The story of our time

Marc Andreessen, partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has started a Substack, which follows the trend that everyone must somehow have a Substack. This is all fine, because everyone should be writing something somewhere, and if they are writing on Substack, sure.

Most of his writing, from what I read in his his inaugural post, will be along the same lines as what he posts on Twitter. Yet there’s one line in the post that is key, as I believe it to be true (emphasis mine):

What will I write about? A lot of tech, business, and investing, of course. But beyond, into history and philosophy — who are we, how did we get here, what are we doing, where are we going? And then back around to the societal impact of technology, which is the story of our time.

The societal impact of technology is indeed the story of our time. Andreessen has a lot of skin in this game, but really this narrative has been true at least since Gutenberg built his first printing press back in the 1440s, if not longer. Being aware of the ways technology affects society is vital to understanding our world. We can see this in phenomena ranging from what people spend money on, to how elections unfold, to the evolution of our collective mental health, all the way to how humans experience their everyday reality.

I probably disagree with Andreessen as often as I think he is right (even he doubts his own veracity: “Anything I say today I may disagree with tomorrow, in fact I frequently won’t even remember tomorrow”), but he is certainly someone worth hearing out, if only for the level of influence he has with the others who occupy this space in our society.