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Remember in the early days of COVID, Marc Andreessen published his It's Time to Build essay? How America needs to start solving housing, education, transportati

Remember in the early days of COVID, Marc Andreessen published his It's Time to Build essay? How America needs to start solving housing, education, transportation, manufacturing? I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you. Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build. https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ Well, it's been less than a year, and it looks like a16z is now big on NFTs. https://a16z.com/2021/02/27/nfts-and-a-thousand-true-fans/ https://a16z.com/2021/02/27/nfts-and-a-thousand-true-fans/

ffggvv 6y ago
so instead of building useful things like bridges or infrastructure, we decided to gamble on useless greater fool theory “assets”
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  To be fair, it's not like Twitter is useful to society. You cant expect people who got a positive feedback loop for building useless to switch to building a bridge, water treatment plant or a mosquito net.
- adventured 6y ago
  Instead? As though some VCs allocating a couple billions of dollars of private capital to crypto investments gets in the way of the government properly allocating ~$7.8 trillion in tax revenue every year. Venture capitalists don't build bridges or infrastructure, fortunately (although they could hardly do worse than the various governments in the US). Government does that by and large. It's the responsibility of government to allocate its tax revenue to infrastructure. The US has among the least responsible governments that has ever existed in world history. That's on the shoulders of the voters and the politicians they elect. It's not the VCs or politicians (insert scapegoat here) that are the primary problem (they're all secondary), it's down to the American people that have behaved like absentee sloven bastards for half a century now.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    I think the opportunity costs here aren't financial capital as much as is it human capital. The amount of STEM talent that goes to work for these crypto shops or hedge funds instead of picking up a nuclear or civil engineering degree and rebuilding the power grid in Texas or California probably has some bad effects. The UK has to increasingly rely on Chinese nuclear expertise because over the last ten to twenty years a lot of engineers have retired and you don't just stagnate but decline because there's just not enough people and also state capacity to keep that process knowledge alive. Musk says a lot of crap but on this he was right when he talked about the real loss of knowledge in spaceflight. It takes a very long time to get an engineering culture back once you lose it.
    - adventured 6y ago
      We are not lacking for the capacity to build infrastructure. We have both a plentiful supply of engineering talent and labor. We're presently bombing Syria because Biden is a continuation of the Obama war hawk stance on toppling everything in the Middle East (which is a program that goes back decades now and fully crosses the political aisle from side to side, they're all doing the same thing when given power). That's the kind of thing we do in the US instead of properly investing into our infrastructure. And we've been doing it across the whole of the post WW2 era. A minimum of $10-$15 trillion has been spent that way by the US just since the late 1960s. That's where our infrastructure money went.
kelp 6y ago
This is what floored me when he wrote that essay. For years, a16z has been poring millions into pointless crypto related companies. And they just keep doing it. Yet Andreessen has the audacity to tell us all to build while he chases the decades most trivial investments and asset classes.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Think of it this way: As a VC, he bets on what makes money in the current system. As a citizen, he calls for a change to a better system.
  - emsy 6y ago
    That makes him a talker.
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    His actions as a VC make it more difficult to accomplish what he's calling for as a citizen.
- DSingularity 6y ago
  That’s your opinion. What if others disagree and view their investments in cryptocurrency tech to be investments in a future where individuals are liberated from banks and legacy money systems? That’s how I view it. Personally, it’s enough to remember how these people exploited the system to crash the economy during the “housing bubble” to sign up for that future. Disparage it all you want.
mtalantikite 6y ago
“Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have organizations behind them let alone marketing budgets, yet are used, owned, and loved by tens of millions of people.” Uh, what? This is written on basically a marketing blog for one of the most well known VC firms in the world. Which will invest millions of dollars in organizations that will go on to market an ever increasing amount of blockchain companies that will do... something. Which will be written about endlessly by news outlets because prices go up crazy amounts. This whole NFT thing has actually made me want to shut off my computer, stop programming, and start farming or something. Either all these people are idiots or I am. I can only make sense of it if I assume most of it is actual money laundering.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  Im literally with you on both your reason to leave tech and to go do farming. As a tip, permaculture is more sustainable than monoculture. Make sure to pick a good, warm environment to make your life easier. Dont name your chickens... makes it harder to kill them for harvest.
  - mtalantikite 6y ago
    Haha thanks, as long as I’m not alone on the sentiment. And I appreciate the advice on permaculture — I just read Masanobu Fukuoka and would like to do more research on these methods. Also, I’m vegetarian and am not so sure I could even kill those unnamed chickens!
    - NoOneNew 6y ago
      At the very least, dont underestimate the benefit of all nature chicken fertilizer (poo and compost processing). They make great passive tillers and pest control too. I fell in love with the idea of farming when I visited (often) my ex's parents farm. Saw a bunch of the permaculture/homesteading stuff in action long before it became "cool".
      - mtalantikite 6y ago
PhillyG 6y ago
From the second link: "Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins" Fortnite skins are different from NFTs - you're not supposed to sell them on. I just checked this with a quick Google search just in case the developer had changed how they work since I last played. They haven't, the way to sell skins is to sell your account details via an external market. Some games companies ban players from online matches who are caught buying or selling like that. I also found a site for buying /selling useful in game items, and the way that the item handover works is literally by making players meet up in game and the seller dropping the item on the floor. VBucks are just tokens that can only be spent in Fortnite and make it slightly harder for spenders to know how much they are spending on each thing. You get them slowly in game, and can also buy them with real money. You can only use them to buy different appearances and gestures, and only from the developer. I'd therefore argue Fortnite does not have a sophisticated economy, nor uses NFTs. It has a clever business model, using free download of the game as a whole but paid customisation, to help make it very shareable and very effective at gradually warming players up to the idea of making a purchase or five. It has become much like a shopping mall for modern teenagers - they willingly hang out there for hours for free, right next to places tempting then to purchase.

ffggvv 6y ago

so instead of building useful things like bridges or infrastructure, we decided to gamble on useless greater fool theory “assets”

NoOneNew 6y ago
To be fair, it's not like Twitter is useful to society. You cant expect people who got a positive feedback loop for building useless to switch to building a bridge, water treatment plant or a mosquito net.
adventured 6y ago
Instead? As though some VCs allocating a couple billions of dollars of private capital to crypto investments gets in the way of the government properly allocating ~$7.8 trillion in tax revenue every year. Venture capitalists don't build bridges or infrastructure, fortunately (although they could hardly do worse than the various governments in the US). Government does that by and large. It's the responsibility of government to allocate its tax revenue to infrastructure. The US has among the least responsible governments that has ever existed in world history. That's on the shoulders of the voters and the politicians they elect. It's not the VCs or politicians (insert scapegoat here) that are the primary problem (they're all secondary), it's down to the American people that have behaved like absentee sloven bastards for half a century now.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  I think the opportunity costs here aren't financial capital as much as is it human capital. The amount of STEM talent that goes to work for these crypto shops or hedge funds instead of picking up a nuclear or civil engineering degree and rebuilding the power grid in Texas or California probably has some bad effects. The UK has to increasingly rely on Chinese nuclear expertise because over the last ten to twenty years a lot of engineers have retired and you don't just stagnate but decline because there's just not enough people and also state capacity to keep that process knowledge alive. Musk says a lot of crap but on this he was right when he talked about the real loss of knowledge in spaceflight. It takes a very long time to get an engineering culture back once you lose it.
  - adventured 6y ago
    We are not lacking for the capacity to build infrastructure. We have both a plentiful supply of engineering talent and labor. We're presently bombing Syria because Biden is a continuation of the Obama war hawk stance on toppling everything in the Middle East (which is a program that goes back decades now and fully crosses the political aisle from side to side, they're all doing the same thing when given power). That's the kind of thing we do in the US instead of properly investing into our infrastructure. And we've been doing it across the whole of the post WW2 era. A minimum of $10-$15 trillion has been spent that way by the US just since the late 1960s. That's where our infrastructure money went.

kelp 6y ago

This is what floored me when he wrote that essay. For years, a16z has been poring millions into pointless crypto related companies. And they just keep doing it. Yet Andreessen has the audacity to tell us all to build while he chases the decades most trivial investments and asset classes.

BurningFrog 6y ago
Think of it this way: As a VC, he bets on what makes money in the current system. As a citizen, he calls for a change to a better system.
- emsy 6y ago
  That makes him a talker.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  His actions as a VC make it more difficult to accomplish what he's calling for as a citizen.
DSingularity 6y ago
That’s your opinion. What if others disagree and view their investments in cryptocurrency tech to be investments in a future where individuals are liberated from banks and legacy money systems? That’s how I view it. Personally, it’s enough to remember how these people exploited the system to crash the economy during the “housing bubble” to sign up for that future. Disparage it all you want.

mtalantikite 6y ago

“Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have organizations behind them let alone marketing budgets, yet are used, owned, and loved by tens of millions of people.” Uh, what? This is written on basically a marketing blog for one of the most well known VC firms in the world. Which will invest millions of dollars in organizations that will go on to market an ever increasing amount of blockchain companies that will do... something. Which will be written about endlessly by news outlets because prices go up crazy amounts. This whole NFT thing has actually made me want to shut off my computer, stop programming, and start farming or something. Either all these people are idiots or I am. I can only make sense of it if I assume most of it is actual money laundering.

NoOneNew 6y ago
Im literally with you on both your reason to leave tech and to go do farming. As a tip, permaculture is more sustainable than monoculture. Make sure to pick a good, warm environment to make your life easier. Dont name your chickens... makes it harder to kill them for harvest.
- mtalantikite 6y ago
  Haha thanks, as long as I’m not alone on the sentiment. And I appreciate the advice on permaculture — I just read Masanobu Fukuoka and would like to do more research on these methods. Also, I’m vegetarian and am not so sure I could even kill those unnamed chickens!
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    At the very least, dont underestimate the benefit of all nature chicken fertilizer (poo and compost processing). They make great passive tillers and pest control too. I fell in love with the idea of farming when I visited (often) my ex's parents farm. Saw a bunch of the permaculture/homesteading stuff in action long before it became "cool".
    - mtalantikite 6y ago

PhillyG 6y ago

From the second link: "Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins" Fortnite skins are different from NFTs - you're not supposed to sell them on. I just checked this with a quick Google search just in case the developer had changed how they work since I last played. They haven't, the way to sell skins is to sell your account details via an external market. Some games companies ban players from online matches who are caught buying or selling like that. I also found a site for buying /selling useful in game items, and the way that the item handover works is literally by making players meet up in game and the seller dropping the item on the floor. VBucks are just tokens that can only be spent in Fortnite and make it slightly harder for spenders to know how much they are spending on each thing. You get them slowly in game, and can also buy them with real money. You can only use them to buy different appearances and gestures, and only from the developer. I'd therefore argue Fortnite does not have a sophisticated economy, nor uses NFTs. It has a clever business model, using free download of the game as a whole but paid customisation, to help make it very shareable and very effective at gradually warming players up to the idea of making a purchase or five. It has become much like a shopping mall for modern teenagers - they willingly hang out there for hours for free, right next to places tempting then to purchase.