What The Hell America!

Marc Andreessen has found a clever justification for dismissing democratic oversight of technology. Over the past year, the billionaire venture capitalist has repeatedly invoked a century-old idea from the German sociologist Robert Michels: the “Iron Law of Oligarchy.” Michels’s theory holds that complex organizations such as a government — even those founded on democratic ideals — inevitably become dominated by a small elite.

Andreessen doesn’t cite this theory to critique power or warn against it. Rather, he distorts it to justify why his class of Silicon Valley “builders” should be in charge. “The Iron Law of Oligarchy basically says democracy is fake,” he concludes from his simplistic reading of Michels’s argument. Andreessen’s understanding echoes the logic Benito Mussolini used to justify fascism in Italy.

If rule by elites is inevitable, Andreessen’s argument goes, we should stop pretending otherwise and get out of their way. Let the builders build. Let the engineers and investors lead. Let public institutions fall in line.

But Andreessen seems unaware — or uninterested — in the deeper points made by Michels’s 1911 book, Political Parties. Michels wasn’t offering a license for elite rule; he was warning about the dangers posed to democracy when leaders claim a monopoly on insight and legitimacy while dismissing the public as too ignorant or irrational to participate. The German Social Democratic Party, which Michels studied, prided itself on mass participation, but in his view, it evolved into a top-down organization with power increasingly concentrated at the top. That wasn’t a sign that democracy was irredeemable. It was a sign that its principles can been eroded from within.

While Michels’s work is not without critique, its insights are prescient. For instance, Donald Trump’s populist rejection of “the swamp” of entrenched elites gave way to a consolidation of power around an inner circle loyal to him. In the 2016 presidential primary, Democratic insiders, not voters, tipped the scales to Hilary Clinton. And during Joe Biden’s term, a small circle of aides, family members, and top Democratic officials shielded the public from concerns about Biden’s health and cognitive decline.

Andreessen is himself a case study in this very dynamic. His writings, political organizing, and even communications strategy — closed-door Signal threads and curated media channels — suggest not a desire to guard against oligarchy, but, like Mussolini, to embody it himself.

In Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he presents a sweeping argument: technological innovation is the ultimate solution to social problems — from poverty to stagnation to inequality. Builders and investors like himself, he insists, should be left to work without interference from regulators, ethicists, or journalists. Democratic constraints are framed not as necessary checks on power but as symptoms of a culture infected by fear and demoralization.

In this worldview, the enemies are many: sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, social responsibility, “trust and safety” — even the “ivory tower” of academics and experts. Any attempts to balance innovation with public accountability are portrayed as tools of suppression. To Andreessen, they are not contributions to democratic debate but roadblocks to be cleared away.

Andreessen’s disdain for the “ivory tower” — which he derides as the domain of “know-it-all credentialed experts” indulging in “luxury beliefs” — is especially ironic given his own efforts to dress up political preferences as grand theory. To be sure, many academic institutions, over the last decade or so, have struggled with ideological conformity, censorship, and the narrowing of debate. But Andreessen isn’t calling for a renewal of intellectual pluralism — he’s trying to delegitimize one class of expertise while enthroning another. His “manifesto” is full of sweeping, pseudo-intellectual declarations about history, economics, and human nature, invoking figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hayek to lend philosophical weight to what is essentially a deregulatory agenda.

He also justifies his authoritarian turn with an argument called the “The Deal,” a supposed bargain society struck with an earlier generation of tech innovators: allow them to build and profit, and in return, they will be generous philanthropists. He also refers to this process as the “Silicon Valley Circle of Life.”

But as a result of growing scrutiny of Silicon Valley — around monopoly power, labor practices, and misinformation — Andreessen claims that society has broken its side of the deal. Rather than engaging with these critiques, he suggests that innovators are no longer bound by any expectations of responsibility or oversight. This supposed dealbreaker is what led him to shift his support from Biden to Trump.

Michels developed the Iron Law to describe the drift of power into smaller and smaller circles, which is well-demonstrated by Andreessen’s — and several other prominent tech figures’ — use of private, encrypted group chats as tools of political coordination. These aren’t casual discussions. As reporting in Semafor shows, they are used to align messaging and shape campaigns — out of view from the public, media, or even political parties. It’s the smoke-filled backroom, digitized and rebranded.

To be clear, no one is denying the value of technology and innovation. Technological progress has driven extraordinary gains in health, mobility, knowledge, and more. But innovation happens within a social and political context. At a moment when AI tools are reshaping employment, information, and education — and when the legitimacy of public institutions is already under strain — we can’t afford to let those who profit most from disruption write the rules behind closed doors.

The lesson of Michels is not that we must accept elite domination. Andreessen’s ideas and actions illustrate exactly why we still need fight for it.