(2023-12-28) Zitron Software Has Beaten The World

Ed Zitron: Software Has Beaten The World. Every single stupid, loathsome, and ugly story in tech is a result of the fundamentally broken relationship between venture capital and technology. And, as with many things, it started with a blog.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen made a subtle comment... At the time, Marc Andreessen’s “Software is eating the world” was lauded as revolutionary

at a time when the tech industry had very little scrutiny.

If it had, somebody would’ve noticed what Andreessen was advocating: a growth-at-all-costs tech ecosystem divorced from financial valuations, defined not by the quality of its businesses but by what “the broader consequences are for businesses and the economy” and the need to “expand the number of innovative new companies created in the U.S. and around the world.”

His mealy-mouthed screed repeatedly trumpets “revenue” as the gauge of a company’s success, and names investments like Zynga, Twitter, Foursquare and Groupon as “building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.”

There is an obvious incentive for venture capitalists to push this kind of unsustainable growth model — a tech industry that is built on a dependency on venture capital. While venture capitalists like Mark Suster and Fred Wilson advocated for slower investment cycles where deeper relationships were built, the venture community mostly followed A16Z’s hawkish guidance, investing fast and loose. (blitzscaling)

Andreessen Horowitz isn’t a “media company that monetizes through VC,” but a form of financial cult. The belief system that made the valley rich is the exact same one that is currently killing it, in part because Andreessen’s views and goals were anti-technological at their core

Andreessen’s focus on hyper-growth companies was not intended to make the world better, but to create more dependencies (like Uber and Lyft destroying local transit, or Doordash eating the margins of every restaurant it serves) under the auspice of “disruption.” (locust)

There is a world (a very different world) where Lyft, Uber and Doordash could have created a true employer-employee relationship with drivers, but the company would have cost too much and grown too slowly to make venture capitalists willing to invest.

Venture capital has, in building a dependent startup ecosystem, created a dependency on a constant flow of cheap or interest-free money. (ZIRP)

They dressed these destructive businesses up as “disruptive,” because they had a massive competitive advantage over industry incumbents — massive amounts of capital and the incentive to dominate a market rather than compete on a qualitative basis by creating a functional business.

As this model dies, its advocates have become desperate, framing those who don’t believe we should spend billions of dollars to prop up unprofitable non-businesses as “decels” that believe the tech industry should “slow down.” These people call themselves “effective accelerationists” (otherwise known as e/acc) and are led by a Guillaume Verdon, a former Google engineer that goes by the agonizing Twitter handle “Based Beff Jezos,”

They are anti-responsibility, anti-accountability and anti-consequence, yet dress themselves in the trappings of rugged individualism and hard work.

What great ideas didn’t happen, or will happen much later, because billions of dollars got pumped into cryptocurrency or vaguely-described “AI” products?

Whatever Andreessen and his ilk are, they are not “optimists.” These are not people fighting to make the world better, or smaller, or more connected. Their war is one where software poisons and monetizes every corner of society, with the costs flowing back to rich and powerful people that can, in turn, add even more tolls to your everyday life

Real techno-optimists — people actually interested in a better tech industry — should campaign for a venture capital industry that doesn’t sit on its cash and focuses it on funding new ideas and new founders. The tech boom grew from accelerators like YCombinator (which produced several boring and societally useful billion-dollar companies like Stripe, Dropbox and Gusto) that almost exclusively focuses on seed-stage companies, and I believe this is where the actual future lies.