Ask HN: What is Marc Andreessen talking about

[limteary]

I saw Marc Andreessen tweet "Buy physical copies of any book you plan to read in the future. Do it now." and thought there was a solar flare coming or something.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1511929365264805897

He's also been non-stop tweeting about "current thing", is there some SV drama that's gotten him worked up?

[manofmanysmiles]

He’s talking about how the mainstream media is whipping people up into a fury over one crisis after another while civilization collapses, with free speech crumbing, supply chains failing and the potential for large scale war and disease a real possibility.

Also some stuff might get even more exciting in the political arena, WRT the revelations of corruption around certain high profile figures.

Also the threat of cyber attacks seems very real.

[cpp_frog]

WRT the 'current thing', it's just internet slang for mocking people who go along with trends. Marc also seems to get hold of neologisms very quickly, as with the whole 'wordcel/shape rotator' meme and the informal usage of 'lindy'.

[exfascist]

https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmNzCMsDDddNZPRh6q7vzZEbDaE...

[mysore]

90% of the time guy seems to be trolling for fun.

the "current thing" refers to everyone bandwagoning on supporting ukraine when they didnt do anything to help them for like 10 years and there were tons of people warning "putin is going to invade someday."

[browserman]

He's red and mad about posts. Spending too much time on Twitter will drive even a disciplined mind insane.

[slater]

"red"?

[raarts]

In my opinion he was referring to the fact that more and more often older pages on the internet are 'updated' or 'fixed' for political reasons.

This can't happen with books.

[WFHRenaissance]

He’s talking about Milady NFTs, Urbit, and psychic Zoomers… duh

[runjake]

“Current thing” in this context is the “current thing the Internet is outraged by or is perceived to be overly-concerned about”. An oblique reference to Cancel Culture.

It seems like he’s become emboldened by Elon Musk’s tweeting and is trying to play a similar role.

(I have no opinion of pmarca, good or bad, except perhaps that he wastes too much time thinking about Internet drama.)

[travisporter]

Would a solar flare destroy all data on SSDs or magnetic hard drives? I couldn't find a good resource. I figure CDs/DVDs would be safe

https://www.quora.com/Could-a-large-solar-flare-fry-disk-dri...

[mikewarot]

A solar flare wouldn't even hurt the power grid, if management shuts it off in time. If some Republican Governor insists his state doesn't shut theirs down... well, that's just Darwin entering the 22nd Century.

[ezekg]

Censorship via cancel/delete/rewrite? a la the Ministry of Truth [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...

[bogomipz]

My guess is that it could relate to state legislatures recently passing legislation that prohibits certain books from public schools in the US. It seems this could possibly be a new front in the on-going culture wars. See:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/05/politics/republican-states-bo...

and

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/04/07/book-ban...

[mikewarot]

Given the rapid change in the way people consume information, books are likely to be as easy to get as Paper Road Atlases are.

[RichardHeart]

He is talking about all time high levels of censorship if you count the number of humans being censored. I've been banned and unbanned 4 times (130k subs on youtube.) An ex president was removed everywhere. Tons of people are banned every single day, with no recourse but to go to empty alt-tech sites where no one watches.

You are also at all time high surveillance. You're also at all time high freedom of movement restriction. I could go on, but I'm tired of gritting my teeth.

[morelisp]

We are also at record numbers of humans speaking their mind freely, record numbers of humans keeping secrets, and (if we stop ca. pre-2020 or project current trends a year or two in the future) record numbers of humans moving between countries.

Maybe "number of humans" is not a good metric.

[Krollifi]

He may be talking about Kindle not using an open format.

[sjg007]

More that Amazon can take away your books. Don't need to burn them, just remotely remove them.

[jjtheblunt]

that made me chuckle

[ls15]

Outages?

[president]

He's trolling and lampooning people that are obsessed with blindly agreeing with the mainstream-sanctioned narratives (Covid, Ukraine). The book thing is probably a comment on censorship and historical revisionism that is occurring as part of the effort to prop up certain narratives. I'm surprised he hasn't gotten called a right-wing nationalist yet.

[chrischattin]

This shouldn't be downvoted b/c it's exactly what he's doing. He's mocking people who instantly conform to the current narrative.

[crate_barre]

You guys severely underestimate how many people have some wine or a beer and tweet lol.

Drunk tweeting is a thing.

[okareaman]

I've never heard Andreesen say anything I thought was particularly insightful or intelligent. He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius thought leader for the rest of his life. I hate his tagline "software is eating the world" If a homeless person standing outside a grocery store said these things you wouldn't listen because the sound like the ravings of a crank.

[bko]

I would have some reverence for the man. This isn't someone who "just got lucky". We was working on the forefront of the internet with Netscape IPOing in 1995 and being bought by AOL for 4 billion in 1999.

He then went on to found another company that had a $1.6 billion exit just 4 years after the AOL acquisition.

He then ran a VC that went from 300mm to 2.7bn in three years.

I would say he knows something about the world. Maybe he doesn't know anything on certain topics or you disagree with him, or he has an ego. But to write him off as a "programmer who got lucky" is wrong, especially considering that the fields he succeeded in were very cutting edge. He didn't just invest in Manhattan real estate or some crap.

Some life advice, go into every interaction with people assuming they know something you don't. You'll get a lot farther that way.

[AlchemistCamp]

> He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius

… okareaman typed into a web browser, the very technology Andreesen became wealthy pioneering.

[WFHRenaissance]

No… lol. If I a homeless person said that, it would seem weirdly insightful for a homeless person.