“If you go back, like, 400 years ago it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” said a great sage of Silicon Valley last week, during the modern-day equivalent of a Socratic dialogue (a podcast). “Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff.” The sage was none other than Marc Andreessen — venture capitalist, crypto enthusiast, devoted Democrat turned Donald Trump adviser, and author of the 2023 late-capitalist cry for help, the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (“love doesn’t scale . . . let’s stick with money”). The man who bet big on Web3 (remember that?) and NFTs (remember them?), and who once described criticisms of the metaverse as “reality privilege”. (Meta, on whose board Andreessen sits, announced this week it was all but pulling the plug on the metaverse.)
“如果你把时间往回拨，比如四百年前，没有人会想到要进行自我反省，”上周硅谷的一位“大贤”在一场现代版的苏格拉底式对话（也就是播客）中说道。“历史上的伟人不会坐在那里干这种事。”这位“大贤”正是马克•安德里森(Marc Andreessen)——风险投资人、加密货币爱好者、从忠诚的民主党人转变为唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)的顾问，以及2023年那篇带有晚期资本主义求救意味的《技术乐观主义宣言》（“爱无法规模化……那就坚持用金钱吧”）的作者。这位曾大举押注Web3（还记得吗？）和NFT（还记得吗？）的人，还曾把对元宇宙的批评称为“现实特权”。（安德里森任董事的Meta本周宣布，几乎要对元宇宙按下停止键。）