Marc Andreessen’s Media Theory of The Internet Age | The a16z Show

Each viral social media meme explosion is like a two and a half day panic cycle. It was not that long ago grown men in serious positions of power and authority in the US got mad at each other and literally have a physical duel. And that was like a normal part of life. If you're sitting at home scrolling social media getting mad, at least you're not under the street like hurting people. The fact that political violence is like an all-time low in Western society is something that people really don't talk about. The news is called the news, not the importance. If you can imagine a version of the news that's called the importance and the newspaper is like here are all the important things that are happening today and nobody would buy it because nobody cares because people want the news. They want the hot thing. They want the outrageous thing.

Good morning. I could not be more excited. Let's monitor some situation.

Yeah. So, someone is I'm old enough to remember when CNN started. Although I didn't actually have cable TV at the time, so I didn't see it, but I remember it and the impact that it had. And then because I'm an obsessive I there's this book at one point that nobody's read but it's the book is called Me and Ted Against the World. Which is a great title. So it's the founder of CNN is this guy Reese Schonfeld. And he basically he's actually the guy who convinced Ted Turner to go into the satellite business which sort of created essentially modern cable TV, satellite TV and then led downstream to streaming and everything else going on today. And so, and you know, this has been kind of lost history, but Ted Turner was like a great amazing example of exactly the kind of great founder that we work with, like just this incredible will of power, very controversial character. Like every other thing out of his mouth horrified people, he generated a huge number of headlines of like, I can't believe Ted said that. Over and over and over again. So, one of these real characters in the history of the media business. And then this guy Reese Schonfeld, who was originally the lawyer that wired up Ted's first satellite deal. And so the two of them came up with this crazy idea in like I forget like 1981 or something. And they said, 'How about having a 24-hour news channel, right?' And this at the time was like just like completely loopy idea. Actually, Ted Turner wanted to be a 15 hour a day news channel because he assumed that there would be nobody watching overnight, the nine hours overnight. And Reese was like, 'Nope, 24 hours people are going to stay up all night to watch this thing.' And the idea was by the way completely alien to what CNN is today. The idea was this concept that Reese Schonfeld came up with called randemonium which basically says at any point in time there is like whatever there is something happening in the world that is like the most amazing interesting controversial bonkers compelling transfixing thing that you can imagine.

The current thing. Exactly the current thing. At any moment in time there's the current thing. And so he's like, 'What should a 24-hour news channel be?' Obviously, it should be the thing, right? Obviously, what it should do is it should lock onto the current thing. It should then cover the current thing continuously, right, for as many minutes, hours, or days as that thing is the current thing. And then he called it random because he basically said for that period, you just put whatever you get, you put on screen. And so you get whatever fragmentary reports or man on the street interviews or whatever it is, you just like slap the thing on the screen and if you get it wrong, you apologize later, but this is real time, it's live. And then people are just going to be glued to this thing. And actually that so okay, so that was the original CNN business plan. They then took a while to get up and running, but then they actually did implement this and the real breakthrough point was the 1991 Gulf War. The first invasion of Iraq and that was the thing that really caused the whole thing to punch through. And there was like a week there where basically people were just glued to CNN around the clock because they had literally live on the ground coverage of they were in Baghdad with bombing raids happening all kinds of crazy stuff and the Iraqi government and just the whole thing. And so it was just like the most incredible show in the world. And then quite honestly they spent the next whatever 20 years basically trying to repeat that experience. And they repeated it every now and then with like the Monica Lewinsky thing was that for a while and the OJ trial was that for a little bit but it was just kind of hard to come up with the next thing like that and then over the last 20 years CNN has kind of become something completely different today let's say that's not that at all and then basically what's happened is the internet reinvented randemonium and so right the experience of monitoring the situation on especially on social media and especially of course on X.

And then by the way also streaming, the other part of it is streaming and now there's obviously streaming on X but also streaming on other platforms like YouTube and Twitch and so forth and so the internet reinvented this and so randemonium turned into the current thing and then monitoring the situation legitimately justifiably became a giant meme and so it is time yes it is clearly time to monitor the situation.

Yeah. So I think there's really two things that have happened that are really different and even different than in the days of cable TV and 24-hour news. So one is just like the internet for better or for worse like the internet plugs you into the world.

The global yes Marshall McLuhan. Okay, so let's cite Marshall McLuhan actually for both of these. So Marshall McLuhan who was the great media theorist of the 20th century. Yeah, he had two key concepts that are relevant here. So one is the global village and so he had this concept of the global village. And the concept of the global village by the way he did not view as a positive. Like he was not endorsing he was just in his mind he was making an observation of what was happening which is basically what he meant by that is you need to conceive of what he meant by village to start with. So village basically means a community with a small enough number of people where everybody knows everybody else. So, like think about a small town or a literal small village and everybody knows everybody else and as a consequence of that there's no privacy, right? And basically everybody's up in each other's business all the time. And I grew up in a small enough town in a rural town where I experienced this. I saw what it was like and this is like that. Everybody knows who everybody is. By the way, it's the same people year after year after year. You get to know them like way too well. Everybody's completely up in each other's business. Like there's basically no privacy. And so and by the way one of the reasons people leave small towns to go to the big city is because they want to get away from that. They want to get to a level of anonymity and have a lot more people running around but the village kind of has that specific thing. And what he said was basically modern media is going to turn the entire world into a village. And so you're just going to be connected and this is pre-internet when he said this right. But it's really happened with the internet where it's just like okay you're connected to everybody all the time. And by the way, like by default, he would find this to be like a very entertaining thing that this is actually happening because he would say, 'Of course you're getting all the downstream effects that you're getting, which is by default, it's going to melt your brain, right?' Like the human animal was not evolved. The human animal was evolved to have like, there's a Dunbar's number. You can basically have a direct relationship with like 150 people. Sort of famously called the Dunbar number in sociology. But the global village expects you to have a Dunbar number of like 8 billion people, right? Because they're all right there and they're all up in your grill, right? And they're all telling you what they think of you and they're all cursing at you and calling you names and so it's just like this really really brain-melting experience. So that's part one. So we just we experience reality differently as a result of that. And so the thought experiment I always have is we talk a lot about the impact of the internet, social media and politics. It's like well okay like imagine having social media during World War II, right? Like we would have had a completely different national experience had like Pearl Harbor happened with like Twitter like it would have been a completely different experience than the way people lived through Pearl Harbor in actually 1941 with primarily with TV and radio and so anyway so there's this global village thing and then there's this other thing that he said which he originally said about television he made this key observation he said this is part of his thing where he said the medium is the message so the actual medium of the media technology actually determines a lot of the message of what's received a lot of the content and specifically he said this thing he said if it's on television it's a television show and what he meant by that is if something's going to be on television it's going to end up being turned into the equivalent of like a half-hour comedy or an hour-long drama right basically the two native media forms of television are the half-hour comedy or the hour-long drama and so you're going to get this basically very polished and sort of glossy and produced thing that's going to be a story and it's going to run the way that a television story runs or a television show runs. And every television show is like a morality play, right? Every television show basically tells a moral story of basically people behaving badly and then learning the error of their ways and then famously you have like the happy ending, right? Where everybody kisses and hugs. And remember Seinfeld was like a huge variation of that because remember the motto of Seinfeld, Larry David's motto for Seinfeld was no learning, no hugging. And it's what made Seinfeld so unique because every other television show up until Seinfeld always ended with everybody learning and hugging, right? You learn the moral lesson and then you sort of reconcile with the people close to you. And so every real life experience would get wedged into the format of a television show and would be turned into this morality play. Okay. So the internet version I believe the internet version of if it's on television it's a television show. The internet version is if it's on the internet it's a viral social media meme. Right. If it's on the internet, it doesn't matter what it is. By the way, if an alien invasion happens later this afternoon, it will be turned into a social media meme and it will go viral and that's what will happen, right? And it will be turned into a viral meme and it will spread virally across the thing and then human beings what they are that will turn into a moral panic. That'll turn into a full-fledged outrage and how dare you and people will line up in each side and sort of tribes will form and then people will go to war with each other on social media and you'll have all these basically back and forth, all the humor and all the rage of how meme culture works. And so everything on the internet basically whatever happens in the real world becomes like a social media viral moment meme complex and then basically a moral panic and search for scapegoats right like a moral emergency and that happens to every single news event right and so and then you combine these two and it's like okay for better for worse we're all in the same room now we're like literally in the same global village and we're sort of surfing controversial internet meme moments over and over and over again. And as far as I can tell, like if you look at the numbers, basically what happens is each viral social media meme explosion, it basically is this huge spike up and then it's like this half-life decay and it lasts about two and a half days. Right. And so each social media basically experiences like a two and a half day panic cycle. And then what happens is the old one isn't necessarily ever resolved or reconciled, but what happens is a new one appears, a new current thing appears, right? And just takes over the outrage, right? Then all the emotional energy that applied to the old one applies to the new one. Everybody forgets the old one even happened. Like a week later, you can't even like what was the social media craze of like seven days ago. I mean, it might as well have been like a thousand years ago. Like lost to the midst of time. Nobody knows. Like seven days ago, whatever it was was the most important thing that's ever happened. And seven days later, it's like it never not even a peep. Like nothing. It's completely gone. And so you're just going to have this repeated emotional shotgun blast over and over every two and a half days, essentially forever. By the way, this is why one of my theories is like it's now possible to predict the outcome of politics. So like it's everybody thinks they know what's going to happen in the midterm elections in November. And I'm like, okay, it's now whatever. It's April 20th. The election is whatever November 6th or whatever. All right. How many two and a half day cycles are there between April 20th and November 6th? And I, the math majors, be able to calculate that in their head, but it's, I don't know, 100 or something, right? Or 120 or something like that. Like whatever is the thing that we think is the thing that's going to tilt the election today is going to be a 100 social media meme cycles old. Like nobody's going to remember anything that's happening right now. The election is going to turn basically on whatever's happening in the economy and then it's going to be whatever is the viral meme panic that's happening that day. And so and you could say like is this good or bad? I don't know. Is this better or worse than television? I don't know, by the way. Is this better or worse than the days of radio or the days of, I don't know, the printed, the revolution that followed the arrival of the printing press. Is this better or worse than the days in which we were all reciting epic poetry around the campfire as our form of media? I don't know. You could have like a big value discussion about which is better or worse. I have an argument I will make that this, notwithstanding all the craziness, this is better. But this is the nature of the world we live in. And look, put it this way. This is we're now on autopilot. The shape of the media determines the behavior basically from here on out and until there's something that fundamentally displaces social media like this is the world we live in. Hence the need to monitor the situation.

So I would say this. We get so a couple things. Yeah. So one is look I would say there you could say this there are more truth and more lies right so I would say both of the following statements are true which is there's more truth on social media than we had in previous forms of media and there are probably plenty of lies in social media like there are plenty of ops well in fact one of the native forms of entertainment of social media is trying to spot the ops by the way maybe I should pitch you a show for on MTS which is maybe every day we shoot an hour on let's spot the ops, right? Like which ones are real and organic, which ones are staged with somebody getting paid behind the scenes. And so, and everybody of course focuses on the downside and so they focus on the fact that there's all these ops which is certainly true, but there's also just like the ability for somebody to tell the truth is like much more direct and clear than it was before, right? Because of the collapse of the gatekeepers. And so I think both of those are true. So I think that's true. And then but the slightly different argument that I would make is that previous forms of media were really good at generating physical violence. And so I mean there's many many examples of this in history, but the Spanish Civil War which was kind of the war that kind of pre-forecasted everything that was going to all the sort of tragedy of the 20th century that followed the Spanish Civil War was kind of basically the test bed for both communism and Nazism in the modern world. And its native media format was posters. And so you literally it was like the ability to do printed colored propaganda posters was like the new media technology at that time right before radio. And the Spanish Civil War was like super violent. And then radio was the technology that led to radio was the Nazi regime's native media format. Radio was the way that basically the fascist regimes got established. As well as by the way as well as FDR was primarily a radio phenomenon. Kind of the rise of modern liberalism. And then television was the native medium of like you just television kind of kicked in starting around World War II. So it played a role but it then television had a huge role to play in the Vietnam War. And then in all of the violent riots of the 60s and 70s which were kind of super crazy both across the US and Europe. And so television has a long history of leading to downstream violence. The fact that we haven't actually had like the fact that like political violence is like an all-time low in Western society is something that people really don't talk about. And it feels like we must be in this super politically violent world because everybody's so angry about politics all the time. But measured political violence is at like an all-time low. And so my theory is the ability to directly participate in online virtual combat is shunting away a lot of the energy that in the past would have translated to street violence. And so it's sort of this thing is if the virtual world can become arbitrarily rhetorically violent without people actually getting physically hurt and that gives people a way to exercise all of their anger and rage over politics and to be able to attack the hated enemy without having it actually be something that translates to physical violence. And so yeah by it's like I don't know social media wars up physical violence down. Nobody wants to hear that because everybody's so mad all the time about what's happening online. But I think that's characteristic like if you're sitting at home scrolling social media getting mad like at least you're not out on the street like hurting people. So that's my moral defense of the whole thing.

Right. Yeah. So I think people just have a really rose-colored glasses view of the past. The past gets sanded off in part because we only interpret the past number one is we weren't there. And then the modern interpreters of the past, are often quite honestly not telling us the truth about what happened because they have their own modern kind of gloss or spin they want to put on it. And so but just the edges of the past gets sanded off in retrospect. But it's just like it's really significant like if you just like the easiest thing to do just go on YouTube and watch old episodes of a TV show called All in the Family. Which was a very famous successful TV show when I was a kid. And All in the Family was a microcosm, a fictional microcosm of basically the culture wars, political wars of the late 60s into the 1970s. And it was famously this character Archie Bunker who sort of represented as this white guy, and he basically represented a retrograde basically Republican, Nixon supporting Republican, and this would be like 1972 or something, 1974. who just basically was painted in the show as like the most backwards basically archaic, knuckle dragging, racist, sexist, just like the worst possible person in the world. And then there was his son-in-law played by young Rob Reiner who Archie Bunker nicknamed Meathead which the character became known as and Meathead was basically just the arch progressive liberal, right? Sort of like I don't know, young Gavin Newsom or something, right? where just like he had just like the exact politically correct approved view of the time. And so he's like super at the time the equivalent then of super woke, super progressive, super liberal, super enlightened on all these issues. And the conceit of the show, and the guy who created the show is this famous television producer named Norman Lear. The conceit of the show was supposed to be a moral lesson of Meathead giving basically moral lectures to Archie Bunker every week to try to get Archie Bunker to stop being such a backwards looking 1950s retrograde basically racist sexist guy and come into the modern world. And of course what happened was Carroll O'Connor number one the actor was just like super funny. But the other was the political environment was superheated at that point and of course it turned out Archie Bunker ended up being the star of the show. And so the show ended up being the opposite of what it was intended to be. That happened later in the 80s that happened at the show called Family Ties. Which was again it was a very similar thing which it was these two parents, baby boomer parents in the 80s. And they were like super it was very left-wing producers who made the show and the characters were like super proper left-wing progressives and then there was this character in the show Michael J. Fox their son who was this teenage kid. And he played the I forget the name I'm blanking on the name of the character but he played the son and the son basically was a Reagan Republican as a teenager, right? And literally the son would like wear like sport jackets and ties to school and carry a briefcase. And they kind of wanted to make him into like a stereotype of like basically a weird Republican kind of weirdo. And again the same sort of weird thing happened which is actually the Michael J. Fox character became oh Alex Keaton was the character's name. Alex P. Keaton he essentially became the star of the show. And so I bring up both of those shows because you can see in those shows you can see the culture wars of the 70s which were actually like super intense. So you can see the culture wars of the 80s which were super intense. You go back before that and you have the Vietnam War and all the campus protests and the civil rights movement and all the riots and all the forced everything dropping the 101st airborne into the rural south to basically desegregate the schools at literally at gunpoint. You go back before that you had the Cold War you had the Red Scare what's now known as the Red Scare but you had communists all through the US government and you had all kinds of freakouts about that. You had the risk of nuclear annihilation. You go back before that, you had World War II, which was like this incredible global orgy of violence. You go back before that, you had the Great Depression and the New Deal, which was hugely controversial. If you go back before that, you had World War I, and then if you keep going back, it's like you have the Civil War, and then you have the Napoleonic Wars, and then you've got the French Revolution, and then you go back further than that, you've got the democratic revolutions all through Europe, and then you've got the Gutenberg printing press kicking off all kinds of violence throughout Europe in the 1600s. And so I just think like the history of Western civilization, American European society is just like constant strife and warfare to like an absurd degree over this entire period. And we go back and we study the history and we're just kind of like, wow, like those people were like really, really, really violent, like really crazy and really violent. And boy, did they really like killing. It was not that long ago, and I don't think there's anybody alive now, but it was not that long ago that like grown men in serious positions of power and authority in the US, if they got mad at each other, they would literally have a physical duel, right? Like, so, you and I start going at it on social media and we get to a point where we get really mad and I challenge you to a duel and we show up in a field in a park at like 6:00 in the morning with guns, right? And then we square off and march off and we turn around and we try to literally shoot each other to death as a thing that they did and that was like a normal part of life.

Oh, everybody was so wonderful. Everybody got along. Yes. Until social media, everybody thought the same thing. Yes, exactly. And everybody was all calm and happy all the time. And so look the way of the world is conflict. Historically the way of the world is conflict and anyway not to beat a dead horse but there was plenty of conflict in the past there were plenty of heated disagreements in the future shape of society there were plenty of political wars there were plenty of violent wars by the way just politics itself was much more violent like if you go back and you read about political movements 100 years ago like they would literally form up in the street and try to kill each other. It was like a common thing strikes I mean even the history of the labor movement is full of this like strikes became super violent and management would literally the strikers would try to attack their plants and the management literally would have like machine guns and they'd be like machine gunning their striking workers. Crazy crazy stuff. And so like we just we live in a much crazier world than we want to give ourselves credit for. And the idea that the current level of conflict is something new is just not true.

Well so the funny thing is different western countries show different data on the quote unquote rise in depression. And it basically turns out it correlates to social benefits programs. And so basically if you get paid or if you get like special dispensation in school for having psychological issues all of a sudden you see a massive spike in those psychological issues. The countries that don't have that the other western countries that don't have that don't show the same results. And so I actually think that's a statistical artifact of literally government benefits programs. So I don't even concede the premise of the question. But that's a longer debate. I would just say in general like I guess what I say I am prepared to say that basically call it since I don't know 2014 or something I'm prepared to say like it does feel like things have intensified right it does feel like things are wilder than they were before that. I think the most that I would be willing to say though is I think we might have lived through an era of what you might call suppressed volatility. And call that maybe from like the end of the Cold War through 2014. Where basically it just looked like the west had won everything. And then also it was sort of by the way it was sort of the peak heyday of centralized media. So if you basically track how distributed is media versus how centralized is media like centralized media sort of peaked somewhere around 1970 where literally like all the newspapers in every city consolidated down to like a single newspaper and then you ended up with only three television networks and all the radio stations independent radio stations got bought up. Let me give you an example. So historically, like if you go back to the days of the American Revolution, it was common in even like mid-size cities, you would have like 10 or 15 different newspapers. And each newspaper would represent like a different political point of view. And then the newspapers would have these furious constant political fighting and accusations back and forth and arguments. And of course, the newspaper owners would be trying to egg all that stuff on because it sold papers. But it was like very common to have like many newspapers per city that would all fight with each other. And then the economics of centralized media meant that those all rolled up into a single newspaper. And then that single newspaper, at least for a while, tried to be nonpartisan and tried to be even-handed because it was trying to appeal to everybody. And so and again, same thing of just like when I was a kid, it was three television networks that were all basically the same. They were all trying very hard to be even-handed, at least kind of as best they could. There were like three national news magazines. There was a small number of national radio networks. There were two newswire services and so I will concede like I think we lived through a period of suppressed volatility as a consequence of the fact that we had overly centralized media. I think if you go back before that like if you go back to the 1930s and before like media was much more fragmented it was much more like it is today and then if like I said if you go all the way back like 200 250 years ago it was like extremely fragmented like if you read the accounts of like Ben Franklin as a newspaper publisher and the stuff that he got up to with his newspaper. So, okay, great story. So, Ben Franklin ran one of the newspapers in Philadelphia originally as a printer. Okay. So, what would happen is Ben Franklin wants to become a commercial printer. He buys a printing press. He advertises that whatever he tries to get like all the local businesses like print pamphlets in the printing press, but he doesn't have enough business for the printing press. And so, he starts a newspaper to have something to print. And so he starts this newspaper. There's like 15 other newspapers in Philadelphia at the time, but he's got to fill the newspaper with something. And so, and he's been Franklin. He's very creative. And so, he creates basically sock puppets. He does basically ops. He also does alts. Yeah. Exactly. Alts. And they're all under pseudonyms. And so he I forget all the names now, but he had all these different names for them. And I think at one point in his own newspaper he had like 15 different alts going at it. And he wrote them all but under different names. And they all had like very different points of view. And then he would basically set them off to have these raging arguments with each other in his newspaper. And people would buy his newspaper to cover this. And then that culminated in the election of 1800 which was the famous election of Thomas Jefferson versus John Adams which was sort of this newspaper-centric election which was characterized by a level of slander. Like the degree to which partisans of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams attacked each other in the 1800 election is like way beyond even what we see today on social media. Like they accused each other of the most horrible stuff you can possibly imagine. And it became like this giant scandal. And so like this is not the idea that there's like whatever rhetorical combat or like that there's like this virtual environment in which there's lots of points of view and there's lots of again both lots of truths lots of lies like this is not new. In fact this is the natural order of things. We just lived through a period of artificial volatility and that artificial suppression of volatility with media becoming over-centralized and obviously those days are over.

Yeah. So again, it's kind of this thing you kind of reverse engineer it. It's like, okay, to be a current thing, it has if again to be this thing of if it's on the internet, it's a viral internet meme kind of outrage cycle. So it has to be something that activates outrage like it has to be something that activates the emotional valence you have to get the emotional reaction off of it, right? And so, it's just like, by the way, this is just like also the history of the press in general. There's just like whatever, I always say the news is called the news, not the importance, right? Like you can imagine a version of the news that's called the importance and the newspaper is like here are all the important things that are happening today, right? And of course nobody would buy it because nobody cares, right? Because people want the news, they want the new thing, right? They want the hot thing. They want the exciting thing. They want the outrageous thing and so the internet version of that is right. They want the outrageous meme. So, it's got to be something that provokes and there's something about this, this is other people made this observation, but the ultimate male-coded version of this is professional wrestling, right? The ultimate female-coded version of this is like Real Housewives, reality TV, and then The Apprentice maybe somewhere in the middle where it's just like reality TV like there has to be sparks like it has to generate a level of emotional intensity driven by some level of outrage and then I think it has to be the kind of thing where you can have tribes that form up and square off against each other right so that's like West Side Story dynamic to it or something right where it's just like okay you can imagine there's something that's worth arguing over where there's a real argument to be had like there's some underlying thing that actually really matters. Maybe this event doesn't matter as much, but the actual underlying issue matters a lot. And then it's going to activate this tribal effect where you're going to become part of what they call a moral tribe. The people on the other side become part of a moral tribe and then you're going to go to war with each other. You're going to have a rumble, what they would have said in the old days. You're going to have a rumble, a rumble in the streets, except you're not going to have a rumble in the streets. You're going to have a rumble online, right? You're going to go at it. And so, it has to lend itself to that kind of tribal formation.

beating back and forth. Then of course the tribes then attack each other on the issues, but then they also attack each other's values and they accuse each other of being horrible people. And then when it gets really into it, they start to dox each other and try to get each other fired, right? And it all becomes very exciting. And so it's got to have the formation of a moral tribe effect. The psychological lens on this, they call moral tribes, and then there's this concept of moral panic. It's got to lead to a moral panic. It's got to lead to this kind of thing of like, this is indicative of how society is going to [__], right? In some important way. And by the way, this is why you can have many, many, many different examples of current things that end up revolving back around the same handful of underlying political or moral questions, right? Because it's really not about what happened. You know, I don't know, Jussie Smollett...

Yeah. And sometimes it's very serious and the stakes are very high, and sometimes it's just an episode that's so funny, like the astronomer CEO HR thing as an example.

Yeah. And then you get the old Stalin thing, which is a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Like maybe it's even the small-scale horrible things that happen that are the most emotionally intense because they're the things that you're going to react to a person kind of the most intensely. And so I think that's the thing. If you're doing the meta observation of this, it's like, okay, you just have to expect this same phenomenon, this outrage cycle, to play out every time regardless of truth or falsehood and regardless of the actual magnitude of the underlying issue, because again, what's being argued about is the specifics about what actually happened. That's not the point. The point is the ability to form up into moral tribes and then have the rumble.