The callous immorality of American authoritarian radical right billionaires

A NYT opinion opines about what authoritarian radical right billionaires want for the rest of us:

It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.

The vision has attracted a good deal of controversy. But the real problem with Mr. Andreessen’s manifesto may be not that it’s too outlandish, but that it’s too on-the-nose. Because in a very real and consequential sense, this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it. You can see it in the work requirements associated with public assistance, which imply that people’s primary value is their labor and that refusal or inability to contribute is fundamentally antisocial. You can see it in the way we valorize the C.E.O.s of “unicorn” companies who have expanded their wealth far beyond what could possibly be justified by their individual contributions. And the way we regard that wealth as a product of good decision-making and righteous hard work, no matter how many billions of dollars of investors’ money they may have vaporized, how many other people contributed to their success or how much government money subsidized it. In the case of ordinary individuals, however, debt is regarded as not just a financial failure but a moral one. (If you are successful and have paid your student loans off, taking them out in the first place was a good decision. If you haven’t and can’t, you were irresponsible and the government should not enable your freeloading.)

As a piece of writing, the rambling and often contradictory manifesto has the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency. It rails against centralized systems of government (communism in particular, though it’s unclear where Mr. Andreessen may have ever encountered communism in his decades of living and working in Silicon Valley) while advocating that technologists do the central planning and govern the future of humanity. Its very first line is “We are being lied to,” followed by a litany of grievances, but further on it expresses disdain for “victim mentality.”  

It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as just Mr. Andreessen’s predictable self-interest, but it’s more than that. He articulates (albeit in a refrigerator magnet poetry kind of way) a strain of nihilism that has gained traction among tech elites, and reveals much of how they think about their few remaining responsibilities to society.  

There’s probably a German word to describe the unique combination of horrifying and silly that this vision evokes, but it is taken seriously by people who imagine themselves potential Chief Executive Authoritarians, or at the very least proxies. This includes another Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel, who has funded some of Mr. Yarvin’s work and once wrote that he believed democracy and freedom were incompatible.

It’s easy enough to see how this vision might appeal to people like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Thiel. But how did they sell so many other people on it? By pretending that for all their wealth and influence, they are not the real elites.

The heartlessness, cynicism and arrogance in Andreessen’s cruel plutocratic vision for America is clear. Corrupt, unregulated brass knuckles capitalism is what the corrupt, modern Republican Party stands and fights for.

Cynical plutocrat Marc Andreessen

(Motto: I've got mine, fuck you)