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Marc Andreessen, a prominent tech billionaire, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and one of Twitter (X)’s current investors, holds a complex and often controversial set of beliefs and ideologies. But who is Marc Andreessen, really — as in, what does he believe in? What is he using his wealth and power to achieve?

His perspectives are often polarizing, marrying an unyielding faith in the transformative power of technology with a worldview that is dismissive of societal concerns and hostile to traditional democratic values. Here are some of the key aspects of his views:

1. Techno-Optimism and Elitism

Andreessen is a strong advocate for techno-optimism, believing that technological advancements are the key to solving societal problems and driving progress. However, this optimism is often tied to an elitist worldview, where he sees technologists and wealthy entrepreneurs as the primary drivers of societal advancement.

 His “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” outlines a vision where technologists are the leaders of society, unencumbered by social responsibility, trust, safety, and ethics — particularly in the realm of AI, which he believes ought to race ahead to whatever end, risks be damned.

2. Critique of Government and Social Structures

Andreessen criticizes the U.S. government for being strangled by special interests and lobbying, yet his firm has engaged in significant lobbying efforts.

He expresses disdain for centralized systems of government, particularly communism, while advocating for technologists to play a central role in planning and governing society.

Who is Marc Andreessen? A Silicon Valley venture capitalist and tech billionaire with extreme views about society

3. Accelerationism and Right-Wing Influences

 Andreessen embraces “effective accelerationism,” a philosophy that champions technological advancement at any cost. This is influenced by thinkers like Nick Land, known for his anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian ideas.

His manifesto draws from the works of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, reflecting a strong right-wing libertarian influence.

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who owns twitter elon musk and others

The social network formerly known as Twitter, now known as X, has been through some things — including a rocky change of ownership 2 years ago. At the time, the person who owns Twitter on paper was known to be tech billionaire and then-world’s richest man Elon Musk — but it was not fully known who was included in the full shadowy list of Twitter investors.

Thanks apparently to some terrible lawyering, the full list of Twitter investors via parent company X Corp has been unsealed during discovery for a legal case against Musk relating to non-payment of severance for employees he laid off after buying the company. In addition to the known in 2022 list below, we can now augment the Twitter investors list with more detail:

  • Bill Ackman
  • Marc Andreesen — legendary tech investor and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, known for his techno-accelerationist views
  • Joe Lonsdale — cofounder of Palantir with shadowy tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the primary financial backer of Trump’s VP pick JD Vance
  • Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
  • Jack Dorsey — one of the original founders of Twitter
  • Larry Ellison
  • Ross Gerber
  • Doug Leone
  • Michael Moritz
  • Changpeng Zhao

Security analyst and intelligence professional Eric Garland notes that beyond the notable billionaires on the list, the investor sheet can be largely read as “fronts for the dictatorships of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and others.” Tech pioneer turned investigative journalist Dave Troy’s take on the Twitter investor list reveal is that it shows “this platform is an instrument of information warfare.”

Continue reading Who owns Twitter (X)? [2024 update]
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The GOP is 3 cults in a trench coat

One of two major parties in our American first-past-the-post voting system of dual-party reality, the Republican Party, has evolved (or devolved…) into a full-throated authoritarian movement seeking to overthrow our democracy, The Constitution, and the rule of law in order to establish a fascist regime in the United States. It’s been a not-so-secret fever dream on the right for decades and even centuries — and the old guard reflexively senses their time is coming to an end.

The demographic changes underway in America are inexorable — by the 2024 election cycle 8 million new young voters who have turned 18 since the 2022 mid-terms, and 5 million seniors aged 65 and up will have died. The first group will vote overwhelmingly Democratic, while the second group represents the ever-dwindling base of the Republican Party. Although historically older voters have participated at much higher rates than the youth voting percentage, the rate of increase for the 18-24 group is much higher.

Faced with these realities and the census projection of a majority minority population in the United States by the year 2045, the Republican right-wing is struggling to keep piecing together a voting base that can achieve victories in electoral politics. The GOP is now 3 cults in a trenchcoat, having been hollowed out and twisted to the point of trying desperately to hold increasingly extreme factions together for another election cycle in which they can try to capture power forever through gerrymandering and other anti-democratic election engineering — or at least long enough to erase the evidence of their criminal behavior during the Trump years culminating in a coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

The 3 Republican cult factions

  1. The Wealth Cult — A business lobby led by Charles Koch and a collection of dark money groups including Leonard Leo‘s Federalist Society and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), this group emerged out of the 1970s business backlash to the civil rights movement — while piggybacking on the still-simmering resentments of the anti-New Deal and pro-fascist America Firsters of the 1930s and the searing anti-Communism of the 1950s McCarthyism era turned, improbably, Russophilia in modern days.
  2. The Christian Nationalist Cult — Started by Jerry Falwell Sr. with the Moral Majority circa 1979, the politicized Evangelical movement is inexplicably led today by “sudden believers” Mike Pence, Mike Flynn, and others under the umbrella of the Council for National Policy (CNP), the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), and other religious organizations involved in politics in large part as a backlash to the Broad v. Board of Education ruling and the federal mandate to end school segregation. Masquerading as so-called “originalists,” this coalition are rather radical reactionaries participating in a long-running backlash against civil rights and the women’s rights movements of the 1960s, including the Roe v. Wade ruling by the Supreme Court that legalized abortion — overturned in 2022 based on efforts by this group.
  3. The White Nationalist Cult — With roots in the 1980s white power movement stretching all the way back to the Civil War and the Lost Cause mythology that followed and long outlasted Reconstruction, today the white identity movement is led by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, with a parallel intertwined branch led by Peter Thiel and the Dark Enlightenment neo-Reactionaries of Silicon Valley. This group includes dominant private militia groups involved in the January 6 insurrection including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (both of whose leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their roles in the coup attempt — with the Oath Keepers’ leader Stewart Rhodes sentenced to 18 years for his actions).

The Wealth Cult

Led by Charles Koch et al, the mostly aging, Boomer crowd who controls much of the US government either directly or indirectly as a donor or operative is starting to panic for one reason or another: the fear of death looming, existential worries about thwarted or unmet ambition, economic turn of the wheel starting to leave their fortunes in decline (with inflation as a common boogie man since the Wall Street Putsch of the 1930s). Much of this crowd inherited the free market ideological zeal of the Austrian School of economics (later, trickle down economics) from their fathers along with their trust fund fortunes that some have squandered (Trump), tread water with (Coors, Scaife), or grown (Koch, DeVos).

The Wealth Cult, by Midjourney
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The Council for National Policy is a conservative organization founded in 1981 by far-right Republican activists in the U.S. including Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Phyllis Schlafly, and Tim LaHaye to advance a Christian Right agenda in American politics.

Today, the CNP is enormously influential on the right and almost unknown on the left. Its secretive cabal designs policy for federal and state lawmakers to amplify or parrot, and they dutifully do. Members include a who’s who of the Trumpian rogue gallery, from Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to Mike Pence, Jim Jordan, Cleta Mitchell, and of course, Ginni Thomas.

The CNP gave Mike Flynn an annual award. Then-President Trump spoke at their 2020 annual meeting. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about how dangerous and well-connected this organization is, and how great is the extent of the group’s influence on American politics — and it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Columbia University scholar Anne Nelson describes the primary impact of the group as “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives” in her excellent book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

CNP and the Big Lie

They go to great lengths to conceal their activities, membership rosters, and connections within the corridors of Washington as well as in state legislatures and the judiciary. For more than 40 years the CNP has united the deep pocketbooks of right-wing donors with strategists, media campaigns, and activists. The group was deeply involved in both the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, leading up to and including the January 6 insurrection — from funding and planning to propaganda and “legal” challenges.

The CNP continues to press its narrow, historically revisionist ideas about America, including efforts to influence the 2022 midterm elections and, undoubtedly, the 2024 contest. In the quest to understand this fractious moment of bitter partisanship, the Council for National Policy is one of the secret keys to unlocking the true inner workings of the right-wing political machine.

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The American Founders, by me and Midjourney

The Founders meant for the republic to be agile in philosophy — always changing to meet the new demands of the next generations. They meant for us to be self-governing, and empowered to create policy for problem-solving in new eras they themselves could not even conceive of. Thomas Jefferson wrote forewarningly of the Dead Hand of the Past and how critical it would be to not remain trapped by it. The Founders were agile not in the sense of software development (obviously!), but in the same spirit: they embraced responding to change over following a plan, and in continuously uncovering ways to develop a more perfect union.

Conservative ideology on the other hand — and in particular, Originalism — flouts the actual intentions of the Framers while cloaking itself in nationalist symbology. It tries to claim that our modern hands are tied by the dead ones of the past. The Originalist doctrine currently holding sway at The Supreme Court, The Federalist Society, and the majority of right-wing judiciary maintains that the best we can do is peer feebly into the distant past and try our best to squeeze ourselves into the minds of the men who inked our Constitution some 235 years ago.

The Founders wrote things. A lot of things.

Leaving aside for a moment the impracticality of that theory as an actual practice of interpreting the law, some consideration of materials on hand shows us that we needn’t go to all that trouble in the first place — why? Because the Founders left a lot of writings behind about exactly what they meant, and the principles they were thinking about, at the time of the nation’s founding and the drafting of our Constitution.

Continue reading The Founders were agile
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Longtermism is an extreme ideology that has gained traction in Silicon Valley and the technosphere: both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are acolytes. In this worldview, the far future of humanity will have colonized the stars and number in the trillions — therefore making all the puny little humans alive today essentially worthless and expendable in their eyes (except themselves, of course). As long as climate change doesn’t kill *absolutely all* 7 billion of us, we’ll manage to soldier on — therefore we should focus on AI instead, they say.

Their breezy tossing aside of morality on anything with effects less than 100 years is also chilling. By use of the frame-shifting device of the far far future, longtermism is able to render basically anything a rounding error of no importance, from the Holocaust to the dropping of atomic bombs to the famines of Stalin and Mao. That is just not going to sit well with most people who have empathy — which is most people.

Related terms:

  • existential risk
  • effective altruism
  • non-linear climate change
  • “vast and glorious potential”
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Or capital vs. labor, oligarchs vs. plebes, plutocrats vs. proles, rich vs. poor — however you want to narrate it, the property vs. people struggle continues on in new and old ways, each and ere day.

Here in America, the plutocrats have devised many clever methods of hiding the class struggle behind a race war smokescreen, that is both real and manufactured — instigated, exacerbated, agitated by the likes of schlubby wife abusers like Sloppy Steve Bannon, wrinkly old Palpatines like Rupert Murdoch, and shady kleptocrats like Trump and Putin.

The United States has nursed an underground Confederacy slow burning for centuries, for sociopathic demagogues to tap into and rekindle for cheap and dangerous political power. Like The Terminator, racist and supremacist troglodytes seem always to reconstitute themselves into strange and twisted new forms, from slavery to the Black Codes to sharecropping to convict leasing to Jim Crow to Jim Crow 2.0 — the psychopaths want their homeland.

The political left loves people, and our extremists for the most part destroy capital or property that insurance companies will pay to make shiny and new again — unlike the right wing extremists who bomb federal buildings, killing hundreds of people and costing taxpayers’ money to replace.

Meanwhile, the right wing claims to be the righteous party for its extreme fixation on life before birth, yet its regulation-allergic capitalists destroy people and the natural world more broadly, from factory farming to deforestation, the destruction of habitats, strip-mining and other toxic extraction practices, and on into climate change itself. Being in fact the chief architects of manmade atmospheric devastation, they have managed to make themselves invisible from the deed by simply (wink wink!) denying it exists.

WWJD?!

Certainly, not anything the Republican Party is up to. Jesus would be sad.

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It’s been said that the devilish ways of pedophiliac liberal Democrats are killing Christianity in America, but the numbers tell a different story. Following the 2016 Armistice in the War on Christmas, Donald Trump yet managed to drive 1 in 7 Evangelicals from the fold, according to data from Pew and PRRI.

Far from the surge in True Believers prophesied by the right wing, the religious right’s deal with the proverbial and/or literal devil seems to have driven members away. Trump is losing Evangelicals, and really — should we be so shocked? If it doesn’t matter (to some) whether our leaders are serial philanderers and lifelong business cheats, or earnestly striving public servants spreading compassion — what use is their moral code, then? None. It is bankrupt.

Shrödinger’s Moral Leadership

The religious right can’t have it both ways — either moral leadership is important, or it isn’t. It can’t selectively be important *only* when a Democrat is in power. Evangelicals also need to make a choice between God and Caesar. Prosperity gospel is the latter and not the former, but many pretend otherwise or are fooled — after all, fool’s gold can still fool.

Cognitive dissonance upon dissonance continues to fall in the totally unraked forest of right-wing values. I’m aiming to continue pulling on a few threads connecting the religious right, and Evangelicals in particular, to the rise of political extremism in the Republican Party:

  • The pitch that winning the culture war is more important than God’s law is thin at best
  • Donald Trump is not a Christian
  • The “imperfect vessel” fails as moral justification
  • Jesus didn’t care about tax cuts
  • Christian leaders’ claims that politics is amoral ground beyond the reach of God’s teachings is self-evident nonsense
  • Christians are leaving their own moral house unguarded. No one is showing the living proof of Jesus’ teachings anymore — and it’s not the fault of the people on the left who weren’t doing it before.
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Peter Thiel at Isengaard looking into the Palantir

Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey are a particularly toxic breed of billionaire welfare queen, who outwardly revile government with every chance they get while having both sucked at its teat to make their fortunes, and currently making a luxe living on taxpayer largesse.

Thiel’s Paypal and Facebook-induced riches rode the coattails of the DARPA-created internet, while Luckey had his exit to internet giant Facebook. Now Thiel helms creepy-AF data mining company Palantir, whose tentacles are wrapped all the way around the intelligence community’s various agencies, while Luckey’s Thiel-funded startup Anduril is bidding for lucrative defense contracts to build Trump’s border wall. It’s the stuff of full-on right-wing neocon wet dreams for both men.

They follow in a long line of right-wing denialism in which Austrian School econ acolytes (and trickle down aficionados) have claimed to be self-made men while reaping untold rewards from lucrative military contracts and other sources of government funding or R&D windfall. Barry Goldwater once famously invoked the mythology of the independent cowboy to describe his successful rise (as would union man Ronald Reagan years later) — when in reality he inherited the family department store business that itself became viable only due to the public money pouring in to nearby military installations springing up in Arizona since as far back as the Civil War.

Even without the American government as their businesses’ largest client, the Libertarian ideal of disproportionately enjoying the fruits of public goods while viciously fighting against the taxation required to pay for them puts the lie to these mens’ claims of Ayn Randian moral supremacy. The ritual flogging of so-called “Great Man Theory” animates all sorts of dangerous social projects such as the world’s richest man purchasing the de facto town square and turning it into a right-wing plaything.

If we’re lucky, Luckey will create some sort of VR seasteading community that sucks the Silicon Valley Supremacists right in and traps them in a sort of Libertarian Matrix forever.

More on Peter Thiel and his right-wing political network:

  • Buddies with right-wing Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks
  • Member of the PayPal Mafia
  • Funded successful Ohio Senator JD Vance‘s campaign
  • Funded loser Blake Masters’ Senatorial campaign in Arizona in 2022
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