Marc Andreessen, whose Google Glasses are rose-colored, sees technological progress in one light when, of course, there are a couple of shades. It’s a net win, sure, but there’s collateral damage and an uneven distribution of the spoils. In a Valleywag post, Sam Biddle takes down Andreessen over a series of breathless technotopia tweets. Part of the summation:

In conclusion, the fact that we aren’t all living in mud huts or clinging to the side of crevasses, babies bundled in animal pelts, is a feat of Silicon Valley. The affordability of a smartphone or a television has everything to do with uncritical, unwavering faith in “tech innovation” and some childish, abstract notion of industrial progress. It has absolutely nothing to do with, say, the legion of Chinese laborers working under deplorable conditions. Ignore the fact that that owning a dishwasher doesn’t mean your position relative to the rest of society is anything resembling good or fair—just be glad your standard of living has increased since the 17th century.

This argument was better made by people like Adam Smith, over two hundred years ago, rather than Marc Andreessen, a guy inside a bubble with a bachelor’s degree in computer science:

Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

Rich have always been able to pay servants to read aloud to them; now most US households can Google ‘wealth of nations summary’ at their leisure. It doesn’t matter, though: Andreessen’s industry peers are so desperate to get some insight via Twitter osmosis, they’ll ignore that his whitewashed analysis and vague trickle-down gesturing would probably land you a C in high school. Marc Andreessen, so far as Valleywag is aware, is not a high school student, but the head of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in history.

The scariest thing here isn’t that Andreessen has such a poor grasp on the history and economics, or his flatly counterfactual statements…•