Andreessen: Incumbents fight new technology because it reorders power and status structures

“It proposes this basically three-step process and sort of you know, step one is basically just, like, flat out ignore, right? New technologies are just, like, dismissed. All, all the experts and all the people who are kind of in power, you know, just kind of say, okay, this thing is not going to matter. It's not going to be a thing. Step two is rational counter argument, right, which is sort of the status quo assembles all of the different arguments as to why this thing can't possibly work and won't possibly be important, but like they really get into the argument in step two and they really like try to try to reason it through. And then he says step three is, he says step three is when the name calling begins. Which is to say step three is when the status quo basically goes bananas and gets like super emotional and super irate and kind of goes on tilt, right? And starts name calling and starts accusing the sort of proponents of the new technology of sort of all of these evil kind of moral crimes. And basically the reason he says it goes through this three-step process is because he says what people think of as technological change is actually societal change and specifically societal change of the form of a reordering of the power and status structure. Right. And so all of the people who have achieved positions of power and authority in the world based on prior generations of technology are inherently threatened by new technology because new technology will upend the power and status structures. And then a new set of people will, you know, come to the foreground and take the power.”

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