This is how dangerous the migrant boat of the technology billionaires capsized off the coast of Sicily: at least five dead

Marc Andreessen is the inventor of the internet browser. This made him rich and famous. Today he is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the leading venture capital firm in the technology sector. He sits on the supervisory boards of Meta, AirBnB, Lyft and Pinterest, among others.

He also sees himself as Silicon Valley’s leading ideologue. His statement became famous: “The software is eating the world.” (Software is eating the world.) He recently published a manifesto, a declaration of war against all critics of limitless technical progress and against all proponents of a socially responsible market economy.

In this manifesto you can find sentences like: “Love doesn’t scale… Let’s stick to money.” Or: “We believe in a romance with technology… in the Eros of the train, the car and electric light.” And finally, it is an unlimited commitment to artificial intelligence (AI), to which no limits can be set. “Any attempt to slow down the development of AI will cost lives,” Andreessen warns.

The real enemies for Andreessen are the “Decels”. He derives the term from ‘delay’. He contrasts them with the representatives of ‘effective acceleration’, a limitless technical progress, who do not want to know anything about sustainability, social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism and similar ‘woke’ ideas.

What Andreessen sells as new knowledge and what tech enthusiasts hail as a “breath of fresh air” is a wash of what has long been known. It is a rough mix of libertarian ideas in the spirit of Ludwig von Mises, the glorification of a superman in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche and social Darwinist theories in the spirit of Herbert Spencer.

Andreessen even uses the ancient Greeks occasionally. He compares the announced boxing match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – which most people find ridiculous, even embarrassing – with the duels of the Greek heroes. The two are not wimps, but real men, Andreessen says, concluding: “What was good enough for Heracles and Theseus is good enough for us.”

When adolescents embrace such ideas in the excitement of puberty—ideas they usually pick up from Ayn Rand’s novels—there is hope that they will outgrow them. Hops and malt are lost at Andreessen. Without a hint of irony, he writes sentences like: “We believe in ambition, in aggression, in perseverance and in ruthlessness – in them Current. We believe in merit and success. We believe in him courage and the courage.»

Marc Andreessen is not the only tech billionaire advocating such ideas. Jonathan Taplin shows in his book ‘The End of Reality’ that Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg are on the same journey. They all learned from Ayn Rand that “if a civilization is to survive, it must say goodbye to altruism and morality.”

Taplin is a colorful bird who knows his way around Silicon Valley as well as the financial world. He was even Bob Dylan’s manager at one time.

Personally, they can be enemies of each other. However, the four tech billionaires are animated by the same ideology, an ideology that can only be described as “anarcho-libertarian,” as Taplin notes. Musk wants to build a new civilization on Mars because he is convinced that planet Earth is doomed. With Meta, Mark Zuckerberg wants to offer the masses an alternative to the real world in cyberspace. Andreessen believes that in the future wars will be fought with robots and Peter Thiel even wants to become immortal. The 54-year-old is already regularly fed blood from young people.

The world of tech billionaires is not a democracy. It is a world in which an elite is in charge, the work is largely done by machines and robots, and the masses are kept quiet, for example with a basic income. On the Internet they get what they are denied in the real world. “The majority of humanity is being denied a privilege of reality,” Andreessen has previously stated. “Your online world will be infinitely richer than the real world.”

What Andreessen portrays here as utopia has long been described as a nightmare by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World. Nothing new here either.

Andreessen wants his ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ to be seen as a departure into the future. In fact, it is a journey to a dangerous past, to a past in which, for example, Benito Mussolini tried to make such thoughts come true. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein puts it plainly: “We should call it what it is: reactionary futurism.”

Taplin goes one step further. “Thiel, like Musk and to some extent Andreessen, has abandoned laissez-faire libertarianism and now wants to give the government more power.” In other words, the billionaires want more than a “managed democracy.” They want a neo-fascist technology dictatorship.