(2021-05-31) The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen Interviewed By A Retard

Niccolo Soldo: The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen - Interviewed by a Retard. As to Substack, if we've learned one thing from the last 2,500 years of human history, it's that all progress out of humanity's default state of misery and despair comes from being able to freely think, write, and argue. The fine folks at Substack run a big tent in which writers of many flavors and stripes are welcome. (Questions are a bit gonzo-performative, but supported an interesting conversation.)

We misremember the past as a Golden Age of Shared Understanding. In reality it was nothing like that; it was a time of information starvation. I think things were actually getting a lot worse in the run-up to the Internet; television was increasingly dominant, and it's been scientifically proven that TV makes you stupid.

The most startling aspect, to me, about the modern institutional media (big media) is its hyperconformity. (Note here, I am not criticizing the content of the hyperconformity; simply that it is hyperconformist. I don't even think the hyperconformists would deny this.) This hyperconformity seems to have developed in two phases: Phase One was a collapse of previously distinct media types (network TV, cable TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, et al) into just "web sites" and now "mobile apps". This was not their fault. Phase Two was the virtually universal industry-wide adoption of a strident ideological monoculture. This is their fault. I'm a First Amendment absolutist, so I don't begrudge anyone the freedom to say and write what they think, but we are told that we live in a marketplace of ideas. But if you mainly consume the standard media product, what you are experiencing is closer to a marketplace of idea.

This monoculture challenges two of my most fundamental beliefs. First, in business -- and these are businesses -- you seek to differentiate, to offer a unique product that your customers can't get anywhere else. In economic terms, differentiation is the key to pricing power, which is the key to profits, which is the key to staying in business. This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you'd expect. Second, civilizational progress happens not by top down unanimity and ideological instruction, but by debate and dispute. That this should happen, but is not happening, in the institutional media today is obvious.

Media theorist Walter Ong articulated the profound differences between Textual (Literate) and Oral cultures. Textual cultures are abstract, analytical, mathematical, clinical, universalist. Oral cultures are grounded, intuitive, emotional, interpersonal, group oriented. I think this maps to what Vilfredo Pareto and James Burnham described as "combinations" and "group-persistences", which also maps to what we know today as libs and cons.

anthropolgist Joseph Henrich in his ultra-important new book "The WEIRDest People In The World" shows how growing up in a Textual culture literally changes your brain's physical structure; your brain reallocates processing power normally devoted to analyzing faces to processing text. Which explains a LOT.

The Internet extensively enables both Textuality and Orality -- a fountain of writing alongside a fountain of audio and video. But also, you have a medium like Twitter, which Antonio Garcia-Martinez argues is actually Oral masquerading as Textual -- on Twitter, you think you're reading and writing text, but you're actually absorbing and spitting Oral fire.

I think Clubhouse is quite literally Socrates' Athenian Agora; it's Oral Culture implemented online in its full glory, for the first time. We should expect it to exhibit all of the virtues and pathologies of Oral Culture for sure -- but since we have lived mainly in a Textual culture for the last 300 years, Clubhouse is a timely and important nudge back to the middle.

paraphrase of a concept articulated by Beau Cronin: "Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges." A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also all of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege -- their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world. (First-World Problem)

Pandemic lockdowns are not the norm -- for that, we'll have to wait for the climate change lockdowns.

Having said that, I also think it's true that the Internet has given all of humanity full read/write access to one another's minds for the first time, and this is a massive shift in individual and collective psychology that we are just starting to grapple with. For example, we are now exposed to the crushing emotional load of suffering anywhere in the world, with no gatekeeping intermediary to insulate us, and not just occasionally but all the time

Rozin wrote a reply to Henrich that I think about all the time, and that exactly makes your point: "Insofar as the social world has transmuted to email, Facebook, and ordering online, it is [WEIRD youth] who best illustrate how humans will function. Globalization, the growing availability of access to computers and the Internet, Internet dating services, the decline of face-to-face markets, automated telephone answering services, WalMart, and the like, are rapidly homogenizing the world, making more and more people like [WEIRD youth]...

I predict that we -- the West -- are going to WEIRDify the entire world, within the next 50 years, the next two generations. We will do this not by converting non-WEIRD people to WEIRD, but by getting their kids. Their kids, and their kids' kids, are going to grow up on the Internet at least as much as they grow up in the real world, and the pull of WEIRD culture will overwhelm all existing non-WEIRD cultures. I realize this is a very strong claim, but this process is already underway; at this point I think it's inevitable. The cost of this will be a collapse of global cultural diversity exactly as you and Rozin predict.

Now, my take on WEIRD culture -- and specifically American culture, which is the beating heart of WEIRD -- is that it contains both strong support for and strong opposition to cultural [[creativity] within it.

The strong support shows up in many thousands of thriving Internet subcultures.. This is the legacy of the conceptual explosion at the heart of secularization and the Enlightenment.

But the strong opposition also shows up, in the form of the hectoring, suppressive demands for hyperconformity that we see all around us now. This is the legacy of Hegel, Marx, and Kojeve: the core progressive idea of WEIRD, that history is advancing toward a single, unified, optimized global way of thinking and being. I think these two legacies are at war within WEIRD, and the outcome will determine whether the Internet-powered WEIRDification of the world ultimately leads to an explosion of cultural creativity, or its absolute death.

I think what you are describing is a cold, virtual, extended, cultural World War III. And I mean that seriously. I don't think a "real" World War III ever happens, because of the mutually assured destruction of nukes, and quite frankly our postmodern lack of energy to go kill other people in the tens or hundreds of millions. But, I think we are already in virtual World War III, the Great Information War, both within and between countries, and it's primarily caused by the WEIRDification process I described above. (cold war, culture war)

the pointy end of the spear of WEIRD in our time is woke; woke is currently America's #1 cultural export -- as demonstrated with Black Lives Matter protests in dozens of countries with no local history of mistreatment of Black people -- and much of the rest of the world and its leadership elite very much do not want their populations going woke.

China is an obvious example; their stated and implemented strategy is to harvest Western technology while preventing that same technology from smuggling Western/WEIRD/woke culture into their society

nothing gets people into the streets in any country in the world these days more than cutting off the Internet..

it's important to contextualize the role of global trade (globalization) in domestic economics. Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%. Most of any national economy, including ours, is domestic; you can't import a haircut, a house, or a hospital visit. So global trade is probably overblown as an issue generally... Further, for things that are made and traded internationally, few are produced in just one place. An iPhone, for example, contains parts from more than 40 countries

Finally, industrial policy works better in theory than practice. The practice is generally disastrous, because of course it is: industrial policy = industrial politics; you're inviting the government to make economic decisions through a political lens, and you end up in the same morass as you do with any other political topic and the decisions end up looking really stupid.

BUT, that being said, it's time to build. We should absolutely be producing more in the US, but not by backsliding into corrosive, corrupt, counterproductive business/government entanglement in the form of industrial policy, but by playing to our strengths. We should build Elon Musk's vision of high scale, highly automated, highly flexible "alien dreadnought" factories by the thousands, and never be left in the breach again when we need to produce anything at all in conditions of duress.

On the one hand, China developing into a powerhouse of technological innovation would be good for the world, because new technologies don't tend to stay hoarded.

On the other hand, China has a strategic agenda to achieve economic, military, and political hegemony by dominating dozens of critical technology sectors -- this isn't a secret, or a conspiracy theory; they say it out loud.

In the meantime, the West's technology champion, the United States, has decided to self-flagellate -- both political parties and their elected representatives are busily savaging the US technology industry (Big Tech) every way they possibly can.

The benefits of cryptocurrency are real, from new competition to "too big to fail" financial incumbents, to new jobs created by the explosive innovation in the space, to enormous consumer gain that extends all the way down the economic ladder to the lowest income and most unbanked in our society.

Here's my startup pitch: "The Final App". Harness current breathtaking advances in big data, machine learning, and GPT-3 text generation -- slurp in all the world's information and all of your personal information, track and monitor everything you do and say, and then tell you at each point in your life exactly the optimal decision to make, the optimal thing to say, to do. Think "Cyrano de Bergerac"; you're on a date, the very attractive person across the table says X, this app instantly tells you via a heads-up display or tiny earpiece the best response. Same for job interviews. Same for which person or job to match with. Same for where to live, what to eat, how to make love, how to raise your kids. (cf CoachBot, Hertling Singularity Series, Guide To Greatness)