2026-04-01 22:00:00
Tech investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen has many bad opinions (as evidenced by his investment portfolio). On a recent podcast, he shared a real boner: that he isn’t introspective, that people 400 years ago weren’t at all introspective, and that introspection was a construct invented by Freud in the early 1900s.
If you’ve read one (1) book, it’s not difficult to see what is wrong with Andreessen’s assertion and The Nation’s David Futrelle does a good job of rebutting it (archive link). But importantly, he also talks about why Andreessen might say such a thing (either because he honestly believes it or he’s performing the belief):
When you examine your own motivations, desires, and inner life, neuroscientists have discovered, you are using the same parts of the brain that allow you to understand the motivations, desires, and inner lives of others. This means in turn that when you wall off access to your own inner life you also impair your capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of other people. Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It’s a permission slip for zero accountability. And Andreessen, it turns out, has good reasons for wanting to avoid accountability.
His firm has bet big on war and the companies that provide the technology behind it…
Futrelle goes on to add:
A man with enormous influence over the technologies of war and surveillance, over the political direction of the country, over the infrastructure of violence that his firm has spent a decade funding, has, in effect, announced that he has no interest in examining his conscience.
Andreessen has built the perfect ideology for Silicon Valley in the Trump age: Move fast, break people, and don’t devote even a moment to self-examination.
As a commenter said on the video snippet I linked to above: “He’s just describing psychopathy. Zero introspection, zero remorse, 100% actions that benefit you.”
Tags: David Futrelle · Marc Andreessen · politics
2026-04-01 09:24:16
Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.”
2026-04-01 07:13:53
The 2026 issue of the HTML Review, “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web”.
2026-04-01 05:14:33
Mark Simonson reminisces about when he discovered type design. “The idea of coming up with an original alphabet design fired my imagination. And learning that it was possible to design type professionally was a revelation.”
2026-04-01 03:04:08
“By focusing its narrative on the tech industry itself, Halt and Catch Fire’s staying power has only increased. The story it tells still has something to say about our present-day reality.”
2026-04-01 01:25:50
For the latest episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews Timothy Snyder about “how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us”. Millman is an *excellent* interviewer.