HOW DEMOCRATS DROVE SILICON VALLEY INTO TRUMPâS ARMS: Ross Douthat of the New York Times interviews Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, who more recently is the âco-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 A.I. companies.â Andreessen was a lifelong Democrat, until the Biden administration, but he could see firsthand how radical Democrats were becoming by the last term of the Obama administration.
Ace of Spades has lengthy highlights of the interview at his blog, including when things began to really become pear-shaped from Andreessenâs point of view. The ellipses are from Ace, to tighten up the material quoted:
[Andreessen:] And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.
Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want?
…
Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it’s very analogous….
It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”
And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.
By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
Douthat: But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.
Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”
They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”
So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they’re spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.
But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there’s this big middle of “go along, get along” people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they’re just trying to follow along with the trends.
So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of “go along, get along” people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.”
But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.
Flash-forward to the Biden era; this excerpt is from the interview at the New York Times:Â
[Andreessen:] So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.
So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that thereâs no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldnât meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.
We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.
We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, âYes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet â those days are over. Thatâs not happening.â
We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, âWell, that seems really radical.â We said, âHonestly, we donât understand how youâre going to control and ban open-source A.I., because itâs just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?â And the response was, âWe classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, weâll do that, too.â
Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?
Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe Iâll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think theyâre defending democracy. I mean, theyâre trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler.
By the way, it appears Obama doesnât believe Trump is Hitler anymore, because he was joking around with him at Jimmy Carterâs funeral.
A lot of these guys, the fireâs in the eyes. And look, itâs not even just the U.S. Itâs the rise of UKIP. Brexit was an equally shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Nigel Farage. The German party AfD, itâs obviously the Nazi Party 2.0. And so this superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just went completely bananas.
So we came in on May â24, at the very height of that, and we said, âOh, my God, theyâre going to kill us. Theyâre going to kill our companies. Theyâre going to kill open source.â By the way if you kill open-source A.I., you also kill all academic research, so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.
Douthat: I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of A.I., but my perception is there is a large constituency not just in Washington, D.C., but in Silicon Valley as well that regards some form of A.I. as potentially dangerous to human civilization or U.S. national defense as nuclear weapons. And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow random start-ups to manufacture nuclear weapons in the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Andreessen: Not only did we ban them from making nuclear weapons; we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway â
Douthat: No, absolutely. No, Iâm by no means arguing that this theory is correct. Iâm just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of A.I. that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government, right?
Andreessen: It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. But I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, those arguments are still going to play out. Those arguments arenât over. Thatâs still going to play out.
The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. Itâs completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.
Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. Weâre no longer dealing with people we can deal with.
And thatâs the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and weâre like, âYep, weâre for Trump.â
Nellie Bowlesâ recent book, of Morning After the Revolution was all about the leftâs revolutionary fever in 2020 and its aftermath. Douthatâs interview with Andreessen focuses on the years leading up to it. But what caused the flip-over among professors at Ivy League universities? At some point in the mid to late naughts, they seemingly switched en masse from understanding that theyâre teaching the scions of parents paying very expensive tuitions so that their kids would learn to make money on Wall Street, or in Hollywood, Washington or Silicon Valley to, as Andreessen said, programming young radicals with the goal of âburning the system down [because you] are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.â
Whether itâs Aceâs lengthy excerpts or the full piece at the New York Times, definitely read the whole thing.
