‘Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor’ ⇥ liberalcurrents.com

Natasha Tiku, Washington Post:

Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed by The Washington Post.

The messages the Post obtained were sent after Ben Smith of Semafor exposed other Andreessen group chats. Those chats, according to Smith, were described by current White House official and former Andreessen-Horowitz partner Sriram Krishnan as “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion” — a frank acknowledgement of the power these rich guys have.

Adam Gurri, Liberal Currents:

Since “the Deal, with a capital D” had been broken, Andreesen and his cohorts had no choice but to throw their lot in with Trump, who now is making those dealbreakers pay the price. And it’s going swimmingly, from Andreesen’s point of view. He is no longer bound by the terms of “the Deal,” which required him to pay lip service to “all the fashionable and appropriate social causes” such as human rights and equal dignity.

To his dying day, Andreessen will surely believe that they are the traitors, that he was the one who was betrayed. But the only traitor is Andreessen himself.

Quibble with Gurri’s summary of Netscape’s task as “relatively easy” — Andreessen, Eric Bina, and others “created one piece of software that performed a simple task well enough to deliver to the market, and they successfully achieved mass adoption” is a notable effort but, to steelman Gurri’s argument, considerably less notable than the technical foundation on which it rested. But Andreessen is a quintessential example of pulling the ladder up now that he has reached the top. He got his — his education, his billions, his mansion — and, because he does not want more traffic in his neighbourhood, other people get screwed.