundane, have distanced themselves from the guilt or any kind of accountability. In their eyes, they are just capitalising on the human tendencies which have been always existed (the seven deadly sins), so the "absolve" themselves pretty quickly by saying that they are not creating new "sins", just leveraging, or allowing the people to go along those sins.
They think, why should they be the ones to not capitalise on them, if someone else might and will. It's a coordination problem of our society. No one wants to let go. They want to hedge, they invest in ozempic and invest in fast-food at the same time, there is no moral compass guiding them. It's for us commoners to debate and think about.
> who wishes to maintain himself
This is the key. Everyone wants stability in their circumstances, but you have to go to extreme lengths to sustain an extreme lifestyle, particularly if it is based on preserving a high rate of accumulation instead of accumulation itself.
Nietzsche also described it well when noting there are those who deem themselves nobles and feel they are righteously above the laws and those who derive their identity from suffering under the same laws.
Setting ethical and moral questions aside for a second:
Never pay a human again
Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
There is no end game. Short term profits are by definition not a long-term view. The family's future will be secured if I invest in plastics and robot payment mechanisms now. I won't live forever, so I won't get to rest under the shade of the trees I plant for my family. With money and influence, they will be best set up to conquer whatever comes in the future.
If a small group of people fully automated all production and controlled it, they wouldn't need anyone to buy anything anymore; they could live off of it indefinitely and produce whatever they needed to in order to protect themselves from the masses. I don't see any obvious reason why this outcome would be prevented by a purely capitalist economic system (assuming that this sort of automation ends up being possible), which in my mind is an argument in favor of some sort of upper bound for wealth consolidation.
> what is the end game here?
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
I think you are interpreting the quote incorrectly. It is not that the prince should be immoral, but rather that he must understand political reality is often filled with perfidious actions and motives. He must recognize that within his principality, there will be those ready to backstab him to gain power. His duty is to the continuation of his principality and the preservation of his own power.
This is not merely selfish ambition; it becomes a duty. People depend on him to defend their city and owe him for the stability of their affairs. Therefore, he must dedicate himself to his principality and, by extension, his power, rather than acting morally like the common man who must navigate political reality.
What is incredible about the current state of the western world is that Andreessen Horowitz seem more like common men. They believe they can simply continue their profession, they are the prince's of are time and are the pinnacle of power in the west. They seem to think there are good guys and bad guys, viewing those who dislike them as bad, while those who accept their power are good. They believe people should never conspire against them.
Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
This is a luxury only afforded in most times to the common man, who can maintain false notions of morality despite his profession depending on the political stability of some sovereign. I don't hate these people; I am just perplexed by their lack of understanding that history is littered with men who worried about politics, yet still fellto fellow members of their class, mercenaries, and scions seeking more than money.
I don't think there is much good in the common people, as bitter resentment is always their. They would do well to know that money does not protect them from it. Most of what is called morality and ethics are cheap, self-serving philosophies. The only exception is true mystagogy, a beautiful flower that cannot grow in the barren American mind. It grows only through the blood of the martyrs.
> Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
They actually don't believe in capitalism and profit, because if they did, they'd recognize that extreme concentration of wealth is actually detrimental to capitalism (the system's) performance. Ricardo, Mill, and Smith all saw this dynamic, but "capitalists" like Andreessen have shown zero interest in combatting it for the health of the capitalist system as a whole.
They also wouldn't, for example, try to use government to prevent the market from building housing near their mansions: https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
You're ascribing way, way too much intellectual consistency to these people. They have no moral system.
TLDR: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".
No, we really should hate the players. They are keeping the game from changing.
No sarcasm: play a different game. If you play their game, of course you'll suffer. But if you play a game they're repulsed by, you can win a life they'll never have access to: one filled with people who love and respect you and an environment where your best self and life can emerge.
The parent comments are talking about how the game is negatively impacting society. Your suggestion is to check out and leave society to them. One of the many problems with that suggestion is that it's hard for your best self/life to emerge in a bleak future.
A small number of players set the rules of the game.
Yes this is their reasoning, it doesn't mean we shouldn't hate the players and the game alike
It’s not the players we should hate but the ones who make the rules of the game. Specifically not the ones who make the rules for the greater good but for themselves.
What game has David Ellison been playing? The same as yours or perhaps slightly different? Does that difference matter?
That’s a cop-out. It’s the most powerful “players” who are making the “game” what it is, and they make the rules be whatever benefits them.
It would be pretty reasonable to hate the player who brings a machine gun to a stadium, kills every opponent to start scoring and when people complain says “Nothing in the rules says we can’t kill other players to score. If I didn’t gun everyone down, the opposing team would’ve. Don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
“Also, I have no intention of acknowledging that not all people have an equal chance at winning the game, nor doing anything about it for that matter.”
> The powerful are just living an alternate life...
So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"? Personal ethics are arbitrary enough to poo-poo any job. It's just as easy to call everyone else "useful idiots".
> So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"?
That is not what OP said, so you may want to re-read what they said.
"Us commoners" ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics, and then go out and buy whatever stock we think will go up without a second thought to any of that idle chatter.
> Lee's stated goal was to “desensitize everyone to the phrase ‘cheating.’” If you say it enough, he argues, “cheat begins to lose its meaning.” A16z praised Lee's approach as “rooted in deliberate strategy and intentionality.”
Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
Cheetahs ate my face.
Do they care? Just cheat the people in the next round!
Some of these SV "founder mode" people do speak like sociopaths. It's probably a good base for success in the industry.
"I don't get it, why are they confessing? They are not confessing. They are bragging"
I'm tired of cheats.
Lee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it.
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
If you see a pile of trash by the side of the road and tell yourself it is ok to dump your trash there, well, you just explained why there is a pile of trash there in the first place.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
Millions decided to reward a liar and cheater with the highest office in the country. Twice! At one point, socially attuned people are going to go that way. And even if you try to educate your children well, they see in their formative years what society rewards.
Yes, but they should be criticized all the while... obviously.
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
Compare Nixon to Trump and you see the problem with America,
This - though I'm not certain that the product really solves any of these identified issues of "y is bullshit"
In America, solving something is to exempt the individual from the problem.
So it solves it by letting you pass the tech interview.
I disagree that tech interviews are bullshit. The biggest tech companies (MS, Google) have invested many dollars, and changed course at least once (remember MS's lateral thinking questions? How many screws in an airplane?) in looking for the most effective ways to quickly gauge whether someone is likely to be a productive SWE. They have done this because they correctly believe that there is a wide range of candidate abilities out there and it is critical to hire as few "lemons" as possible; in particular, not hiring lemons is much more important than neglecting to hire someone who would have been really good. Thinking about it from their POV makes this immediately clear.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
I know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm:
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
Tragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
Jokes on them - they poison the commons enough, and soon no one is going to trust anything they read on the internet.
Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
What makes you think that is not the intention?
Rather depends on the "spoils" capacity of the channel.
The windfall may not even justify the initial expenditure before it's exhausted.
I think spoiling a commons is risky for individuals, not so much for investors. Breaking a future law is lucrative
Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise".
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.
But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.
Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.
>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
You gotta remember that people with money have money. Money doesn’t make you smart, gives you the ability to hire the smartest people.
But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.
It is bad for this guys business to admit it’s unethical and probably has a time limit, so he doesn’t. There’s no big mystery there. If he’s unethical to his victims/spam targets, why would you think his marketing of all things would be honest about the tradeoffs? Even “respectable” companies feel very little qualms about lying by omission in marketing.
How come Flock is not listed? That’s the most troubling company a16z has heavily invested on and supported.
Hard to say Flock is the worst... There's a lot of competition. I'll throw Toka into the ring.
https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-...
Wow, that's an insane pairing. For those who don't click, Toka is a software company that specializes in hacking and altering security camera footage.
Edot, we have footage of you stealing a car at gunpoint, then you getting out and breakdancing while turning into an elephant. Any explanation or straight to jail?
Marc Andreessen is an evil man with the behavior (and appearance!) of a Bond villain.
He's the embodiment of the banality of evil. Just can't avoid being cliché.
I have you now, Mr. Bond. But instead of quickly disposing of you, I shall spend a 20 minute monologue on How We Must Build Things while you inexorably escape
Had to google his name. Welcome to the Egghead's lair, Mr. Bond.
Don’t forget a16z’s breathless boosterism of NFTs and Crypto.
They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
They really are the grift that keeps on giving.
The grift that keeps on griefing.
The grift that keeps on grifting.
It should be possible to make money by inventing projects and services that make people's lives better.
It is possible, but sadly the alternative is easier.
Not surprised at all as Marc Andreesen has been in the rabbit hole for a while: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...
He also organized/hosted a reading club for discussing Evola, the fascist/nazi occultist.
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
If your metric is growth I guess this is where you end up
Humpty is a joker and a con man, and a man without vision (in his own words!).
If you think this is morally acceptable, in which case, what you're doing is essentially trying to trick the algorithm to uprank your content. But people at Facebook/X/Youtube can just update a table row and accomplish 1000x as much as you're trying to do. Their business model is selling a less powerful version of that.
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
Probably it's a random sample of AI companies. Curing cancer is the marketing slogan, AI is not capable of doing that. But it's good enough to impress bankers and lawyers who will keep inflating the bubble for the foreseeable future.
Why dont you read the article?
Who says it isn't? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41698-026-01276-6
"Curing cancer" reminds me of a specific late-70s penny-stock grift, where companies promising a vaccine for cancer (but with no product or R&D) would be pumped-and-dumped.
History doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
Curing cancer is such a lazy goal. Finding out how to make everyone smarter is a much better one.
That's really it, isn't it. How do we make smarter people, without them getting insufferable?
The smartest people aren't insufferable, but people who think they're the smartest are.
Sometimes when I see these comically dystopian surveillance startups, I sort of wonder what the founders were thinking when they came up with the idea?
Like, were they just watching some random documentary about China, and noticed how their surveillance state works - and said to themselves "You know, that's exactly what we need here!"
Or is it just purely greed? They see some potential cash crab, and come up with some rationalization that doesn't sound that bad ("We'll catch criminals").
I just wonder what type of founder walks up to a VC, and pitches some idea with the explicit goal of robbing everyone of their privacy even a bit more.
In my perception, VCs don't really care about goals. They care about a convincing argument "if you give me money, I'll give you back more money". Note that it doesn't matter if that statement is true; it only needs to be true in aggregate to keep the VCs behaving the way that they do.
Pure greed; and most people think it won't apply to them. It'll monitor "the others"
People often forget that the world is not just US or "the West". What he is investing in is a phase that the West certainly is headed into and we will be testing the idea of creating a feedback loop that gives more and more power to people who are successful in one thing to call the shots in all other things. I would say so far those people demonstrated very low efficiency and inability to match the ranks of the China Communist party in pretty much all metrics, including the creepy stuff. One may argue that the Western way of doing dystopia is a self-correcting loop, so maybe eventually we may have more advanced and optimized dystopia than what China or Russia can achieve through centrally held power. Alternatively maybe the human nature will prevail and all this will actually lead to another run of freedom and democracy. Considering the history of Europe, both can happen as stages of a continuous loop.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
Some of the creepy things like the 'phone farm' have been done for many years in China and other locations. I follow the social media of a low-budget 'phone farm' operator in Pakistan who has about 400 phones which are used for various forms of paid "boost your post/boost your business" social media manipulation domestically in Urdu lanuguage social media.
He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same.
Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/12/25/the-dark-world-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/business/india-lending-ap...
You know how sometimes you're exploring a location in a post-apocalyptic video game and find a message on a 'datapad' or scrawled on the wall in blood or something, as a world building fiction exercise to inform the player how screwed up the dystopia became in its last days before everything went totally to shit? Well, now I have some new material for you...
How about an AI startup up that automatically finds companies whose stated business model is to flout existing laws, and then initiates legal proceedings.
Funded by the fines it generates for governments.
The results of startups flouting laws though have been such that even when faced with determined opposition, in the end they are defeated. Airbnb and Uber ran roughshod over the law and faced determined taxi commissions and groups that usually beat real estate developers.
The latest and largest Uber fine - 825 million.
https://www.reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966...
Also, in the UK, lost their 5 year battle about whether drivers are self-employed or workers for Uber.
https://www.taxiplus.co.uk/news/new-rules-for-uber-drivers-w...
Or AirBnB versus Barcelona - https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2026/06/10/barcelona-is-shutti...
The US is not the only jurisdiction - and that complexity creates an opportunity to leverage fines.
This problem can be resolved easily by re-introducing ostracism.
Of course, isn’t Andreessen the one who believes introspection is a waste of time, a fad from the 1900s the only outcome of which is to slow one down? Why even consider the long term consequences of your actions when they can make you billions of dollars in the short term? Introspection, like empathy, is for suckers and losers.
Yeah really
How do people like him get the money to fund his little projects, it's amazing
In this case by founding Netscape
All investors do this, they don't really have an idea of "the future" they want to build. They just "find something they can throw money at". Their words, not mine.
One way to cope with the world going to shit is that to pretend that you want it, and thus you're somehow "winning" when the world goes to shit.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
Liminal places like 4chan are upstream to mainstream culture/sentiment.
Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.
This needs to be taught in school. I’m shocked at how many people don’t get it. I’ve believed this forever which is why I follow the “strange” including weird cultural spaces, fringe para-stuff, whatever.
What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.
If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.
It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.
You think you "cope" and are being resilient, but enough people doing that actually leads to the said bleak future, at which point it doesn't matter who's to blame.
I didn't say I was doing this. It's just something I think I see.
Not true. There are banks and funds that have environmental policies. Where you invest speaks about your character.
As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.
Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.
Pretty solidly false. Some have a thesis. Some have rules about what they will not invest in.
The theses and rules vary, of course, because there are many investors.
This one seems to have a thesis of “make 80s and 90s noir cyberpunk real.”
> Some have a thesis. Some have rules
You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character (who doesn't, right?). Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.
Talk is so cheap you wouldn't believe.
I guess that's were you end up when you aim for "zero introspection". Marc Andreessen proves again and again that he's an utter piece of shit.
Intentionally going after old people because they’re more susceptible to AI and declaring as much on record is fuckin wild.
Does SV now optimize for evilness?
SV is a paperclip optimizer, except instead of maximising paperclips, it maximises human misery.
I won't be surprised when "The Com"[1] will be revealed to be a project of some rich SV accelerationist.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com
They call it "goal orientation".
I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.
> Does SV now optimize for evilness?
Since when has it not ?
I think the existence of the internet as a mass-market entertainment platform used by billions of non-tech users is part of it. SV from like the 1970s/1980s seemed a much more innocent place.
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
What makes you think they are less evil other than absence of high-quality information?
Well, for one they had less capability to execute evil plans on a worldwide Internet scale.
Maybe some of the early 80s tech entrepreneurs very well could have become the same sort of founders that are in this list of horrid a16z things. But the reach and scale just wasn't possible.
The whole paradigm of software development, and distributing that software product to end users was completely different than what we have today.
Called it! [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056765
Making world a better place by so lo mo
They’ve been grooming the elderly for years to fall for right wing propaganda to keep securing the ignorant elderly vote so this is just the natural progression to keep grooming them to fall for whatever narrative Horowitz wants to peddle for his GOP overlords to get one final dickover on the country as it keeps running into the ground.
I mean a lot of successful new tech companies were about side-stepping legislation. Some that are missing here are airbnb which effectively side-stepped fairly strict hotel legislation (Though there is a case to be made that it simply improved short-term lodging), and uber which side-stepped strong taxi/private-hire legislation.
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
And thank god they did. I'm old enough to remember the hell of the taxi cartel.
I’m old enough to remember the heavenly times before people repeated phrases like “the taxi cartel” as if they were original thoughts vs. cooked up by Uber’s comms team.
I remember reading about Andreessen coaching Zuckerberg, having to spoon feed him answers at trial, and apparently he was one of the masterminds behind the dual class shares/proposed third class of share
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
For me it's insane, how in this day and age, we don't conduct DSM-V / ICD tests (interviews) that screen for Cluster B personality disorders on everyone, and bar, at least those with anti-social PD, psychopathy, or extreme forms of narcissism, to work in positions of influence or power over others.
Why would they answer honestly on that test? It's quite obvious what the "wrong" answers would be.
Well... you would be surprised on how many "successful" people, i.e. people with immense wealth, fall into these categories.
These are the specific traits which allow them to reach the positions of influence or power.
It seems we are successfully screening for people that do.
How do you get that implemented where they are the very types that run the show?
People don't like to entertain the idea that determinism could exist. Specifically, the idea that some people are just born bad, mean, or unintelligent. When people commit crimes there is endless hand-wringing about how "society" failed them. They blame it on poverty, or abuse, or inequality, or racism, or anything which absolves the individual of their agency.
For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
I'm sorry but this is such an unhelpful knee-jerk reaction.
When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.
Well that's predicated on those tests being infallible, not open to personal interpretation, and not subject to sabotage ("hey Mr. Psychiatrist evaluating Person X, we at <competitor> think X is a total sociopath, perhaps you might be convinced to see it our way"). And that's not even getting into how what the DSM labels certain things as being "mental illness" or the like is subject to change over time.
You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
@pmarca: Current status: Retardmaxxing.
https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2033989507213889615
And you know that when someone bets so much money in a dystopian future, they’ll actively work towards that outcome.
Well this is all pretty fucking horrifying.
The US consumer economy must grow. Regulating anything that has the potential to continue its growth is simply not a priority for the current US administration, and investors won't miss out on big tech exits as they grow more scarce. Let the gamblers gamble, let socially harmful uses of AI proliferate, let the surveillance state spread, as long as they generate revenues that do not collapse* the economy. If they produce individuals harmful to society, well, indignants can be Flocked, fined, and, if necessary, imprisoned.
Flouting the law ahead of regulators has always been a strategy in startups, only now the stakes are not "get a ride to the airport."
“Ethics” and “Silicon Valley” like oil and water.
The guy that quoted some of the early fascists in his reactionary manifesto that included a list of enemies wants to build a bleak future? Say it ain't so!
"I have zero introspection. As little as possible" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk
We can tell, Marc. It's not a good thing. It's the sort of thing oblivious villains say.
They're also part of the same group of christian tech feudalists as Thiel and supports trump/project 2025. Seems like they all went insane because the government can still say no to them.
So... nothing new? /s
You naively thought Silicon Valley was just a funny TV show about people wanting to make money, a lot of it, but even that was an idealized version.