We will be posting on Web3 and Marc Andreessen, its greatest promoter, in all its Metaverse, cryptocurrency, play-to-earn-gaming glory and this is as good a place to start as any.
Also, I had forgotten about Taylor Lorenz lying about Andreessen's use of the "R" word.
From Niccolo Soldo's Fisted by Foucault substack
May 31, 2021
The Internet King on why the Internet is a force for good, on media conformity, the inevitable triumph of the WEIRD, Crypto, Retards, etc.
Marc Andreessen uses the word ‘retard’ roughly 200 times per day. I decided to confront him about this and his reply was: “I consider myself an intelligent man and I choose my words very, very carefully. Proper diction is the measure of a man/woman, so I deploy that word because, uh, because so few other words, uh, um…..fit.”
If you’re on the internet, it’s because of him. The driving force behind Netscape Navigator (the world’s first widely adopted web browser), he also saw the early potential in LinkedIn and Twitter and invested in both. His most recent investments have been in Substack and Clubhouse. The man is everywhere when it comes to the Internet and social media.
After three weeks of hard negotiations with his team of insanely-priced lawyers, I got them to finally approve his answers to my very sensible questions. The following is the product of the meeting of our two over-sized heads.
I would like to begin with a quote from yourself:
"This guy [Niccolo Soldo] is a fucking retard. It's important that we let absolute retards like him publish at Substack because they will attract other retards who also think too highly of themselves and their own intelligence and overestimate their value to society. Retards are good for the top line and the bottom line. Don't ever, ever forget this important lesson in building a successful business. I shit successful businesses out every fucking morning, unlike you retards. You can quote me on this."
This quote might not be real, but the thought of it being real sends Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times into spasms of orgasmic delight (her first ever orgasm was when she thought she caught you using the word 'retard' during a Clubhouse discussion). The question here is: how hilarious is it that she fucked up her reporting this badly?
Don't underestimate yourself! The great writers of the past tended to be disassociative cranks. Diogenes Laertius says Heraclitus lived "by himself in the mountains, feeding on grasses and herbs" and died by burying himself in literal dung. Rousseau condemned his own children to the hell of an 18th century orphanage while sanctimoniously passing judgment on the rest of society. Nietzsche went insane protecting a horse from a whipping, and in his last messages to the world demanded the pope be jailed and all anti-Semites shot. You see, you fit right in.
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, including the talented Ms. Lorenz.
You are a Titan of the Internet. In fact, you were inducted into the World Wide Web Hall of Fame way back in 1994. Without you there's no LinkedIn. No Tumblr. No Reddit. No Instagram. No DeviantArt. How responsible do you feel for the horrible state of the world as it is today? Feel free to apologize to everyone.
As with everything in life, it's a question of the counterfactual. I'm old enough to remember life pre-Internet. There were only three largely identical television networks (plus PBS if you lived near enough communists, which I didn't), a few radio stations, a newspaper or two, three printed news magazines, a handful of book publishing houses, and a few mimeographed newsletters. That was it. 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.
What does the Internet do? I think it's clear the Internet is both an engine and a camera. To some extent it does drive behavior, but it also shows us ourselves in vivid detail. That is bound to make us uncomfortable, but is also very useful. The Internet can reinforce existing beliefs and misconceptions, but it also reveals underlying truths that otherwise would remain hidden. For example, the Internet makes it far easier to discover when an authority figure is lying to us, which is an overwhelming good.
As with any technological change, it's important to consider who is the most threatened by it…..who freaks out the most. The Internet can be thought of as a cream that you rub on undeserving gatekeepers to drive them insane. I think it has all the right enemies....
....MUCH MORE
And just to make sure you don't miss it, here's Andreessen's response to Niccolo's elevator pitch for $10 million in funding:
"....I'll beat and raise you. 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.
Suppose it *works*, it gives you the optimal answer every time. Heaven or hell?...."
