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Why did Marc Andreessen -- inventor of the first internet web browser, and perhaps the prime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today -- switch from his longstanding support of the Democratic Party and back President-elect Donald Trump this year?
Because, in his view, the Democrats who claim to be the great scourge of "disinformation" are threatening to embed disinformation in the bedrock of society. At least that's my interpretation of Andreessen's comments in a wide-ranging interview with The Free Press cofounder Bari Weiss.
"My concern is that the censorship and political control of AI is a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control of social media -- maybe a million times more dangerous," Andreessen, a prime innovator of artificial intelligence, told Weiss. "The thing with AI is, I think AI is going to be the control layer for everything in the future — how the health care system works, how the education system works, how the government works. So that if AI is woke, biased, censored, politically controlled, you are in a hyper-Orwellian, China-style, social credit system nightmare."
Like fellow tech titan Elon Musk, Andreessen has come to see the Democrats as "the ones who are trying to silence free speech." However, unlike many Trump supporters, he does not fasten upon the obvious partisan example: Secretary of State Antony Blinken's 2020 campaign enlistment of 51 current or former intelligence officials to depict Hunter Biden's laptop as bearing "the hallmarks of Russian disinformation."
That Democratic disinformation operation suppressed facts about Biden family corruption during the campaign year, but not forever, as President Joe Biden's pardon of his son showed.
Andreessen is concerned less about transitory partisan finagling and more about possibly permanent suppressions of truth. An example he cites is the claim that "the COVID lab leak hypothesis was 'misinformation' and broadly censored on social media."
I have written often about the lab leak hypothesis and how denigration of it was concocted by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.
Starting in February 2020, they conspired to get colleagues who considered the lab leak likely to write a paper disparaging that theory and endorsing the idea that the virus came from a live animal market. No evidence of such transmission has been found, and presumably, Fauci and Collins' control over millions of dollars in research funding helped persuade the authors to change their minds. After publication, Fauci airily referred the article to the press as if he had nothing to do with it.
Establishment press outfits were happy to play along, characterizing the lab leak theory as "already debunked" (The Washington Post) or a "fringe theory" (The New York Times). The latter outlet's lead COVID-19 reporter offhandedly referred to its "racist roots." Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter, now X, followed the cues and suppressed the lab leak theory even as they suppressed criticism of masking protocols and school closures.