Here’s the bottom line: The techno-optimist tribe gives off the distinct impression of people who have been so ridiculously rich for so long that they’ve just completely lost the plot about how the real world works. To be fair, this is an apt description of most of Silicon Valley. These days, if you’re not vampirically using your teenage son’s blood to regenerate your own aging body, or torturing monkeys to death in the hopes of creating the Matrix, or trying to get a belligerent reality TV star elected president, you’re just not winning. The tech industry is fueled by people with bad ideas, and Jezos, Andreessen, and company are just some among many. What makes this crowd somewhat different (and a little more dangerous) is that they’re now writing Unabomber-style manifestos that give some pretense of intellectual legitimacy to their terrible ideas. They’re then using that legitimacy to push for a totally unregulated tech industry that stands to “disrupt” (i.e., potentially destabilize) large parts of society. 

This makes it all the more ironic that Andreessen names as one of his so-called “enemies” those who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Frankly, there’s no better description of the “techno-optimist” crowd—a gaggle of out-of-touch tech bros who think their wealth gives them license to chart a future nobody else wants.

Lukas Ropek, Gizmodo