An unhinged psychopath has been allowed to rise to power and the whole world is under threat.

[jfz9580m]

15. You forgot Andreessen!

I can’t believe how much that asshole flies under the radar. He is one of the worst. He has NO positive qualities.

I keep posting about him here and then deleting my posts. Unlike a lot of DU, I am not even close to retirement and once in a while have mixed feelings and up deleting a lot of my journal only to repost it all later .

I really feel Andreessen deserves way more hate than he gets. He was part of the anti-Lina Khan faction that really wanted President Biden gone:

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/10/tech-billionaire-marc-andreessen-bet-big-on-trump-its-paying-off-for-silicon-valley_partner/

Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen bet big on Trump. It’s paying off for Silicon Valley
Trump administration’s gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been good for venture capitalists
By JAKE PEARSON
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 10, 2025 6:00AM (EST)

For more than a decade, Silicon Valley venture capitalists have poured enormous sums of money into newfangled technology companies seeking to disrupt, and even supplant, the traditional financial system and sidestep its burdensome regulations.

At the same time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has policed that effort, going after such businesses for deceiving, overcharging or otherwise taking advantage of their customers by enacting rules, filing lawsuits and shutting down the worst offenders.

This cat-and-mouse game has long rankled tech leaders, but it has especially irritated Marc Andreessen, one of America’s most well-known investors and an outsize figure in the so-called fintech industry.

Of particular concern to Andreessen was federal regulators’ targeting of the freewheeling crypto industry under President Joe Biden — an effort that legal experts said would have planted a costly roadblock in the path of several companies’ rapid growth. The investor’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, told the CFPB last year it planned to put more than $7 billion in crypto funds. So in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the longtime Democrat shifted his allegiance to Donald Trump, donating more than $5 million to groups supporting the Republican candidate, and even volunteered to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

This asshole in particular MUST be held responsible for this calamity. Can you imagine being crass enough to have caused the mess the world is in today only so he could shill a bunch of trashy crypto? There is no there there with guys like these.

A few years ago he wrote this widely derided screed whining about regulations, women’s rights etc. I never read it. But I didn’t need to. He should never live this down. He should be tarred and feathered.

A tech critic I rather like called Nicholas Carr ridiculed him here:

https://www.roughtype.com/?p=9020

In Andreessen’s view, society is condemned, by natural law, to radical inequality. In a world where material goods are scarce and human will and talent unequally distributed, society will always be divided into two groups: a small elite who lead rich lives and the masses who live impoverished ones. A few eat cake; the rest get, at best, crumbs. The entire history of civilization — Andreessen’s “5,000 years” — bears this out. Any attempt, political or economic, to overcome society’s natural bias toward extreme inequality is futile. It’s just magical thinking. The only way out, the only solution, is to overturn natural law, to escape the quote-unquote real world. That was never possible — until now. Computers have given us the chance to invent a new world of virtual abundance, where history’s have-nots can experience a simulation of the “glorious substance” that history’s haves have always enjoyed. With the metaverse, civilization is at last liberated from nature and its constraints.

Andreessen is not actually suggesting that the metaverse will close the economic gap between haves and have-nots, it’s important to note. At a material level, there’s every reason to believe that the gap will widen as the metaverse grows. It’s the Reality Privileged, or at least its Big Tech wing, who are, as Andreessen emphasizes, building the metaverse. They will also be the ones who own it and profit from it. Andreessen may expect the Reality Deprived to see the metaverse as a gift bestowed upon them by the Reality Privileged, a cosmic act of noblesse oblige, but it’s self-interest that motivates him, Zuckerberg, and the other world-builders.

Not only would the metaverse expand their wealth, it would also get the Reality Deprived out of their hair. With the have-nots spending more and more of their time experiencing a simulation of glorious substance through their VR headsets, the haves would have the actual glorious substance all the more to themselves. The beaches would be emptier, the streets cleaner. Best of all, the haves would be able to shed all responsibility, and guilt, for the problems of the real world. When Andreessen argues that we should no longer bother to “prioritize improvements in reality,” he’s letting himself off the hook. Let them eat virtual cake.

He really does come off as a genuinely stupid man. The state of our world is explained well by the fact that a few million relatively politically powerless scientific and medical elites like Dr.Fauci aside (who are themselves typically embattled by these creeps), we allow guys like Andreessen to be considered elite.

A cool scientist called Adam Becker has written a book mocking these idiots. I recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with these morons. He told a journalist I really like, Chris Ketcham, that Andreessen is his least favourite person of the bunch. I totally get why:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/22/the-mad-religion-of-technological-salvation/

Ketcham: I’ve noticed a phrase you like to use: That’s not how the world works. These people, it seems, are divorced from the reality of the world.

Becker: Yeah, they are. They have completely misunderstood how the world works, how science works, how people work. I know I keep hammering away at Andreesen, because he’s my least favorite person in the entire book. He says in that unhinged manifesto of his that he is the keeper of the true scientific method, contrasting himself with academic scientists. Well, buddy, first of all, you wouldn’t need to say it so loud if it were true. And second, the real scientific method is not to have a statement of beliefs about what the world is and how it works, or what the inevitable future of technology is. The real scientific method is to be curious and questioning about the world and be open, constantly open, to the possibility that you’re wrong – in fact, expecting that you’re wrong. And that’s not something these people are capable of.

Adam Becker is so cool. I like it when someone dissects these guys as they should be picked apart.

I used to just get inarticulate with rage before I found writers and scientists do the work of patiently countering these assholes.

My own brain would just reel and give up under the ~15 different fallacies this type can contrive to stuff into a single sentence leaving one confounded as to which one to address first.

What Adam talks about is precisely what makes anyone who is trained to have the humility science and reality inevitably result in frustrated in dealings with people who have this fully formed daft worldview they keep trying to force as some sort of absolute.

This is a profile of Andreessen that DUer UpInArms correctly described as vomitous:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man

I repost these same pieces over and over so I do my small part to raise the profile of guys like Andreessen where they are hoping to slip under the radar and become obscure again when repercussions finally occur for their attempted coupe against the American state that has proven to be so disastrous for all the rest of us across the globe already.