“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.)
The a16z founder was proudly explaining to Founders podcast host David Senra that he had “zero” levels of introspection. “Move forward. Go,” was his own anti-introspective mantra. “I’ve found that people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.” He went on to claim that the very concept of the individual was only invented a few hundred years ago and that it wasn’t until the start of the 20th century that we started to believe in guilt and self-criticism.
It’s hard to know quite where to start. I could start by surmising, as commenters on X were quick to do, that perhaps Andreessen hadn’t heard Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, or had misunderstood the entire philosophy of stoics like Marcus Aurelius whose thinking he often cites (he even claimed, as part of his defence, that the author of Meditations would have been on his side of this argument).