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| Techno-fascist Marc Andreessen and his Substack stooge Razib Khan Like Thiel and Musk, Andreessen can easily afford thousands of courtiers like Khan, ready to say whatever their liege desires ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
Mostly because the connections between Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the Intellectual Dark Web and race pseudoscience have been much more obvious for much longer.
Thiel especially, has been a player in right-wing politics since he was in college. And it has been credibly claimed he "secretly" funded the admittedly hereditarian, racist rag Quillette.
Steven Pinker is a big fan of Quillette, even writing for Quillette, which completes the third component of the race pseudoscience - Intellectual Dark Web - Steven Pinker Dark Triad.
So I've made a big deal about possible connections between Peter Thiel and Substack while ignoring the indisputable connection between Andreessen and Substack.
And now, here from last week is Andreessen promoting a tweet by racist Razib Khan, whose career has been promoted by Steven Pinker for decades.
And like Peter Thiel, the indisputable fascist, Andreessen has a friendly relationship with infamous white supremacist Richard Hanania.
Andreessen is a libertarian megalomaniac, which has been public knowledge for at least the last decade, but recently that's been made more obvious by his famously unhinged rant, which the Washington Post called "a self-serving cry for help." And:
The venture capitalist’s grievances are many, as are his out-there pronouncements. Universal basic income “would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” Global population “easily” could grow to 50 billion (from about 8 billion today)— “and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.” And he has a Fox News-ish fear of a grab-bag of hobgoblins: “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”
Andreessen also calls out Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as one of his patron saints. Marinetti is not only the author of the technology- and destruction-worshipping Futurist Manifesto from 1909, but also one of the architects of Italian fascism. Marinetti co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and founded a futurist political party that merged with Mussolini's fascists. Other futurist thinkers and artists exist. To call Marinetti in particular a "saint" is a choice.
You can't be more obviously in love with fascism than that - to call a Mussolini-era fascist a "saint." To those of you unfamiliar with history, Mussolini was an ally of Hitler.
So should we really be surprised that Substack, a platform that Andreessen has heavily invested in, is not only platforming Nazis and profiting from Nazis, but unashamedly promoting Nazis?
A software developer on Github compared Andreessen to Karl Marx and Ted Kazinsky (the "Unabomber") -
In the vein of Ted Kazinsky, Karl Marx, and others before him, Marc Andreessen has proudly penned a manifesto, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto . Or more properly, “a rant.”
I chose the word “rant” with care. He’s ranting against something, but it’s a terrible essay riddled with citations from racist writers (whom he admires), straw men, false dilemmas, and reads like a high school sophomore barely squeaked out a passing grade in a macroeconomics course.
Lucas Roper in Gizmodo, in an article entitled Marc Andreessen Is Wrong About Everything writes:
Here’s the bottom line: The techno-optimist tribe gives off the distinct impression of people who have been so ridiculously rich for so long that they’ve just completely lost the plot about how the real world works. To be fair, this is an apt description of most of Silicon Valley. These days, if you’re not vampirically using your teenage son’s blood to regenerate your own aging body, or torturing monkeys to death in the hopes of creating the Matrix, or trying to get a belligerent reality TV star elected president, you’re just not winning. The tech industry is fueled by people with bad ideas, and Jezos, Andreessen, and company are just some among many. What makes this crowd somewhat different (and a little more dangerous) is that they’re now writing Unabomber-style manifestos that give some pretense of intellectual legitimacy to their terrible ideas. They’re then using that legitimacy to push for a totally unregulated tech industry that stands to “disrupt” (i.e., potentially destabilize) large parts of society.
This makes it all the more ironic that Andreessen names as one of his so-called “enemies” those who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Frankly, there’s no better description of the “techno-optimist” crowd—a gaggle of out-of-touch tech bros who think their wealth gives them license to chart a future nobody else wants.
It should be obvious to all by now that the United States - and the world - has a deadly-serious billionaire techno-fascist problem.
Now I want to take a moment to mention the epic post about Substack shenanigans by Allan Stromfeldt Christensen of the curiously named "Filmers to Farmers" website. This is the first time I've seen someone else discuss some of the issues about Substack that I have raised in the past couple of years. I will have more to say about this epic post soon, but for now I just want to quote this bit:
Because yes, the notion of Substack's "hands-off ... moderation stance" ostensibly being part of a 10-15 year Andreessen-aligned covert plan can be a bit too conspiratorial to swallow, but it nonetheless turns out that there's nothing covert at all about Substack's extremist machinations, and it's getting harder and harder to not admit that Substack is increasingly turning into something rather similar to what Musk has transformed his Twitter/X platform into.
As I said back in July:
With all the racists it is platforming (Hanania, Kirkegaard, Bo Winegard, Razib Khan, Indian Bronson - undoubtedly many more, those are just off the top of my head) and now promoting, it sure looks like Substack is going the way of Twitter - and if it's less obvious than with Twitter, that's probably because Peter Thiel is stealthier than Elon Musk.
Of course I should have said Marc Andreessen - but don't count Thiel out yet - he does indeed like to do things secretly.
