Dave Karpf with a thoughtful response to the silly a16z manifesto from a few days ago. Andreessen’s mid-life crisis? A response to the crypto bubble bursting? Higher interest rates making leverage investing more difficult? Or just the tedium of a sector entering the mature phase of the lifecycle? The piece is worth reading even if you haven’t (or can’t bring yourself to) read the original post.

Charismatic technologists like Andreessen like to imagine that technological advances are solely authored by courageous inventors and the scrappy companies they found. But that’s a childlike fantasy. It has never been even a little bit true. Silicon Valley was built of public largesse during the Space Race! Venture Capital was an outgrowth of changes to 1970s tax policy. Tesla wouldn’t exist without California’s emissions trading scheme.

Karpf references Blood in the Machine (and his glowing review is better written than mine), and ends with optimism:

We don’t need cowboy billionaires talking themselves into Leroy Jenkins’ing the climate crisis.

It is a good thing that, after 30 years, we have grown a few critical calluses and no longer reflexively cheer every announcement from the tech barons.

It is a good thing that people are questioning the childlike assumptions of the financial services industry.

It is a good thing that we have grown alarmed enough to organize, that 2023 has been a year of labor victories, that citizens and regulators and elected officials have decided that we all have a larger role to play than as adoring audience of the tech elites’ fantasy tales.