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The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen
- luffapi 5y agoWow, what a terrible interview. It was so bad I thought it must be satire, but apparently it’s real. Andreessen comes across as mind bogglingly ignorant. Who could possibly care what this guy has to say about anything? > Two of your latest investments are in highly successful ventures: Substack and Clubhouse. Yeah, citation needed on that one.
- Grustaf 5y agoI’d say he always comes across as a self-important ignorant buffoon. His partner sounds less buffoonish, but even more full of himself.
- tyingq 5y agoThe first paragraph is pretty telling.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago> ventures He means brands. And that says enough about the intellectual depth of the interviewing.
- toiletfuneral 5y agoI wish I hadn’t read this, what a bunch of sociopathic horseshit
- jolux 5y agoWhy does it have to start with a gross, misogynistic dig at Taylor Lorenz? Comes off as petty and gives me absolutely no appetite to read the rest of it.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoyeah WTF, struggled to read that paragraph and then just closed this. Dunno who this guy is (Nicollo) or why should care but can we stop sharing these lame ass substack newsletters like they're decent content? They're newsletters silo'd away so these people and their readers can stay hidden away from the rest of us.
- sithadmin 5y agoNiccolo's entire brand is irony-poisoned shitposting from (what Americans would perceive as) a far-right perspective. If you want to take anything he writes seriously, you must simultaneously take nothing he writes seriously.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jolux 5y agoWhat is the non-irony-poisoned translation of that paragraph that I'm meant to accept as the serious interpretation?
- jessedhillon 5y agoIt's bait. Certain people were probably never going to give the interview a honest read anyhow, but here you are giving it free advertising and also putting on demonstration one of its theses (tendency of the WEIRD to insist on hyperconformity)
- jolux 5y agoI was actually pretty interested in reading it until I saw that paragraph.
- 1cvmask 5y agoPerhaps he is referring to the false accusations wrongfully leveled at Marc Andreessen (he never used the word retard in Clubhouse which was the appropriation term of reddit group wallstreetbets) by Taylor Lorenz: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale... https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1358463935771516928?lang=en https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1358463935771516928?la...
- Flatcircle 5y agoAfter the first couple questions he really dropped a lot of wisdom. For instance, the story about the US's fear of the Japanese owning the flat screen tech in the 90's. and... "Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%." "We've lived in a cultural and intellectual space just as much as we've lived in a physical space for thousands of years." much like the internet itself, you gotta read through lots of hay to find those golden needles. The comments from folks about how bad the interview was, probably stopped reading after the first couple of paragraphs and missed the meat of the interview.
- samstave 5y agoI’d be willing to bet that every single household in the US has products more than 3% made in China.
- Flatcircle 5y agoSounds like you need to read the article.
- DSingularity 5y agoSound alike you need some critical thinking. Roughly speaking, what percentage of your household products are manufactured in China?
- Flatcircle 5y agoPercentage of household products manufactured in china is irrelevant, he's talking about spending (excluding investments) so music, movies, television, video games, internet, cellphones plans, healthcare, schooling, food, gas, sporting events are all included in this equation. So importing Chinese goods isn't that much money when factoring the entire US consumption. That's a novel idea, that I never thought about before reading that article.
- 5y ago
- sithadmin 5y agoFor those who aren't aware, the interviewer is a founder of Salo Forum, which is an...interesting community. A sort of highbrow version of 4chan /pol/ with a posting style that feels very SomethingAwful.
- luffapi 5y agoIt doesn’t seem highbrow at all.
- sithadmin 5y agoPerspective is relative. I compared it /pol/. Nearly anything is highbrow compared to /pol/.
- luffapi 5y agoThis seemed like it would be very at home on /pol/. They literally spend paragraphs saying “retard” as much as possible. Total edgelord stuff.
- Griffinsauce 5y agoMost things are clean if you compare them to shit. At some point a metric doesn't really make any sense anymore.
- bendbro 5y agoYeah, its pretty repugnant. If I take a moment to unpack the dissonance here, it reminds me if a quote from a man smarter than I, Trevor Noah: "In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony poke at another's expense. But because, I am englightened by my own kindness."
- CRConrad 5y agoSalo? Hm... Is this a dog-whistle for fascism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Social_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Social_Republic
- jeffreyrogers 5y agoThe interviewer has an interesting interview with Glenn Greenwald as well: https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-kinshasa-interviews-glenn-greenwald https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-kinshasa-interviews-glenn...
- alfl 5y agoThe language is an intentional shibboleth [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
- mycologos 5y agoThat says a shibboleth is a word or phrase "that distinguishes one group of people from another". What is that group, here?
- alfl 5y agoFor example, the people in the other threads, here, who say that they can't read past the first few paragraphs. The author is using diction to intentionally exclude those people.
- tyingq 5y agoHe says that, but it's also a fairly nice card to pull if you just like being an arrogant asshat.
- Traster 5y agoBy intentionally being a massive arsehole they exclude people who won't tolerate arseholes so that they don't have to expose themselves to criticism from anyone with any sense of self-worth or intelligence.
- spoonjim 5y agoCan someone explain this piece in the style of Reply All’s “Yes Yes No”? Either there is a lot of context I don’t have or this thing makes no sense.
- specialist 5y agoThe goal of "Software is going to eat the world", Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat", Thiel's "Competition is for Losers" is to sound profound. Any inherit wisdom is accidental.
- keiferski 5y agoWEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic: I find this thesis enormously compelling and largely optimistic. 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. I think he is about 5 years behind on this. While WEIRD culture has definitely been influential worldwide since ~the collapse of the USSR, I think it has reached its local peak. American culture is increasingly seen as something entertaining or strange, not as an aspirational role model. Democracy is losing its prestige and other nation states are starting to construct their own Great Firewalls to keep WEIRD out. Instead, I think we will see something more akin to the Middle Ages. Distributed authorities and sources of power, each with its own internally developing cultures. There will be connections between them, but not the universalizing homogenization he claims. Just my opinion as an American that has been living abroad for the last ~6 years.
- jolux 5y agoYeah, this sounds like a very early 90s post-Soviet perspective, i.e. at least 30 years late. I'm a Fukuyamaist when it comes to historical development, but even Fukuyama has argued that the long-term trend towards liberal democracy may be upset by authoritarian backsliding in the short term.
- fsloth 5y agoCould it be you've been interacting with the "parents" generation which supplies the internet for the kids but does not get WEIRDed. Kids soaking in YouTube, gaming - it's creating a geek monoculture. There are backlashes, sure, but I don't know how well they can keep the tide at bay. Anyway as a parent of 11 and 13 year olds this is the vibe I get. They are much more familiar with memes and internet "things" than anything I would call 'traditional' culture in my country (Finland). Of course we are in the west, so not sure what the situation is elsewhere. But it sure looks like getting more WEIRD (I mean rural folk not speaking english creating youtube channels to present their traditions to a global audience - how can you hold it back (unless you are a large authoritarian nation state).
- briefcomment 5y agoIs this a real interview?
- DSingularity 5y agoWhat a terrible interview. Where is the substance?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tosh 5y ago> on Twitter, you think you're reading and writing text, but you're actually absorbing and spitting Oral fire
- etc-hosts 5y ago"Niccolo" is a prolific poster on the Salon Forum, named after the Italian town that served as the capitol of the last Italian fascist state. I'm not sure why Andreeseen would associate publicly with someone like that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Social_Republic#In_post-war_Italian_politics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Social_Republic#In_p...
- Traster 5y agoBecause in Andreesens world the baddies are the guys who point out he’s investing in projects to enable fascist, not the actual fascists. The worst thing you can be in Andreesens world is Kara Swisher asking “do you feel responsible for sexist bullying on the platforms you fund” - because Marc Andreesens personal hero is Marc Andreesen.
- ixabert 5y agoFor people wondering about the tone of the interview, the interviewer Niccolo is a far-right ultranationalist and fascist Croatian based in Toronto and Europe named Darko Peric. His whole shtick is to use irony for plausible deniability.
- CRConrad 5y agoAh, thanks. That answers this, then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27367181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27367181
- qualudeheart 5y agoIs this satire?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]