More Mark Watney, Less Marc Andreessen: The Ideological Clash Over Humanity's Future

When Marc Andreessen wrote his techno-optimist manifesto, he was trying to preach to the few to join his new religious cult and forgo their humanity in search of a heaven where only those purged of emotional connection can be happy to live among androids and thrive. Move to Vulcan, then.

When Andy Weir wrote The Martian, he unwittingly wrote a manifesto of the complete opposite that showcased exactly who the human race really is. The differences between the two are stark; one wants humanity to become some sort of technology-infused super-species akin to the kind of imagination a 7-year-old geek bullied at school comes up with in the late hours alone in their bedroom.

“Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape.”

The other strives to show humanity at its best, a species able to overcome impossible odds using the ingenuity, knowledge, adaptability, and tools available to them at the time. And this is precisely the optimistic message we need to convey to this generation and all generations who have dreams and want to become builders of the future.

We do not need to merge with the machine in order to release that kind of creativity and drive to become the absolute best we can be as a species, to take to the stars and settle beyond our own Earthly borders, or master some other hidden force behind physics.

At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?

I was lucky enough to read the book long before it became a movie and would definitely urge you, if you haven’t already, to seek out a copy even if you’ve watched the film. I watched the longer movie edit over the weekend, and it still shines, but the greatest detail is in the book, and that’s where you’ll find just what a real future human manifesto reads like. It’s actually quite funny pulling out quotes from the book like the one above because this particular one literally could talk about the life of a founder, too, something that I don’t think Marc even remembers or experienced because he got lucky with Netscape and then thought he was Internet Jesus.

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.”

Everything contained in Marc’s manifesto could be underlined in red pen under certain words that form the investment thesis behind a16z. If you don’t believe in hypergrowth or particular tech trends that they want you to push forward with, then you’re not in the gang. Marc and his disciples have become masters of manipulation in the venture community. They have become synonymous with successful venture capitalism and skating to where the puck is going to be, as Wayne Gretzky once said. He appears prophetic and a techno-shamanic futurist.

However, this is not entirely true. I’d go as far as to say that Marc is a master of neuro-linguistic programming, but instead of changing people’s minds and thoughts for their positive benefit, it’s all entirely to make a16z successful and shape the future he wanted when he was a boy in his bedroom. Seriously, he mentions “growth” 22 times in his manifesto. He uses the term “we believe” 113 times. He really wants you to pay attention to these words.

As they’ve become larger, they have engineered a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy in relation to technology hype — when they herald a new trend, every tier 2 and tier 3, 4, 5, and 6 investor plows their money into whatever they say, and wherever they place their bets. It becomes a snowball effect driven by greed and FOMO, and therefore the prediction manifests itself beautifully. If a16z says that Key Lime Pie is the shit, then everyone will pile in and write long articles about why this is so and beg Techcrunch to publish it, third rate VCs will write books on how to pull together the perfect baking strategy to create Key Lime Pie, Big 4 consultants will perform incredible feats of mental gymnastics to convince themselves and their clients that Key Lime Pie is where the money is. And those at the bottom of the pyramid scheme pretend they know what they’re doing and talk about different flavors of Key Lime Pie.

And so Key Lime Pie sells and becomes big, but not before a16z has already cashed out of Key Lime Pie tokens at a fever pitch and moved on to Lemon Meringue.

If you really want to understand the mindset, go watch the utterly brilliant monologue delivered in The Fall of the House of Usher by Bruce Greenwood.

In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.

Mark Watney, on the other hand, demonstrates just what being a part of the human race really means and the type of manifesto we write every single day. Problem-solving, personal, national, and international collaboration to come up with solutions that allow for the next step forward, science and engineering — the skills many are advocating we shouldn’t bother with because the robots will do it for us, resilience, the ability to cope with isolation, making mistakes then solving the next problem, the human spirit of being so fucking stubborn we will never fucking giving up. If he paid attention to Andreeseen, then he’d have died waiting for someone to bootstrap a startup to invent quantum teleportation to save his ass because, clearly, going full-on MacGyver is just too low-key for humanity now.

Watney’s journey is more uplifting than a techno-optimist manifesto. Even though it’s a fictional story of survival, it speaks more about the human drive to conquer the future and claim a stake in it than Marc’s ChatGPT-prompted reality.

Marc doesn’t want to get his hands dirty; Mark does. Marc wants to reinvent duct tape; Mark just wants to repair his spacesuit before he dies.

It’s time we stopped not only paying attention to Marc but giving him a platform for attention, too. If the venture community stopped placing their bets on the same roulette wheel pockets, we might start seeing a lot more movement forward in diverse levels of technologies that deserve to see the light of day.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” — are there any venture capitalists or family offices that have a multi-generational investment strategy?

I feel it’s the only perspective that will matter now, and it’s missing from his manifesto.

Too many are working with LPs fixated on short-term gains they can spend in their lifetime rather than helping build a future they will never see. They want a 10x return in 10 years, and so founders with longer-term visions that could reshape humanity are sacrificed for another TikTok app or SaaS product knocked up by a code interpreter from ChatGPT.

They all have spreadsheets with formulas driven to the smallest decimal point but nothing by gut feeling and a sense of high adventure.

Venture capital used to be about high-risk tolerance and bets on future possibilities, not calculated certainties. Some of the biggest shifts in human history took place as a result of sheer willpower and the drive to go beyond capital-intensive risk. Now, it’s stunted by a focus on easy software and a set of “product-market fit” handcuffs.

“Software will eat the world,” they said, but it doesn’t have the appetite for the long term. Bring back Adventure Capital.

Techno-optimist is just another name for long-termism or Effective Altruism because those terms have been ruined, and the hardcore wants to be associated with something else that their masses see the appeal in. What else feels more appealing for Marc’s supporters than aligning yourself with an ‘optimist’ and then calling everyone else who doesn’t want to be happy a pessimist or an enemy of optimism?

“We believe technological progress, therefore, leads to material abundance for everyone.” — there is absolutely no evidence of this. This is the same mentality that drives a locust swarm, but repeatedly using the “we believe” phrase cements that Marc and a16z somehow know the future because they will shape it for us. It’s more NLP in action.

And at the end, after all is read and digested, Marc sounds more like Khan Noonian Singh than Gene Roddenberry. “We offered the world order!” he proclaimed in Space Seed. It’s pretty much all there between the lines.

Which one would you rather leave their mark on history: Marc or Mark?

Also published here.