"Dystopian tech overlords are good, actually," say dystopian tech overlords
Future, a new online magazine run by venture capitalists, aims to only publish "optimistic" tech takes
Modern scientific and technological innovation has brought us some impressively important developments in recent years, but it’s still more often than not a wild, Blade Runner-esque world we find ourselves in these days. Thankfully, there are some great publications out there staffed by determined journalists seeking to uncover every aspect of our rapidly changing, dystopian overlord-run society… and the dystopian overlords among us are not happy about that one bit.
“We are pro-tech, pro-markets, pro-innovation,” reads the description for Future, a new tech publication that launched this week, before helpfully clarifying that they “are also ‘informed optimists,’” and not those pesky “freewheeling futurists making predictions without any skin in the game.”
So, exactly who are these “pro-market, informed optimists” with so much skin in said game? Why, they just so happen to be the folks at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capitalist firm with over $16.5 billion in assets spread across private healthcare and cryptocurrency industries, among other markets. Andreessen Horowitz, aka “a16z” according to their “About Us” page (presumably in an attempt to illustrate how good they are at “disrupting” the phonetics industry), seeks to solely publish “optimistic” pieces about the goings-on within the tech world, as opposed to what Andreessen Horowitz a16z described to Axios as all that, “excessively negative coverage in the traditional tech media.”
Given their asset portfolio, we assume they’re primarily referring to coverage akin to, say, explaining how Elon Musk is a complete asshat dedicated to exploiting cryptocurrency market vulnerabilities, or how private healthcare has mutated into an exploitative, labyrinthine, unconscionable industry of Lovecraftian Elder God-sized proportions.
Look, we’re not saying to needlessly bash all VC ventures, but its hard feel much better about *gestures wildly* all this when the only ones cheering on our algorithm-determined, privacy-scarce, all-too-wired lives are the ones financing said culture.
But what do we know? Unlike the venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz a16z, the rest of us have so very little skin in the games of financial solvency and patchwork health insurance coverage.
[via BoingBoing]
Send Great Job, Internet whitewashes to [email protected]