The Infernal Triangle: My Dinner With Andreessen

Recently, I read about venture capitalist Marc Andreessen putting his 12,000-square-foot mansion in Atherton, California, which has seven fireplaces, up for sale for $33.75 million. This was done to spend more time, one supposes, at the $177 million home he owns in Paradise Cove, California; or the $34 million one he bought beside it; or the $44.5 million one in a place called Escondido Beach. Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all a story I’ve been meaning to set down for a long time now about the time I visited that house (the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean). Strictly on a need-to-know basis. Because you really need to know how deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are.

It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club. They offered a free flight and hotel; I accepted. We met in that house. I was vaguely aware of Andreessen as the guy who invented the first web browser, a socially useful accomplishment by any measure and a story I had long kept in the back of my mind as an outstanding proof text that useful invention often flourishes best when government subsidizes it, socialism-style—given that Andreessen had created it while a student at a public institution, the University of Illinois. Then I boned up on what he was up to now, courtesy of a gargantuan 13,000-word profile from two years earlier in The New Yorker.

Andreessen, I learned, was “Tomorrow’s Advance Man.” He superintended the “newest and most unusual” venture capital firm on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road. He “seethes with beliefs” and is “afire to reorder life as we know it.” His enthusiasms included replacing money with cryptocurrency; replacing cooked food with a scheme called, yes, “Soylent,” and boosting the now-invisible Oculus virtual reality headset.

Zero for three when it comes to picking useful inventions to reorder life as we know it, that is to say, though at no apparent cost to his power or net worth, now pegged at an estimated $1.7 billion. Along the way, I also learned he was a major stockholder in Facebook and a member of the civilian board that helped oversee the Central Intelligence Agency. Much later, it was in a tweet of his that I first saw the phrase “woke mind virus.” (He’s not a fan.)

Last year, a manifesto he published on the website of his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz got a good deal of attention. It includes lines like “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” (The residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima might once have wished to disagree.) “For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this—until recently.” (Really? I only wish I could escape the glorification for one goddamned day.) “We believe everything good is downstream of growth.” (Everything?) And “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.”

The big idea: “Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.” Normal people define that as the imperative of seeking to prevent and contain certain potentially civilization-ending potentialities like nuclear holocaust and pandemic. Andreessen, conversely, calls precaution “perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime … deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.”

What ought be embraced in its stead, naturally, is markets, because “they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.” (The opening of markets, as all students know, having everywhere and always been the most peaceful pursuit known to humanity.)

What stands in the way of the recognition of this so self-evident truth? Ideas like “sustainability,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “social responsibility,” “tech ethics,” “trust and safety,” and “risk management,” which must be eliminated—“with extreme prejudice.” According to the logic of the piece, I suppose, this must happen in order to nip in the bud the armies we can expect the avatars of ethics and responsibility to raise any day now.

Basically, the manifesto is an argument, dressed up in the raiment of morality, about power: Andreessen and people like him should get to make decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference from anyone else. Which will be quite relevant to know for the saga ahead, once you see the style of moral judgment this most powerful of human actors displays behind closed doors.

IT WAS A NICE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA DAY. I saw from the map that a rideshare trip from San Francisco to Atherton would be a good bit cheaper if I embarked from a freeway entrance a mile or so from where I was. I set off on one of those glorious walks that remind you why you can’t help loving cities, in all their unplanned and unplannable charm. I strolled across one of the remaining shabby parts of San Francisco, untouched by the gentrifiers, and my stops included a glorious junk shop stuffed stem to stern with ghosts of San Francisco past, including a pile of wooden chairs tangled from floor to ceiling like they came from some ancient Gold Rush; and a street corner where a clutch of elderly Black men were singing doo-wop.

I arrived at my destination in a good mood, electric with a writer’s observant curiosity. The first detail I noted in Atherton was the gate where I was dropped off; it informed me that an armed guard was on duty 24 hours a day. The second was the hulking object standing by the front door: a sculpture by the French modernist master Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), a smaller version of a massive, beloved downtown public monument Chicagoans call “Snoopy in a Blender.”

That certainly made an impression: not the sort of thing one usually finds on front lawns.

I rang the bell; an Asian man in khakis and a sweater answered. I snapped into guest mode, introducing myself enthusiastically. He responded with an odd coldness. Then I realized he was not a fellow guest but, I guess you’d say, the butler. A hundred years ago, he might have been referred to as “houseboy” and greeted me in a tux.

I met Andreessen’s wife. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is the daughter of a sharp fellow who began scooping up commercial real estate in the bedraggled lands around Stanford University that became Silicon Valley, becoming its pre-eminent landowner, which is kind of how aristocracies start in the dim mists of time. I reflected, perhaps unfairly, that marrying off their daughters to young men of talent and fortune is often how such families institutionalize their power.

She showed me around her art collection. I tried not to gawk, and failed. “That’s an Agnes Martin! … A Claes Oldenburg maquette! He’s one of my favorites!” And so on. I later learned that Arrillaga-Andreessen made a project of classing up the “cultural desert” of Silicon Valley—the “pop-up gallery” she organized with a Manhattan powerhouse art dealer at her father’s Tesla dealership was covered in the art press as something like a philanthropic venture. But progress was apparently sluggish; Arrillaga-Andreessen seemed absurdly grateful to finally have a guest who knew who these artists were. Quietly, I reflected upon how odd it is that people who claim to love art, and sharing it with the world, would lock masterpieces away for only themselves and their guests to enjoy. Among aristocrats, I suppose, it has ever been thus.

There were also lots of books on many subjects, piled up in skyscraper-like stacks. Andreessen, you see, is an intellectual. That was why I was there.

Andreessen wasn’t, yet. I waited at the dining room table. A chef in starched whites (was there a toque?) served me something delicious. Then arrived in the room a “cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can’t help but think of words like ‘jumbo’ and ‘Grade A’” (The New Yorker’s words, not mine); and, one by one, his guests. My first impression of them came of their response to my small-talk description of my delightful afternoon. Jaws practically dropped, like I had dared an unaccompanied, unarmed stroll through Baghdad’s Sadr City in the spring of 2004.

I had been told, via email, a little about the people I would meet: mostly fellow investment magnates, but also an extra person added at the last minute. She was a woman researching life extension, something that, at the time, the world was just learning was a Valley plutocrat obsession. A woman, it was subtly emphasized. The times we’re living in: you know.

I can be slow, but I got it. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was enmeshed in a scandal over endemic sexism, and it had suddenly seemed imperative to de-bro-ify the local culture a bit. Thus, this late-breaking ringer. She was young, very pretty, and seemed to have practically no spoken English.

The chef served us a lovely meal. I couldn’t help but notice that he was treated rather like a pizza delivery guy.

I see from a follow-up email that among the things discussed were David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, on the geographic patterns of American political culture and their persistence; the anti-Enlightenment philosopher Julius Evola (I had just begun exploring the explicit anti-liberalism of those close to Trump, like Steve Bannon); 1970s New Left historiography on regulatory capture; Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind; Jimmy Carter’s embrace of austerity; the magnificent volume Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (I was hard at work then on my book about the 1976–1980 period); and Jonathan Haidt on personality type and ideology (someone else must have brought him up; I can’t stand him). I don’t remember much of the discussion at all. But certain telling sociological details will always stick with me. My close friends have frequently heard me tell the tale.

ONE PARTICIPANT WAS A BRITISH FORMER JOURNALIST become computer tycoon who had been awarded a lordship. He proclaimed that the Chinese middle class doesn’t care about democracy or civil liberties. I was treated as a sentimental naïf for questioning his blanket confidence.

Another attendee seemed to see politics as a collection of engineering problems. He kept setting up strange thought experiments, which I did not understand. I recall thinking it was like talking to a creature visiting from another solar system that did not have humans in it. I later conveyed my recollection of this guy to an acquaintance who once taught history at Stanford. He noted a similarity to a student of his who insisted that all the age-old problems historians worried over would soon obviously be solved by better computers, and thus considered the entire humanistic enterprise faintly ridiculous.

I also remember I raised an objection to Silicon Valley’s fetish for “disruption” as the highest human value, noting that healthy societies also recognize the value of preserving core values and institutions, and feeling gaslit in return when the group came back heatedly that, no, Silicon Valley didn’t fetishize disruption at all.

The subject of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came up. They rose up in thunderous hatred at her for blocking potential “innovation in the banking sector.” (She’ll make a similar cameo in Part Two of this series.) I suffered an epic case of l’esprit d’escalier at that.

I thought it was pretty much universally understood by then that the fetish for “innovation in the banking sector” was what collapsed the world economy in 2008. Had I not been stunned into silence, I could have quoted Paul Volcker that the last useful innovation in banking was the automatic teller machine, and pointed out that it was only by strangling “innovation in the banking sector” that (as Elizabeth Warren always points out) the New Deal ushered in the longest period of financial stability in American history, and the golden age of global capitalism to boot. It was only when deregulation broke down banking’s vaunted “3-6-3” rule (take deposits at 3 percent, lend them at 6 percent, and be on the golf course by 3 o’clock in the afternoon) that financial collapses returned as a regular feature of our lives. Silicon Valley, alas, would never learn.

Anyhoo.

The evening progressed. The man with or without the toque cleared the plates. This is when, as I’ve learned at hyper-elite confabs I’ve attended, things tend to get down to brass tacks. Come with me, then, inside that $33 million manse and hear what this extraordinarily powerful individual who helped oversee the CIA and one of the most powerful instruments of communication in human history (Facebook, whose decisions the previous year had helped make Donald Trump president) said when the subject turned to rural America. It was like the first scene in an episode of Black Mirror.

I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.

It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.

I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …

And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.

“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”

I’m taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I can’t be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you’re reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said “quiescent,” or “docile,” or maybe “powerless.” Something, certainly, along those lines.

He was joking, sort of; but he was serious—definitely. “Kidding on the square,” jokes like those are called. All that talk about human potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with, for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.

There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.