Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…We learned from Twitter that today’s supposedly rigorous thinkers are often not very rigorous at all. They often use rigor against themselves, in a sense, right? The great miracle of Twitter. Everybody looks at Twitter. It’s like this mass. Basically, it has an engine — there’s no question. Are these different machines engines or cameras? Like, is the stock market an engine or a camera? It’s something that economists will debate. The thing about Twitter — is Twitter an engine or a camera? This prevailing view is that . . . I say social media broadly, but Twitter specifically because it’s where the elites are — the intellectual elites, the social elites. The prevailing wisdom on Twitter is that it’s primarily an engine. It’s changing behavior for better or worse. I actually tend to think it’s at least as much a camera. It’s like a giant X-ray machine. You’ve got this phenomenon, which is just fascinating, where you have all of these public figures, all of these people in positions of authority — in a lot of cases, great authority — the leading legal theorists of our time, leading politicians, all these businesspeople. And they tweet, and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, that’s who you actually are. [laughs] These are the things you actually think.” To your point, “This is your actual level of thought. Oh, these are the delusions you’re operating under.” Our friend Martin Gurri has this thesis of collapsing authority in the modern world. I think a lot of it is the authority figures just basically showing up and exposing the emperor, quite literally, in a lot of cases has no clothes. The fact that that phenomenon is so widespread and not more recognized, and then that it continues — I just think it’s absolutely fascinating. All this extensive reading of history, of earlier social science — how does it affect your daily practical investing decisions at the conceptual level?…

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