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Silicon Valley Thinks You're Stupid and It Will Pay a Lot to Make It True

a16z will start its own media company with a lens of 'rational optimism about technology' and any dissenters will be dismissed as Luddites who want us all to be pig farmers.

“Our lens is rational optimism about technology and the future,” a16z partner Margit Wennmachers said in the blog announcing the news. “We believe that it’s better to be alive after the industrial revolution than in an agrarian society. I say this with conviction as I grew up on a pig farm! Living through a pandemic has not been fun at all, but try doing it without technology.”

This sentiment encapsulates the false choice that Valley oligarchs have tried to convince the world is true for decades: kneel before the monopolistic power of technology companies (and the venture capitalists who fund them), or slide back into pre-industrial barbarism, struggling to secure the calories you need to survive, hiding from a ranging pandemic without even Zoom meetings to keep you employed or Netflix to keep you entertained.

There was a time, about a decade ago, when this pitch seemed like it could work. The tech beat was still emerging from its highly specialized, marginal, and often enthusiast origins. Companies like Facebook and Uber were covered with overwhelming enthusiasm because they had a positive, hopeful message, and they made technology an inseparable part of everyday life as opposed to a curiosity only nerds interact with. Business reporters covering obscure funding rounds and wonks who not so long were covering web browser updates and laser printers were suddenly rubbing elbows with the executives and technologists who altered the course of history.

It took more time than it should, but eventually the bloom fell off the rose. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just a Harvard dropout who became a billionaire by connecting the world, he’s an incredibly powerful and irresponsible tycoon who enabled genocide. Uber didn’t just make getting a taxi more convenient, it’s also the ruling class’s tool for gutting what little labor rights Americans had left. Technology is a powerful tool, and you know how dangerous it is in the hands of billionaires because legions of journalists across the world have reported about these dangers for years.

This scrutiny, entirely appropriate for extremely powerful people in public, has generated predictable backlash. An entire sect of Silicon Valley believes that the journalists who came after the tech boosters of the early 2000s know nothing about technology, hate technology, hate companies, hate Silicon Valley, and care only about clicks and Silicon Valley blood. Silicon Valley elite gather on private chat apps to discuss how journalists have too much power. Elon Musk beefs with any critic openly on Twitter, creating his own reality.

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