Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. It’s truly disturbing. I don’t think anybody wants this kind of overreach of power for government, including perhaps people that are participating in it. It’s like this dark momentum of power that you just get caught up in it. And that’s the reason there’s that kind of protection. Nobody wants that. I use the metaphor, the ring of power. And for people who don’t catch the reference, that’s Lord of the Rings. And the thing with the ring of power and Lord of the Rings, it’s the ring the Gollem has in the beginning and it turns you invisible. And it turns out it unlocks all this fearsome power. It’s the most powerful thing in the world, is to key to everything. And basically the moral lesson of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things is, yeah, the ring of power is inherently corrupting. The characters at one point, they’re like, “Gandalf, just put on the ring and fix this.” He will not put the ring on even to end the war because he knows that it will corrupt him. As it starts, the character of Gollem is the result of a normal character who ultimately becomes this incredibly corrupt and deranged version of himself. I think you said something actually quite profound there, which is the ring of power is infinitely tempting. The censorship machine is infinitely tempting. If you have it, you are going to use it. It’s overwhelmingly tempting because it’s so powerful, and that it will corrupt you. Yeah. I don’t know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don’t know if they do. But yeah. You go out five or 10 years later, you would hope that you would realize that your soul has been corroded and you probably started out thinking that you were a patriot and you were trying to defend democracy, and you ended up being extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic and anti-western. Can I ask you a tough question here? Staying on the ring of power is quickly becoming the most powerful human on earth.…

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