Amid all the chaos of the early days of the Trump administration a small piece of news popped up. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which is a partner to just about all of our tech overlords, is hiring Daniel Penny as an investor.
Penny is the former Marine who was tried last year and found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of homeless man Jordan Neely with a long history of personal tragedy and mental illness. After Neely made threats to passengers on a New York City subway, Penny held him in a choke hold, which killed him.
Without relitigating the case, the hiring is on its face a strange choice for the a16z; Penny does not have a background in investing.
But when viewed in the context of our new AI government that will make nearly everyone’s lives worse and our tech overlords’ eagerness to dispose of anyone they deem useless to their grand experiment, it begins to make more sense. Penny will work in a16z’s American Dynamism practice, which invests in government and defense tech.
A16z and its petulant billionaire cofounder and general partner Marc Andreessen is one of the plutocrats plunging us all into the Elon Musk-led grand experiment — one that is dismantling public institutions and turning their role over to automation intended to organize society for maximum profit. While Musk and his DOGE goons play point, others like Andreesen are assisting on policy, specifically on tech, business, economics, and the “success of the country” more generally.
“Success of the country.” To them, that of course does not mean stuff like reducing inequality, free high quality education and healthcare for all, and improvement of infrastructure. So what are they talking about?
Andreessen’s 2023 screed, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” helps provide a glimpse of these tech billionaires’ egotistical worldview and where their grand experiment is going. If one can stomach the read, it can be thought of as a policy platform now being enacted.
What really stands out in Andreessen’s sermon is not just the incoherence and disregard for humanity, but that for all the tech billionaires’ fanciful talk of utopia and colonizing the galaxy, they harbor the same sense of victimhood that is a hallmark of the plutocrats so well described by Thomas Frank in “Pity the Billionaire”:
It has now been more than thirty years since the supply-side revolution conquered Washington, since laissez-faire became the dogma of the nation’s ruling class, shared by large numbers of Democrats as well as Republicans. We have lived through decades of deregulation, deunionization, privatization, and free-trade agreements; the neoliberal ideal has been projected into every corner of the nation’s life. Universities try to put themselves on a market-based footing these days; so do hospitals, electric utilities, churches, and museums; so does the Post Office, the CIA, and the U.S. Army. And now, after all this has been going on for decades, we have a people’s uprising demanding that we bow down before the altar of the free market. And this only a short while after the high priests of that very cosmology led the world into the greatest economic catastrophe in memory. “Amazing” is right. “Unlikely” would also be right. “Preposterous” would be even righter.
It’s getting a lot more preposterous. Let’s take a brief look at “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” here and then turn to how Andreessen’s incoherent snake oil plays out in reality. Here’s how it starts:
We are being lied to.
We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
We are told to be pessimistic.
The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares.
We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.
We are told to be miserable about the future.
Andreessen starts off by channeling John Galt from Ayn Rand’s 1957 Atlas Shrugged, a sort of Bible for free-marketers. Galt, an engineer whose genius is underappreciated, organizes a strike by the world’s industrial leaders, inventors, and businessmen, in order to bring about the collapse of the bureaucracy, rid the world of collectivization and free the individualist mind.
That’s much the same way Andreessen and his ilk describe their efforts today (apologies for the long quotes, but they really help capture the lunacy):
Our civilization was built on technology.
Our civilization is built on technology.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.
I am here to bring the good news.
We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being…
Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.
We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being…
We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.
There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.
Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.
Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.
And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology…
Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past…
We believe this is why our descendents will live in the stars.
We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology…
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. …Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand.
How will Andreessen and his friends eradicate poverty through profit-driven technology? Who knows? It certainly hasn’t happened yet, but that’s nothing a even more free market can’t solve:
We believe in market discipline. The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.” Markets prevent monopolies and cartels….
We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward. …This upward spiral has been running for hundreds of years, despite continuous howling from Communists and Luddites. Indeed, as of 2019, before the temporary COVID disruption, the result was the largest number of jobs at the highest wages and the highest levels of material living standards in the history of the planet.
So what on earth is this guy complaining about? Some hypothetical limits on his precious AI, of course.
We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder…
We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment…
We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.
We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.
We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time a price falls, the universe of people who buy it get a raise in buying power, which is the same as a raise in income. If a lot of goods and services drop in price, the result is an upward explosion of buying power, real income, and quality of life.
So unlimited AI + unlimited energy = unlimited stuff. Which leads to a few questions. What would they need laborers for anymore? They’re already doing the whole AI and energy ramp up, so why isn’t life getting better? Why are prices rising? How much time does Andreessen need? He doesn’t say.
Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology – both unnecessary and self-defeating.
Tell me about it. Unlike Galt in Atlas Shrugged, however, Andreessen and company unfortunately aren’t going on strike. “We are conquerors,” he declares at one point. And he’s got the enemy list for who needs conquering.
We have enemies.
Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.
I’ll just leave this here:
While Andreessen’s drivel is comical, it’s also deadly serious — as we can see with what’s happening with the Musk coup. Here’s Brian Merchant writing at Blood in the Machine:
These notions—AI can replace workers, the government should function like a startup—are not meant to describe reality; they are meant to create a permission structure for those in power to obtain more of it. Here, AI will either allow Trump and Musk to install more loyalists, hollow out the administrative state, or degrade the quality of services once provided; all outcomes that favor Trumpism, and, I guess, Muskism. The startup mentality, meanwhile, seeks to give license to break laws, in the name of progress, of disruption, of building the future.
Same as it ever was: Way back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, early factory owners deployed automation to deskill workers, to justify employing precarious and child laborers, and as a means of circumventing long-held laws—all to produce more products at lower quality, and to concentrate profits, and power, in fewer hands.
What could this look like? As Yves wrote last week:
This program is so deranged, particularly in combination with the other intended Trump economic shock of radically cutting or otherwise disrupting Federal funding of all sorts of activities that one has to wonder if Trump is trying to create a US version of the neoliberal shock Russia suffered in the 1990s, which allowed mere mortals to become obscenely rich by hoovering up distressed assets.
Just a reminder of what that meant for Russian workers:
Run by chance into some of my old data. These are real earnings of workers’ households in Russia 1987-96. Much worse than the Great Depression in the US. pic.twitter.com/JZddHnKOT9
— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) April 30, 2024
And Russian life expectancy:
It was the US’ best and brightest that sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of Russia in the 1990s. They wanted another go at it after Project Ukraine was supposed to collapse the Putin government in Moscow. That failed spectacularly, and it looks like they’re taking aim at the US instead.
The poorest in the US have already been experiencing a declining life expectancy for decades, numbers which have worsened in recent years. And the country should reasonably expect to see sharper drops there, as well as declines in higher income brackets.
Despite all Andreessen’s highfalutin twaddle about intelligence and energy to infinity, what it all boils down to is absolute power for him and his pals, which involves further enriching themselves while crushing workers and a police state to help the grand project run smoothly.
Let’s take a brief look at what’s coming on those two fronts.
Your Wages Are to Crash to “Near Zero” but Don’t Worry
A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.
— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) January 25, 2025
As we saw above in Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” this is central to the future the techno oligarchs’ are busy building right now.
If it doesn’t work out for us lowly laborers, well, tough luck. I’m sure they’ll say they tried, but something prevented them from completing their vision, and we’ve only got to sacrifice more. They, of course, will not be sacrificing but instead reaping constant rewards for their genius, which we’re told is needed now more than ever in order to win the great AI race:
Picture CCP-controlled Chinese AI running the world. How does that make you feel? https://t.co/yxQZ9es5MB
— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) February 6, 2025
As Malcolm Harris wrote in his epic history of the American citadel of capital and eugenics “Palo Alto”:
War Capitalism could put on a blindfold and run into a maze of horrific, absurd plans with confidence because it had class power echolocation for a guide: As long as the rich strengthened and the working class weakened, then things had to be going in the right direction. It didn’t matter that capitalists were investing in finance sugar highs, monopoly superprofits, and an international manufacturing race to the bottom rather than strong jobs and an expanded industrial base. The twenty-first century was going to be all about software anyway, baby. The robots will figure it out. Silicon Valley leaders sat on top of this world system like a cherry on a sundae, insulated from the melting foundation by a rich tower of cream.
And so it goes. This time it’s AI with the goal of crushing labor or eliminating much of it. This go-round all the military keynesianism will flow to the top. As Cedric Durand writes at New Left Review:
Whereas capital traditionally invests to lower costs or meet demand, technofeudal capital invests to bring different areas of social activity under its control, creating a dynamic of dependence which ensnares individuals, businesses and institutions alike. This is partly because the services offered by Big Tech are not commodities like any other. They are often critical infrastructures on which society depends.
AI is where the American ruling class thinks it can win WWIII — or at least mint some trillionaires in the process — and the vision that accompanies this war is being crafted by the likes of Andreessen. For them it’s a world of abundance and luxury; for the rest of us not so much. The train is barreling down the tracks with the likes of Andreessen assuring us that it’ll all work out and paradise is nigh.
And yet, for a man convinced of paradise, his venture capital firm sure spends a lot of time and money worrying about police.
Las Vegas as Vision for America
Andreessen writes the following in his manifesto:
Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof.
But it does, Marc. As Kevin de Liban from Inequality.org points out:
AI and related technologies are used by governments, employers, landlords, banks, educators, and law enforcement to wrongly cut in-home caregiving services for disabled people; accuse unemployed workers of fraud; deny people housing, employment, or credit; take kids from loving parents and put them in foster care; intensify domestic violence and sexual abuse or harassment; label and mistreat middle- and high-school kids as likely dropouts or criminals; and falsely accuse Black and brown people of crimes.
We can take the city of Las Vegas as an example. With Andreessen Horowitz’s help, it is one of the foremost adopters of aggressive AI policing that is simultaneously a boondoggle and devastating to those caught in the hallucinatory AI web.
It’s fitting that Las Vegas — the site of the post-WWII fusion of capital, spooks, zionists, and organized crime, and long a surveillance testing ground — is now playing the same role for AI. Edward Ongweso Jr. writes:
Natasha Schüll, citing her landmark study of machine gambling in Las Vegas (“Addiction by Design”). On close examination, gamblers are less addicted to winning than to the “world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm” that machine play offers. The shape and feel of consoles and seats, the displays and interfaces, the acoustics of the floor, the lack of natural sunlight, these and much more are engineered to maximize “time on device” and thus the casino’s profits. To further that end, casinos engage in an impressive array of surveillance to track gamblers, construct personal profiles, kick out winners, and determine the breaking points of losers—intervening just before they leave so that time on device can be maximized.
Because of the extensive data collection involved in managing a casino (i.e. ensuring gamblers are losing as much as possible), casinos have also functioned as a testing grounds for other industries interested in surveillance. Schüll names “airports, financial trading floors, consumer shopping malls, insurance agencies, banks, and government programs like Homeland Security” as just some of the beneficiaries of Las Vegas’s technological innovation.
As the police state expands in Vegas and across the country, so too do other aspects of Sin City:
It may have been unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision, but as I wrote in 2021 it was partly supercharged by the Covid-19 pandemic: speculative finance bullshit proliferated thanks to “fintech” that reduced barriers to losing money on stocks, crypto, and NFTs; more traditional finance bullshit in the form of SPACs; the aggressive lobbying by the gambling industry to set up online casinos, influencer gamblers targeting children, app-based sports gambling, and closer ties between sports leagues and gambling outfits.
…a culture as committed to preying upon and immiserating its most vulnerable citizens as ours turns out to be a culture where people will retreat into various escapes/addictions, such as gambling or substance abuse. The world that lies waiting for us will not come to pass because of gambling, though gambling is actively ruining the one we currently live in.
No, the world that is being born is coming to us courtesy of the tech plutocrats like Andreessen, Horowitz, Musk, Thiel, and company.
Andreessen Horowitz is using Sin City as a little pet project where it’s deploying and testing AI and other tools in the city’s criminal justice system, and it provides a glimpse of the future the tech overlords embrace: Sigmund Freud’s “death instinct” in overdrive. Americans reveling in hedonism, turning their money over in rigged games in increasingly desperate attempts to catch up, and an advanced Israeli-style police state that’s been growing ever since the US’ Silicon Valley-led offshoring brought about the country’s novel approach that crime is a problem of too many criminals rather than too few well-paying jobs. All in a water-starved furnace. While that might sound like hell on earth to some, there’s also profit there outside of the casinos if you know where to look:
A November report from TechCrunch details how Horowitz paid to help the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s (LVMPD) police foundation purchase Skydio (an a16z company) drones for the department, including drone docks on schools.
And the city is adopting plenty of other products from a16z portfolio companies, including Prepared that uses AI to help with 911 calls, surveillance cameras from Flock Safety, AI license plate readers from Flock Safety, secure communications from startup Kodex, and Earnin’, which helps employees access their pay before payday. The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, is also the first transit system in the U.S. to implement system-wide AI weapons scans.
In response to the TechCrunch report detailing Andreessen Horowitz’s tentacles in Las Vegas, the two venture capitalists had the city’s sheriff on their podcast where they all doubled down.
“We’re not going to stop” funding purchases, Horowitz said.
Next on the list is AI to go through the reams of information the police receive when they subpoena cell phone tower data and AI for bodycams.
As Edward Ongweso Jr. writes after a January visit to CES, the annual consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas, the tech crowd is growing more unhinged and their disconnect from reality stands out even in Vegas:
…entrepreneurs and investors enter into a dance where half-baked ideas or narrow use cases are given new life (scale) with a sufficient infusion of capital; journalists are lied to, seduced, distracted, or otherwise deputized in an extravagant masturbatory ritual performed with ironic self-awareness. “Don’t you see that while A is obviously never happening, B would be a genuine improvement?” I’m assured by financiers and writers who’ve come to the conference every year seriously wondering where their promised robot servants and sentient assistants are!
What was actually being offered at CES? This year, it was what Jared Newman called “AI gaslighting” as firms previewed plans to trick consumers into thinking long-offered features were new innovations made possible by “AI.”
What dangers do these delusions about AI pose?
It threatens to narrow our institutional imagination to the dreams of monopolistic firms and flood the zone with propaganda to reinforce these nightmarish visions, rehabilitate reactionary ideologies that pine for the ancien régime, and serves to enrich some of the least among us: white South Africans who don’t seem to have gotten over the end of apartheid. The concern about the Subprime AI crisis, as Ed Zitron puts it, is that it will not only misallocate resources in a bubble that’ll burst and leave behind immiserated masses, dessicated public institutions, and an increasingly withered capacity for political action not aligned with Wall Street/Silicon Valley’s interests BUT that it’ll empower masters of the universe like Peter Thiel who seem interested in building the worst possible future for all but themselves.
An honest look at Palo Alto’s past (eugenics, environmental ruin, and surveillance) and present (“less a fascism of blood and soil than a nihilistic capitalism of the bottom line”as Quinn Slobodian puts it) suggests the world we’re racing towards will be dominated by bantustans, though I’m sure the Riverians won’t have much qualms about putting casinos inside of them. The sooner we free ourselves of delusions about Silicon Valley’s supposed right-wing turn, the sooner we can articulate the futures we do or don’t want (and the technologies involved in both) and speak a bit more bravely about the gap between the stakes and our willingness to act. Quickly approaching is the day when we will see the embrace of a genocidal telos (“exterminism”) that’ll seek to sacrifice the environment, genetically and socially engineer humanity, and liquidate the uncooperative elements. All of the ingredients are already there. Now we wait for the Great Work that will bring together the brigands laying waste to our world for one last orgy of violence. Will it be those that seek to purify capitalism of its democratic flaw and colored defects? Or those that promise us it will give birth to yet another stillborn god?
While reading through Andreessen’s “techno-optimism” ramblings, I kept thinking that this is the logical end of organizing a system around neoliberalism that abandons the unfortunate in the name of capital accumulation. A system where Jordan Neely — who when he was 14 his mother’s body is found in a suitcase along the Henry Hudson Parkway — wanders the streets for years. A system where his killer goes to work for craven lunatics like Andreessen who rise to the top based on their lack of concern for humanity or the future of the planet, and who would throw their own mother into a pit if it made him a buck. All while remaining “optimistic” about it all.
For us lowly non-billionaires it’s probably time to build or strengthen local mutual aid networks. Because it won’t get any better should the one other option we’re gifted with in the greatest democracy in the history of the world return to power:
Remarkable quote that really gets to the heart of what “mending fences” means in this context. https://t.co/9SGRM8rps6 pic.twitter.com/23tUv6X6pP
— austerity is theft (@wideofthepost) February 7, 2025
It’s little weasels everywhere you look at the top.
— Bottomless Hippopotamus (@stationkj) January 26, 2025
