Tomorrow's Advance Man
May 12, 2015 10:54 PM Subscribe
The word you were looking for is conehead pinhead.
posted by not_on_display at 11:37 PM on May 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by not_on_display at 11:37 PM on May 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
Same difference. SNL stole it from Bill Griffith and slapped on a 'space-alien' cover story.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:00 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:00 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
I would love to believe that he has the 'Three Commas' art from Silicon Valley...
posted by DanCall at 2:34 AM on May 13, 2015
posted by DanCall at 2:34 AM on May 13, 2015
You know what I love reading about? Billionaires. Billionaires are SO interesting. Their every word, their every action are just so profound, simply because they’re billionaires. Billionaires: they’re just better than everyone else.
Seriously, though, doesn’t Condé Nast already have Vanity Fair to print this kind of blowjob journalism? Why does it have to spill over to—and spoil—an otherwise top-notch New Yorker magazine?
posted by 1970s Antihero at 3:17 AM on May 13, 2015 [28 favorites]
Seriously, though, doesn’t Condé Nast already have Vanity Fair to print this kind of blowjob journalism? Why does it have to spill over to—and spoil—an otherwise top-notch New Yorker magazine?
posted by 1970s Antihero at 3:17 AM on May 13, 2015 [28 favorites]
You know what I love reading about? Billionaires. Billionaires are SO interesting. Their every word, their every action are just so profound, simply because they’re billionaires. Billionaires: they’re just better than everyone else.
Hey, hey, hey, let's humanize them a little now. Billionaires are people too, just like you and me. They make mistakes just like you and me, such as not investing enough in Instagram and getting a return of only seventy-eight million dollars. Who among us hasn't made a little oopsie like that at one time or another?
posted by Spatch at 4:47 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
Hey, hey, hey, let's humanize them a little now. Billionaires are people too, just like you and me. They make mistakes just like you and me, such as not investing enough in Instagram and getting a return of only seventy-eight million dollars. Who among us hasn't made a little oopsie like that at one time or another?
posted by Spatch at 4:47 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
That's a really long article! It was worthy reading. Definitely learned some things.
One thing I learned is that his wife is turned on by bald heads:
She told me that Andreessen satisfied most of the criteria on her checklist: he was a genius, he was a coder, he was funny, and he was bald. (“I find it incredibly sexy to see the encasement of a cerebrum,” she explained.)
Her father, Andreesens's father-in-law, is John Arrillaga. Check that dude out.
posted by rmmcclay at 5:18 AM on May 13, 2015
One thing I learned is that his wife is turned on by bald heads:
She told me that Andreessen satisfied most of the criteria on her checklist: he was a genius, he was a coder, he was funny, and he was bald. (“I find it incredibly sexy to see the encasement of a cerebrum,” she explained.)
Her father, Andreesens's father-in-law, is John Arrillaga. Check that dude out.
posted by rmmcclay at 5:18 AM on May 13, 2015
“I find it incredibly sexy to see the encasement of a cerebrum,” she explained.
Millions of people find bald sexy, but surely no one actually ever speaks like this once they have graduated from high school, right? What is next, using "plethora" in every sentence?
posted by Dip Flash at 5:58 AM on May 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
Millions of people find bald sexy, but surely no one actually ever speaks like this once they have graduated from high school, right? What is next, using "plethora" in every sentence?
posted by Dip Flash at 5:58 AM on May 13, 2015 [5 favorites]
His most famous "innovation" is the "tweet storm" wherein you rapidly tweet in sequence a whole blog post worth of material rather than, you know, just making a fucking blog post and linking to it on twitter. *genius*
posted by j03 at 6:01 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by j03 at 6:01 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
You know what I love reading about? Billionaires.
1970s Antihero
Only if they have crime-fighting alter egos.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:38 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
1970s Antihero
Only if they have crime-fighting alter egos.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:38 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
Soylent? This man is not to my liking. Cannot read past soylent.
posted by bukvich at 7:00 AM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by bukvich at 7:00 AM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
Andreessen reminded me—in his formidable achievements and manner, his thickly armored sensitivities and yearnings—of Rilke’s remark “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” When I told him so, he stared back in absolute horror.
That was extremely well played. Bravo for having the wit to trot that out in that giant bubble of bullshit.
posted by Wolof at 7:02 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
That was extremely well played. Bravo for having the wit to trot that out in that giant bubble of bullshit.
posted by Wolof at 7:02 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
His most famous "innovation" is the "tweet storm"
In fairness, I think his most famous innovation is the "Web Browser"
posted by tehgubner at 7:06 AM on May 13, 2015 [8 favorites]
In fairness, I think his most famous innovation is the "Web Browser"
posted by tehgubner at 7:06 AM on May 13, 2015 [8 favorites]
j03 that's just a silly thing to say. His most famous work is Mosaic and Netscape. While this piece is a little puffy, it's certainly not a totally flattering portrait of Andreessen and I found it a fascinating anthropological portrait of tech VC today. I also found the various reactions, both positive and negative, over at Hacker News to be interesting.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:06 AM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Wretch729 at 7:06 AM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
You know what I love reading about? Billionaires. Billionaires are SO interesting. Their every word, their every action are just so profound, simply because they’re billionaires. Billionaires: they’re just better than everyone else.
That's a lot of contempt for one of the most influential persons of the last thirty years.
You know what? Billionaires may or may not be interesting based solely on their billions, but the choices they made and the risks they took are interesting.
Mr. Andreesen's choices are one of the reasons the blue exists, as well as every site in existence, so I would at least be curious what he might be working on at the moment.
posted by exparrot at 7:08 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
That's a lot of contempt for one of the most influential persons of the last thirty years.
You know what? Billionaires may or may not be interesting based solely on their billions, but the choices they made and the risks they took are interesting.
Mr. Andreesen's choices are one of the reasons the blue exists, as well as every site in existence, so I would at least be curious what he might be working on at the moment.
posted by exparrot at 7:08 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
Horowitz told me that every once in a while Andreessen will “get all Wisconsin on you, sticking up for his people. When we looked at an Internet pawnshop, people here said, ‘It’s immoral,’ and Marc went bananas. He said, ‘If you’ve got no fucking money, and you need to pawn your watch to pay for your kids to eat—you think that’s morally fucking wrong because it offends your sensibilities, you rich motherfuckers?’ He knew that guy who was pawning his watch because he’d missed the harvest, or whatever. Or we saw an Uber-for-private-jets thing, or some wine thing that came through, and he just got incensed: ‘We didn’t start the firm for rich people to buy hundred-dollar bottles of wine or to fly around on fucking private jets!’
posted by mecran01 at 7:53 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by mecran01 at 7:53 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
That quote is rich, considering that Andreessen is one of the guys who helped create the IGMFY attitude of Silicon Valley. It also shows that he has no clue about why pawn shops have always had an unsavory reputation, and thus no clue about what economic justice actually looks like.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:07 AM on May 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:07 AM on May 13, 2015 [6 favorites]
I honestly didn't recognize the name - not sure what that says about me.
It *does* say, "one-line one-link FPPs are not good". Maybe even a little summary?
posted by sidereal at 8:35 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
It *does* say, "one-line one-link FPPs are not good". Maybe even a little summary?
posted by sidereal at 8:35 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
You know what? Billionaires may or may not be interesting based solely on their billions, but the choices they made and the risks they took are interesting.
Sometimes. And sometimes billionaires are just people who were doing some random thing that *someone* was going to be doing, but had the sheer dumb luck to be doing it when that thing exploded. Andreessen seems pretty clearly to be one of the latter, because "graphical lynx" is not rocket fucking science. If Andreessen and whats-his-face-nobody-remembers hadn't written Mosaic... we'd just be using browsers derived from Viola or Cello instead.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:48 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
Sometimes. And sometimes billionaires are just people who were doing some random thing that *someone* was going to be doing, but had the sheer dumb luck to be doing it when that thing exploded. Andreessen seems pretty clearly to be one of the latter, because "graphical lynx" is not rocket fucking science. If Andreessen and whats-his-face-nobody-remembers hadn't written Mosaic... we'd just be using browsers derived from Viola or Cello instead.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:48 AM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
You know what I love reading about?
Oh cool, we both enjoyed the article. Considering he invented the web browser that is the foundation of the modern internet and has just happened to be connected to a good number of interesting events since, I'd say he's a pretty good subject for an article.
posted by the jam at 10:12 AM on May 13, 2015
Oh cool, we both enjoyed the article. Considering he invented the web browser that is the foundation of the modern internet and has just happened to be connected to a good number of interesting events since, I'd say he's a pretty good subject for an article.
posted by the jam at 10:12 AM on May 13, 2015
Wait--there's a branch of science devoted to copulating with rockets?
posted by mecran01 at 11:16 AM on May 13, 2015
posted by mecran01 at 11:16 AM on May 13, 2015
ROU_Xenophobe: "And sometimes billionaires are just people who were doing some random thing that *someone* was going to be doing, but had the sheer dumb luck to be doing it when that thing exploded"
I think that's probably too high a bar— would someone have eventually made a web-browser usable by the average user, yes, but they didn't. Would someone have eventually made an iPhone like phone if the iPhone never came along, yep, but they didn't. You can always play the "Well, that's fucking obvious! Anyone would do it that way!" but you rarely play that game before someone actually does that fucking obvious thing.
If a bus careened out and hit the Mosaic developers and it was never released, well-- the Internet as we know it wouldn't exist, maybe the alternative would be almost exactly the same, perhaps it'd only be a few months behind, hell, maybe it'd be more advanced and we'd all be sitting here in our fully realized VRML worlds, but Mosaic set us walking down a path that lead to Netscape and set the ball rolling on the standards we sum up when we say "Internet".
Now, I only clicked the article because I was tempted in by the conehead reference and I wasn't dissapointed, so perhaps we can at least agree on that? :)
posted by Static Vagabond at 11:22 AM on May 13, 2015
I think that's probably too high a bar— would someone have eventually made a web-browser usable by the average user, yes, but they didn't. Would someone have eventually made an iPhone like phone if the iPhone never came along, yep, but they didn't. You can always play the "Well, that's fucking obvious! Anyone would do it that way!" but you rarely play that game before someone actually does that fucking obvious thing.
If a bus careened out and hit the Mosaic developers and it was never released, well-- the Internet as we know it wouldn't exist, maybe the alternative would be almost exactly the same, perhaps it'd only be a few months behind, hell, maybe it'd be more advanced and we'd all be sitting here in our fully realized VRML worlds, but Mosaic set us walking down a path that lead to Netscape and set the ball rolling on the standards we sum up when we say "Internet".
Now, I only clicked the article because I was tempted in by the conehead reference and I wasn't dissapointed, so perhaps we can at least agree on that? :)
posted by Static Vagabond at 11:22 AM on May 13, 2015
I for one kept getting an impression that the article was better written than the subject was interesting.
posted by polymodus at 11:33 AM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by polymodus at 11:33 AM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
I haven't read it yet, but to see that Andreessen is absolutely horrified by Rilke tells me pretty much everything I need to know.
posted by blucevalo at 12:34 PM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by blucevalo at 12:34 PM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
Hey, hey, hey, let's humanize them a little now. Billionaires are people too, just like you and me."When you’re worth as much as Marcus Vanston, you have proved your value to society through hard work and determination, and are no longer required to show anyone any further proof that you care about anything or anybody else, because you obviously do. Look at all your money!
According to some, Marcus is worth over five billion dollars, and that’s five billion reasons Marcus is our town’s greatest citizen."
posted by WizardOfDocs at 2:16 PM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
I think that's probably too high a bar— would someone have eventually made a web-browser usable by the average user, yes, but they didn't.
Viola predates mosaic and the only reason it wasn't "usable by the average user" is that it ran on X.
I see your larger point, but Andreessen and mosaic don't seem analogous to Jobs and iphone to me. More analogous to saying that Cisco were super-geniuses for making network equipment in the mid 90s.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:03 PM on May 13, 2015
Viola predates mosaic and the only reason it wasn't "usable by the average user" is that it ran on X.
I see your larger point, but Andreessen and mosaic don't seem analogous to Jobs and iphone to me. More analogous to saying that Cisco were super-geniuses for making network equipment in the mid 90s.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:03 PM on May 13, 2015
I liked this line near the end of the piece, "Only human beings could have created such a supercollider of contradictions: a font of innovation that pools around conformity; a freedom train that speeds toward monopoly; a promoter of transparency that shrouds its own dealings; a guild that’s dedicated to flattening hierarchies, and that rewards its leaders with imperial power."
posted by mecran01 at 10:05 PM on May 13, 2015
posted by mecran01 at 10:05 PM on May 13, 2015
I have also taken an interest in following (stalking?) Jamie Zawinski, another early Mosiac developer, and his interactions with Andreessen, over the years. It would make an interesting biopic, seeing how their lives diverged, except the ending is a little sad.
posted by mecran01 at 10:13 PM on May 13, 2015
posted by mecran01 at 10:13 PM on May 13, 2015
If Andreessen and whats-his-face-nobody-remembers hadn't written Mosaic... we'd just be using browsers derived from Viola or Cello instead.
By "whats-his-face" you mean Eric Bina, the guy who actually wrote Mosaic. He did what we all said we'd do if we got rich: moved back home, hung out with his college friends, lived a nice life with his family, didn't try to fuck up the world.
In fact, in one of the few interviews Eric ever gave after coming back to Chambana, he says:
By "whats-his-face" you mean Eric Bina, the guy who actually wrote Mosaic. He did what we all said we'd do if we got rich: moved back home, hung out with his college friends, lived a nice life with his family, didn't try to fuck up the world.
In fact, in one of the few interviews Eric ever gave after coming back to Chambana, he says:
"One obvious thing, the web browser was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. He wrote the first web browser, and the guy doesn't get nearly enough credit. We popularized the web browser and we helped popularize the web but there were other web browsers, besides ours, like Tim's browser, ViolaWWW, and the MidasWWW web browser. Due to issues in the way they were written and distributed, they didn't become popular and ours did. To say we’re wonderful for inventing it is wrong. To say we made significant contributions is accurate. But there were a number of people coming up with similar things. If it hadn’t been us, it would have happened anyway."posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:46 PM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
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posted by ennui.bz at 11:18 PM on May 12, 2015 [2 favorites]