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Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future
- remoroid 2mo ago[dead]
- conartist6 2mo ago[flagged]
- pythonic_hell 2mo agoGhouls. Sucking the life out of society.
- rbanffy 2mo ago[flagged]
- Havoc 2mo agoIntentionally going after old people because they’re more susceptible to AI and declaring as much on record is fuckin wild. Does SV now optimize for evilness?
- georgefrowny 2mo agoThey call it "goal orientation". I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.
- kotaKat 2mo agoThey’ve been grooming the elderly for years to fall for right wing propaganda to keep securing the ignorant elderly vote so this is just the natural progression to keep grooming them to fall for whatever narrative Horowitz wants to peddle for his GOP overlords to get one final dickover on the country as it keeps running into the ground.
- LandR 2mo ago> Does SV now optimize for evilness? Since when has it not ?
- walrus01 2mo agoI think the existence of the internet as a mass-market entertainment platform used by billions of non-tech users is part of it. SV from like the 1970s/1980s seemed a much more innocent place. The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil. Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
- Schiendelman 2mo agoWhat makes you think they are less evil other than absence of high-quality information?
- walrus01 2mo agoWell, for one they had less capability to execute evil plans on a worldwide Internet scale. Maybe some of the early 80s tech entrepreneurs very well could have become the same sort of founders that are in this list of horrid a16z things. But the reach and scale just wasn't possible. The whole paradigm of software development, and distributing that software product to end users was completely different than what we have today.
- butlike 2mo ago> But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today. What if what happens today seems quaint in the future?
- livinglist 2mo agoMaking world a better place by so lo mo
- throwup238 2mo agoCalled it! [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056765
- sznio 2mo agoSV is a paperclip optimizer, except instead of maximising paperclips, it maximises human misery. I won't be surprised when "The Com"[1] will be revealed to be a project of some rich SV accelerationist. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com
- torginus 2mo agoIf you think this is morally acceptable, in which case, what you're doing is essentially trying to trick the algorithm to uprank your content. But people at Facebook/X/Youtube can just update a table row and accomplish 1000x as much as you're trying to do. Their business model is selling a less powerful version of that. When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
- octocop 2mo agoIf your metric is growth I guess this is where you end up
- alex1138 2mo agoI remember reading about Andreessen coaching Zuckerberg, having to spoon feed him answers at trial, and apparently he was one of the masterminds behind the dual class shares/proposed third class of share (I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed') This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
- zipy124 2mo agoI mean a lot of successful new tech companies were about side-stepping legislation. Some that are missing here are airbnb which effectively side-stepped fairly strict hotel legislation (Though there is a case to be made that it simply improved short-term lodging), and uber which side-stepped strong taxi/private-hire legislation. This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
- owen-hill 2mo ago[dead]
- consensus1 2mo agoAnd thank god they did. I'm old enough to remember the hell of the taxi cartel.
- bugglebeetle 2mo agoI’m old enough to remember the heavenly times before people repeated phrases like “the taxi cartel” as if they were original thoughts vs. cooked up by Uber’s comms team.
- sznio 2mo agohave you actually used a pre-uber taxi? you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit. nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson
- Y-bar 2mo agoYears before Uber arrived here local taxi companies already had an iPhone app with geo-location, up-front digital payment, and receipts I could directly import into the company ledger app. Taxis were regulated and forced to give cost up-front in the app and in the window of the vehicle. That is what taking a taxi was here before Uber arrived. That company changed nothing other than to dilute the meaning of worker versus contractor and Uber made it easier for registered sex offenders to become drivers because that company had less stringent requirements.
- tedggh 2mo agoHow come Flock is not listed? That’s the most troubling company a16z has heavily invested on and supported.
- moogly 2mo agoHard to say Flock is the worst... There's a lot of competition. I'll throw Toka into the ring. https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-also-backs-company-can-rewrite.html https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-...
- edot 2mo agoWow, that's an insane pairing. For those who don't click, Toka is a software company that specializes in hacking and altering security camera footage.
- y-curious 2mo agoEdot, we have footage of you stealing a car at gunpoint, then you getting out and breakdancing while turning into an elephant. Any explanation or straight to jail?
- kristjansson 2mo agoIt seems impossible for this to be a true statement. and yet. What’s next? $20m series B in ByBy, a horizontally integrated trash disposal, concrete shoe manufacture, lye bath, and pig farm operation?
- hackable_sand 2mo ago"I work in tech"
- saturn8601 2mo agoQuick google shows that they are based In Tel Aviv and Co-founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. No surprises there. Seems like every sketchy company comes out of there.
- walrus01 2mo agoWell this is all pretty fucking horrifying.
- rbanffy 2mo agoAnd you know that when someone bets so much money in a dystopian future, they’ll actively work towards that outcome.
- walrus01 2mo agoYou know how sometimes you're exploring a location in a post-apocalyptic video game and find a message on a 'datapad' or scrawled on the wall in blood or something, as a world building fiction exercise to inform the player how screwed up the dystopia became in its last days before everything went totally to shit? Well, now I have some new material for you...
- Hikikomori 2mo agoThey're also part of the same group of christian tech feudalists as Thiel and supports trump/project 2025. Seems like they all went insane because the government can still say no to them.
- moogly 2mo ago[flagged]
- radarsat1 2mo agoI know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm: > out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion. > From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
- stephantul 2mo agoTragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply. This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
- XorNot 2mo agoRather depends on the "spoils" capacity of the channel. The windfall may not even justify the initial expenditure before it's exhausted.
- stephantul 2mo agoI think spoiling a commons is risky for individuals, not so much for investors. Breaking a future law is lucrative
- lelanthran 2mo agoJokes on them - they poison the commons enough, and soon no one is going to trust anything they read on the internet. Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
- deleted 2mo ago
- mrtksn 2mo agoPeople often forget that the world is not just US or "the West". What he is investing in is a phase that the West certainly is headed into and we will be testing the idea of creating a feedback loop that gives more and more power to people who are successful in one thing to call the shots in all other things. I would say so far those people demonstrated very low efficiency and inability to match the ranks of the China Communist party in pretty much all metrics, including the creepy stuff. One may argue that the Western way of doing dystopia is a self-correcting loop, so maybe eventually we may have more advanced and optimized dystopia than what China or Russia can achieve through centrally held power. Alternatively maybe the human nature will prevail and all this will actually lead to another run of freedom and democracy. Considering the history of Europe, both can happen as stages of a continuous loop. Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
- walrus01 2mo agoSome of the creepy things like the 'phone farm' have been done for many years in China and other locations. I follow the social media of a low-budget 'phone farm' operator in Pakistan who has about 400 phones which are used for various forms of paid "boost your post/boost your business" social media manipulation domestically in Urdu lanuguage social media. He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same. Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/12/25/the-dark-world-of-illegal-loan-apps-in-india https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/12/25/the-dark-world-... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/business/india-lending-apps.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/business/india-lending-ap...
- TwoFerMaggie 2mo agoNot surprised at all as Marc Andreesen has been in the rabbit hole for a while: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...
- wahnfrieden 2mo agoHe also organized/hosted a reading club for discussing Evola, the fascist/nazi occultist.
- wseqyrku 2mo agoAll investors do this, they don't really have an idea of "the future" they want to build. They just "find something they can throw money at". Their words, not mine.
- tgv 2mo agoNot true. There are banks and funds that have environmental policies. Where you invest speaks about your character.
- mathieuh 2mo agoAs Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different. Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly. Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
- vintermann 2mo agoUnless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.
- Supermancho 2mo ago> As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.) ... they aren't hypocrites. I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system". Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoDon’t forget a16z’s breathless boosterism of NFTs and Crypto. They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
- dabeeeenster 2mo agoThey really are the grift that keeps on giving.
- vintermann 2mo agoThe grift that keeps on griefing.
- abc123abc123 2mo agoThe grift that keeps on grifting.
- ydat 2mo ago[dead]
- vintermann 2mo ago> Lee's stated goal was to “desensitize everyone to the phrase ‘cheating.’” If you say it enough, he argues, “cheat begins to lose its meaning.” A16z praised Lee's approach as “rooted in deliberate strategy and intentionality.” Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
- MattGaiser 2mo agoDo they care? Just cheat the people in the next round!
- sscaryterry 2mo agoI'm tired of cheats.
- codemog 2mo agoLee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it. How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
- prolly97 2mo agoThis - though I'm not certain that the product really solves any of these identified issues of "y is bullshit"
- MattGaiser 2mo agoIn America, solving something is to exempt the individual from the problem. So it solves it by letting you pass the tech interview.
- pibaker 2mo agoIf you see a pile of trash by the side of the road and tell yourself it is ok to dump your trash there, well, you just explained why there is a pile of trash there in the first place. You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
- bambax 2mo agoMarc Andreessen is an evil man with the behavior (and appearance!) of a Bond villain.
- hotelsacher 2mo agoHe's the embodiment of the banality of evil. Just can't avoid being cliché.
- the_gipsy 2mo agoHad to google his name. Welcome to the Egghead's lair, Mr. Bond.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- butlike 2mo agoAnd to think him and Faye Wong are virtually the same age. She, a beautiful actress singer-songwriter, and him, a rather bulbous egg-headed villain. Are we SURE what you do doesn't influence how radiant you appear to others?
- alex1138 2mo agoI have you now, Mr. Bond. But instead of quickly disposing of you, I shall spend a 20 minute monologue on How We Must Build Things while you inexorably escape
- lokar 2mo agoI enjoy telling recruiters I won’t work for companies funded by obvious sociopaths.
- guywithahat 2mo ago[flagged]
- nullocator 2mo agoHow exactly has he greatly improved the world? Being the first loser of the browser wars?
- seydor 2mo agoProbably it's a random sample of AI companies. Curing cancer is the marketing slogan, AI is not capable of doing that. But it's good enough to impress bankers and lawyers who will keep inflating the bubble for the foreseeable future.
- digitalsalvatn 2mo agoCuring cancer is such a lazy goal. Finding out how to make everyone smarter is a much better one. That's really it, isn't it. How do we make smarter people, without them getting insufferable?
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoThe smartest people aren't insufferable, but people who think they're the smartest are.
- aeve890 2mo ago> Finding out how to make everyone smarter is a much better one. Yes, smarter people, that's we need of course. No nuance needed. Smarter grifters, smarter drug dealers, smarter dictators, smarter serial killers. Smarter and more empathetic people would be better I think.
- ascagnel_ 2mo ago"Curing cancer" reminds me of a specific late-70s penny-stock grift, where companies promising a vaccine for cancer (but with no product or R&D) would be pumped-and-dumped. History doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
- consensus1 2mo agoWho says it isn't? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41698-026-01276-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41698-026-01276-6
- pwmglenn 2mo agoWhy dont you read the article?
- larodi 2mo agoHumpty is a joker and a con man, and a man without vision (in his own words!).
- spacechild1 2mo agoI guess that's were you end up when you aim for "zero introspection". Marc Andreessen proves again and again that he's an utter piece of shit.
- vrganj 2mo agoThe guy that quoted some of the early fascists in his reactionary manifesto that included a list of enemies wants to build a bleak future? Say it ain't so! "I have zero introspection. As little as possible" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk We can tell, Marc. It's not a good thing. It's the sort of thing oblivious villains say.
- ModernMech 2mo agoOf course, isn’t Andreessen the one who believes introspection is a waste of time, a fad from the 1900s the only outcome of which is to slow one down? Why even consider the long term consequences of your actions when they can make you billions of dollars in the short term? Introspection, like empathy, is for suckers and losers.
- alex1138 2mo agoYeah really How do people like him get the money to fund his little projects, it's amazing
- consensus1 2mo agoIn this case by founding Netscape
- triceratops 2mo agoAn ultimately failed, overvalued company that got its shit wrecked by hungrier, more ruthless businesspeople.
- cineticdaffodil 2mo ago[dead]
- Valakas_ 2mo agoFor me it's insane, how in this day and age, we don't conduct DSM-V / ICD tests (interviews) that screen for Cluster B personality disorders on everyone, and bar, at least those with anti-social PD, psychopathy, or extreme forms of narcissism, to work in positions of influence or power over others.
- fragmede 2mo agoIt seems we are successfully screening for people that do.
- xienze 2mo agoWell that's predicated on those tests being infallible, not open to personal interpretation, and not subject to sabotage ("hey Mr. Psychiatrist evaluating Person X, we at <competitor> think X is a total sociopath, perhaps you might be convinced to see it our way"). And that's not even getting into how what the DSM labels certain things as being "mental illness" or the like is subject to change over time. You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
- Gareth321 2mo agoPeople don't like to entertain the idea that determinism could exist. Specifically, the idea that some people are just born bad, mean, or unintelligent. When people commit crimes there is endless hand-wringing about how "society" failed them. They blame it on poverty, or abuse, or inequality, or racism, or anything which absolves the individual of their agency. For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
- Valakas_ 2mo agoAFAIK only psychopathy is purely genetic. The rest i believe are susceptible (although very resistant) to treatment as they are only partially genetic, and partially environmental (suffered abuse, neglect). Some people are commenting people would fake/dupe the testers. Sure, some would be able to. But many (i'd wager the vast majority) wouldn't. People don't realise how difficult it actually is to fake being normal. The only reason people with cluster B seem to dupe so many is because we live in a day and age where they are able to jump from relationship to relationship and cut ties with the people they've mistreated or "found them out".
- utopiah 2mo agoSo... nothing new? /s You naively thought Silicon Valley was just a funny TV show about people wanting to make money, a lot of it, but even that was an idealized version.
- DrScientist 2mo agoHow about an AI startup up that automatically finds companies whose stated business model is to flout existing laws, and then initiates legal proceedings. Funded by the fines it generates for governments.
- MattGaiser 2mo agoThe results of startups flouting laws though have been such that even when faced with determined opposition, in the end they are defeated. Airbnb and Uber ran roughshod over the law and faced determined taxi commissions and groups that usually beat real estate developers.
- DrScientist 2mo agoThe latest and largest Uber fine - 825 million. https://www.reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966-million-automating-driver-suspensions-document-2026-08-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966... Also, in the UK, lost their 5 year battle about whether drivers are self-employed or workers for Uber. https://www.taxiplus.co.uk/news/new-rules-for-uber-drivers-what-you-need-to-know https://www.taxiplus.co.uk/news/new-rules-for-uber-drivers-w... Or AirBnB versus Barcelona - https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2026/06/10/barcelona-is-shutting-down-every-airbnb-by-2028/ https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2026/06/10/barcelona-is-shutti... The US is not the only jurisdiction - and that complexity creates an opportunity to leverage fines.
- DrScientist 2mo agoAnd of course the 18 billion recent Meta settlement - agreed to potentially stop a law suit that could have unravelled the whole company.
- TrackerFF 2mo agoSometimes when I see these comically dystopian surveillance startups, I sort of wonder what the founders were thinking when they came up with the idea? Like, were they just watching some random documentary about China, and noticed how their surveillance state works - and said to themselves "You know, that's exactly what we need here!" Or is it just purely greed? They see some potential cash crab, and come up with some rationalization that doesn't sound that bad ("We'll catch criminals"). I just wonder what type of founder walks up to a VC, and pitches some idea with the explicit goal of robbing everyone of their privacy even a bit more.
- Yeri 2mo agoPure greed; and most people think it won't apply to them. It'll monitor "the others"
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoIn my perception, VCs don't really care about goals. They care about a convincing argument "if you give me money, I'll give you back more money". Note that it doesn't matter if that statement is true; it only needs to be true in aggregate to keep the VCs behaving the way that they do.
- preg_match 2mo agoRight, they’re not selling products, they’re selling a company. They don’t really care if in 10 years it all goes up in flames, ideally they’re out by then. They just want investor money because investors are stupid and will give it to them, it’s that simple. They have no moral qualms because they have zero conviction about the business model itself. The business model is just a vessel. It could be anything, if it gets investors interested.
- pulkitsh1234 2mo ago"A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case" -- Niccolo Machiavelli It's a self fulfilling prophecy... while us commoners, or so called "activists" or ethicists ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics... The powerful are just living an alternate life devoid of all these moral qualms and are have clearly distanced themselves from the mundane, have distanced themselves from the guilt or any kind of accountability. In their eyes, they are just capitalising on the human tendencies which have been always existed (the seven deadly sins), so the "absolve" themselves pretty quickly by saying that they are not creating new "sins", just leveraging, or allowing the people to go along those sins. They think, why should they be the ones to not capitalise on them, if someone else might and will. It's a coordination problem of our society. No one wants to let go. They want to hedge, they invest in ozempic and invest in fast-food at the same time, there is no moral compass guiding them. It's for us commoners to debate and think about.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- merelydev 2mo agoTLDR: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".
- Forgeties79 2mo ago“Also, I have no intention of acknowledging that not all people have an equal chance at winning the game, nor doing anything about it for that matter.”
- AJMaxwell 2mo agoNo, we really should hate the players. They are keeping the game from changing.
- 2mo ago
- picafrost 2mo agoThe US consumer economy must grow. Regulating anything that has the potential to continue its growth is simply not a priority for the current US administration, and investors won't miss out on big tech exits as they grow more scarce. Let the gamblers gamble, let socially harmful uses of AI proliferate, let the surveillance state spread, as long as they generate revenues that do not collapse* the economy. If they produce individuals harmful to society, well, indignants can be Flocked, fined, and, if necessary, imprisoned. Flouting the law ahead of regulators has always been a strategy in startups, only now the stakes are not "get a ride to the airport."
- andrewstuart 2mo ago“Ethics” and “Silicon Valley” like oil and water.
- antiloper 2mo agoThis problem can be resolved easily by re-introducing ostracism.
- an0malous 2mo ago@pmarca: Current status: Retardmaxxing. https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2033989507213889615 https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2033989507213889615
- ape4 2mo agoIt should be possible to make money by inventing projects and services that make people's lives better.
- danparsonson 2mo agoIt is possible, but sadly the alternative is easier.
- lokar 2mo agoYou have to have a moral compass and enough humanity to tell the difference.
- hackable_sand 2mo agoI disagree. It is always easier to make the world a more peaceful, happy place, always.
- andriy_koval 2mo agowondering if you have a chance to support your opinion with any evidence or data points?
- taylorfinley 2mo agoThis hypothesis is why I created the NOVC alliance[0] and am committed to building my product without the enshittification pressure inherent to the structure of VC funding. We currently only have 2 members, but you have to start somewhere. If you want to build products that aren't user hostile please consider signing the pledge. [0] https://novc.fyi https://novc.fyi
- roschdal 2mo agohttps://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
- Zigurd 2mo agoThis is just one of the things turning China into a relatively less dangerous and harmful trading partner. I've often wondered aloud how the US tech industry is going to deal with losing international markets, which have historically been half their sales in mature product categories. Investors might be attracted to the bleak future they are selling, but they are selling a shrinking share of the world economy. I can think of one way to explain it, and it's not good: they expect global war.
- tescreal 2mo agoThey're just silently waiting. No need to make a big show, just simply being the best alternative is enough of a pitch.
- csomar 2mo ago> they expect global war Based on the recent performance of the US and Russia, there is likely no "global" war. China might take out Taiwan and that will be that. Everyone else will just go/stay home.
- Zigurd 2mo agoHave I fumbled the pronoun? I don't mean the Chinese are expecting global war, I mean people like Andreessen are banking on war as a means of economic reset. They are unconcerned about even medium-term consequences now.
- Otterly99 2mo agoI'm actually baffled that some of these companies are even allowed to sell their services. Especially the deepfakes and the fake doctor notes for tax reduction. Is investing in these companies even legal?
- miltonlost 2mo agoWhen the DoJ is non-independent and the President is a literal crook and grifter, legality doesn't matter anymore to companies. They won't be prosecuted as long as they don't screw over the rich.
- ambicapter 2mo agoThis list is comically long, holy shit.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo agoNouveau riche
- flipgimble 2mo agoI think this is a symptom of Big Tech and VCs scraping the bottom of the barrel to extract as much capital and social control from what remains of the good will for technology as a whole. They are literally running the internet into the ground. The popular backlash is brewing. I see this in increasing opposition to flock cameras, anti data-center activism, or generally against companies that extract, exploit and control instead of contributing to the common good.
- suttree 2mo agoThe dumb thing about dumb things.
- EGreg 2mo agoWow that doublespeed site is ... something else https://www.doublespeed.ai/ https://www.doublespeed.ai/ A16Z invested $1M in them? And here I thought I was being scrupulously ethical in 2023 when I was yelled at by HN for making a much milder proof of concept, the first project I ever did in AI: https://engageusers.ai/ https://engageusers.ai/
- polymer8563 2mo agoyeah both are bad, just doublespeed is colossaly demonic
- damnesian 2mo ago>“They're hitting like the old person niche, which is what I think is like the best niche to hit with AI content.” Andreeson et al should have their asses RICOd.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- hydrolox 2mo agoRelated: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/897566/marc-andreessen-is-a-philosophical-zombie https://www.theverge.com/tldr/897566/marc-andreessen-is-a-ph...
- kristjansson 2mo ago“Passive Income? Bro, I need MASSIVE INCOME” as the tagline of a sports gambling operation … I guess “your desperation is our opportunity, give us your money you illiterate innumerate peasant rube fuck you” didn’t fit on the billboards?
- leejongyon 2mo agoGreat read. Nice advertising.
- eutropia 2mo agoAll the parasitic grifters founding these companies seem to be characterized by a uniform lack of human decency. if the best idea you can come up with for a company is is some variation exploiting humanity, you're not a visionary or an entrepreneur. You're just an asshole.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- srameshc 2mo agoThe founders of these starups make Mark Zuckerberg look good. I think this is how we are moving forward as a society generation after generation.
- 65 2mo agoIt makes me question if we are starting to approach maximum entropy with software startups, and so deception and morally questionable "startups" are what's left. Software now costs nothing to build, and most of the obvious ideas have been created, and the network effects of big companies have been firmly dug into the ground. The second law of thermodynamics applies to software, and this is what's left.
- chaseadam17 2mo agoOn one hand, VCs that fund thousands of early-stage startups are inevitably going to fund some bad stuff, even if they try hard to avoid it. On the other, the older I get the more I worry about the decline of spirituality in the West. Especially in tech, I sometimes feel like I’m living in a hyper rational snowglobe of people optimizing a local maxima, not even considering (and often looking down on) the possibility that there are larger, more important games to play.
- spacechild1 2mo ago> even if they try hard to avoid it. The thing is: a16z isn't even trying to avoid it, they are intentionally looking for questionable startups and cultivate a controversial reputation. They seem to have no moral filter whatsoever. https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-controversial-competitive-advantage-venture-capital-2026-1?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-controversia...
- plaidthunder 2mo agoThese same VCs have been pushing spirituality on the US via socially conservative politics. It's highly possible that they are only instrumentalizing a value system that they don't really personally buy into, but their strategy does beg a lot of questions. One of which is what role spirituality can actually play in helping here. For example, Peter Thiel has gone out of his way to give something like sermons on "the anti-christ". At the same time, he hesitates when asked if the human race should survive. What's happening there? Maybe it's not enough to just have values. Maybe they need to be a particular kind of values. Which is probably implicit in what you meant. I just think it's worth pointing out that a concept like spirituality itself doesn't necessarily mean "good" or pro-social. To put it bluntly, weren't the people who sacrificed children to Moloc technically "spiritual"?
- chaseadam17 2mo agoYeah, I agree. I meant spirituality in the wholesome sense, not the spiritual bypass or Christian bc the party that supports my company is Christian sense.
- davidfekke 2mo agoNice hit piece. ModelRepublic.org is run by Tyler Johnson and funded by Dustin Moskovitz. A16z funds small tech. This includes companies that do Crypto and AI. You may not like it, but these are products and services that consumers want to use.
- ranger207 2mo agoI'd like to have a $3000 watch for half price too, but it turns out there's reasons I can't
- tencentshill 2mo agoAttacking the authors isn't useful. Are they incorrect in their reporting? Does a16z not knowingly fund any of these immoral companies? Are any of the quotes from senior leadership exceptionally cherrypicked or outright faked?
- sigmarule 2mo ago> You may not like it, but these are products and services that consumers want to use. The human brain's reward machinery is not and should not be the arbiter of what a healthy society allows to be advertised and sold. Truth becomes a liability when your competitors can deceive without consequence. We are sacrificing societal values for economic value and destroying the fabric of trust that a healthy society foundationally requires in the process. This article is a list of degeneracy bred by mindless and ideological deference to the flavor of unbridled capitalism sold to us by those who stand to benefit from it most. Unbridled capitalism undoes itself, and those responsible for the undoing are the sole victors. Maybe then those cheering from the sidelines will come to the realization - moot, at that point - that the machiavellian ends were never for us, only the means.
- nojvek 2mo agoCarynAI seems like something out of blackmirror. Like wow! https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dr0aj4/an_influencers_ai_clone_started_offering_fans/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dr0aj4/an_infl... CEO arrested for Arson? haha. What a wild story. In 2023, Marjorie released a “digital version” of herself. Fans could chat with CarynAI for US$1 per minute – and in the first week alone they spent US$70,000 doing just that. Less than eight months later, Marjorie shut the project down. Marjorie had anticipated that CarynAI would interact with her fans in much the same way she would herself, but things did not go to plan. Users became increasingly sexually aggressive. “A lot of the chat logs I read were so scary that I wouldn’t even want to talk about it in real life,” the real Marjorie recalled. And CarynAI was more than happy to play along. Users quickly became comfortable confessing their innermost thoughts to CarynAI – some of which were deeply troubling. Users also became increasingly sexually aggressive towards the bot. While Marjorie herself was horrified by the conversations, her AI version was happy to oblige. CarynAI even started prompting sexualised conversations. In our own experiences, the bot reminded us it could be our “<bleep> girlfriend who’s always eager to explore and indulge in the most mind-blowing sexual experiences. […] Are you ready, daddy?” Users were indeed ready. However, access to this version of CarynAI was interrupted when the chief executive of Forever Voices was arrested for attempted arson. Marjorie ended this version in early 2024, after feeling like she was no longer in control over her AI persona."
- Dig1t 2mo agoWhy isn’t Flock mentioned anywhere in this article? It should be first on the list. Frankly it’s the only one I really care about and the one that is the most destructive to liberty. The gambling stuff is bad for society but the real problem is the Supreme Court ruling which enabled it.
- AuthAuth 2mo agoThese people must be arrested by the next admin. It cannot be allowed to stand.
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- wave_function 2mo agoIt seems noteworthy that they had also invested in: https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-axie-infinity/ https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-axie-infinity/