Thoughts on Marc Andreessen’s “It’s time to build” post

I’m very amused and stunned by Marc Andreessen’s “It’s time to build” article/podcast.

It’s basically an 180 degree shift in his worldviews from the time he debated Peter Thiel and called out Thiel for being too pessimistic about the state of innovation in the world. No problem with that, people can change their minds.

But the thing I found quite disturbing about his current thought process is that (now that he’s convinced the Western world is indeed stagnating) he attributes that to “a lack of desire and will”.

I totally disagree with him. I think the problem is the dominant innovation paradigm in the Capitalist world in which rapid business model innovation is a pre-requisite for radical innovation in any problem space that matters.

We’re literally pausing multiple generations’ capacity to think and hack, just because there aren’t enough companies and business models that’d justify that thinking/hacking. That’s so sad and inefficient. “Hard work” is inefficient in a world where automation is a thing.

China gets this. It’s no longer about capitalism vs communism, it’s about automation vs ego, and the Capitalist world chooses ego because it has valued hard work so much that it sees automation and decentralisation as a threat to its identity.