Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…TV show — favorite? That one’s easy. Deadwood by far, by a mile. Deadwood is a product of an auteur named David Milch, who’s a legend, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting one time and really enjoyed. Deadwood, in my opinion, is the closest thing that we’re going to get to Shakespeare out of our era. It’s an absolutely extraordinary creative accomplishment. The language is unbelievable, but the content — it really sticks with me. In fact, I’m due to re-watch it. I need to re-watch it. As far as I’m concerned, it is the actual telling of the creation of America through the development of the frontier. For good, bad, and ugly, it’s all in there. It’s the entire process. It’s the story of carving out, basically, the mining colony of Deadwood and then, ultimately, the creation of the state and, essentially, the creation of modern America that we live in. I wasn’t there, so I can’t attest to how accurate it is. Of course, it’s dramatized and so forth, but it’s a very visceral recreation of what it must have been like to be in a place like that at a time like that. In a lot of ways, it’s the emergence of human civilization, not being able to rely on law enforcement that’s not necessarily there. The military is not necessarily there. If you have a contract dispute, it might get solved in a fistfight or a gunfight. What it takes to basically carve what we would consider civilization out of the wilderness. By the way, again, the complexity of it, with all the complications and all the controversy and everything else that revolves around the creation of the country and the creation of the frontier. I think a lot about the frontier idea. I think I work in the frontier. Basically, the American frontier went west as far as it could. It reached the Pacific coast; it stopped. People weren’t quite sure what to do next, and then eventually, we figured out that we should just keep going, but in the virtual frontier. I think that’s why California has the tech industry in the north and the media industry in the south. It’s because those are the two parts of the virtual frontier: the networks and then the content in the imaginary world. I live kind of post the exploitation of the physical frontier. That show puts me right in the center of what that must have been like halfway through that. Marc Andreessen, thank you very much.…

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