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“If you go back, like, 400 years ago it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” said a great sage of Silicon Valley last week, during the modern-day equivalent of a Socratic dialogue (a podcast). “Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff.” The sage was none other than Marc Andreessen — venture capitalist, crypto enthusiast, devoted Democrat turned Donald Trump adviser, and author of the 2023 late-capitalist cry for help, the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (“love doesn’t scale . . . let’s stick with money”). The man who bet big on Web3 (remember that?) and NFTs (remember them?), and who once described criticisms of the metaverse as “reality privilege”. (Meta, on whose board Andreessen sits, announced this week it was all but pulling the plug on the metaverse.)
The a16z founder was proudly explaining to Founders podcast host David Senra that he had “zero” levels of introspection. “Move forward. Go,” was his own anti-introspective mantra. “I’ve found that people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.” He went on to claim that the very concept of the individual was only invented a few hundred years ago and that it wasn’t until the start of the 20th century that we started to believe in guilt and self-criticism.
It’s hard to know quite where to start. I could start by surmising, as commenters on X were quick to do, that perhaps Andreessen hadn’t heard Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, or had misunderstood the entire philosophy of stoics like Marcus Aurelius whose thinking he often cites (he even claimed, as part of his defence, that the author of Meditations would have been on his side of this argument).
Let’s start instead with the most charitable interpretation. After all he was getting at some element of truth: overthinking and ruminating on things that are in the past or out of our control gets us nowhere, as the Stoics knew. Further, in our decadent age, in which most of us sit on our behinds all day rather than using our bodies for anything productive, there is a risk that we can become a little indulgent of our own emotional whims. At a certain point, turning inward stops being helpful and slides into navel-gazing, which becomes yet another form of procrastination. And it’s important to ensure plans and ideas are followed with action, or we’d get nowhere.
But Andreessen has grossly misunderstood the meaning of introspection, as was revealed in his responses to the online backlash generated by his comments — not just his claims to be on the side of the Stoics. He shared, for example, a video of Apple founder Steve Jobs being asked by an interviewer to “be introspective” by saying how he fit into “the American family of thinkers and inventors”. Jobs replied: “I don’t think that way.” Andreessen captioned the video with one word: “Well.” As if working out where you fit in history could in any way be described as introspective; as if this proved that Jobs — a committed Zen Buddhist — was also opposed to the idea of introspection.
Andreessen seems to conflate the idea of overthinking, and even of guilt, with introspection, a word deriving from Latin that simply means “looking within”. The value of introspection is not to keep us in our heads but rather to liberate us from them. It is to allow us to let go of our repetitive thoughts — our own mental doomscrolling, if you will — by the conscious process of working out why and how they got there in the first place.
He also fails to realise that the current era is the only one in which we would even have the option of not being introspective; the only one in which the a16z-backed merchants of the attention economy have made non-optional boredom extinct. In a recent X post, Andreessen described his “information consumption” thus: “1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily.” (One wonders whether he reads the old books, or asks those leading AI models for their summaries.)
My main issue with Andreessen is not so much that he’s wrong; it’s that he’s so confident about it. He sounded similarly confident when he told us that bitcoin represented a breakthrough akin to the internet, that Web3 was the future and that we shouldn’t fear AI because “the moral of every story is the good guys win”.
We seem to believe, as a society, that wealth, influence and confidence can be equated with wisdom. But Silicon Valley billionaires are not our sages; they’re our enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb, and making sure we never stop scrolling for long enough to think about why we are wasting our lives on their platforms.
