Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Tech superinvestor Marc Andreessen has been traveling the podcast circuit, sharing his insider take on why his industry has veered sharply to the right of late. Eventually, these interviews, like his one with the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, wind around to Andreesen’s theory of “the Deal, with a capital D:”
Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.
Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.
Andreesen’s personal history of “the Deal” begins when he arrives in Silicon Valley in 1994, “in the full swing of Clinton-Gore.” He paraphrases the former vice president, who was “thrilled” and involved with the early days of the web: “The internet worked, and now we’re going to have this giant economic boom. It’s going to be led by dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism.” The deal has since fallen apart, he says, a process he credits to, among other related causes, “the Great Awokening,” radicalized “America-hating communist” tech employees and political staffers, and a turn against the tech industry by the media and Democratic politicians post-2016.
It is at least a little bit funny for one of the world’s biggest beneficiaries of strategically written, time-sensitive venture capital deals to tell the story of the last 30 years in tech in terms of an amorphous counterparty welching on an unwritten contract; it’s the familiar “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me” story, given new life in translation to the language of startups and funding. At least ask for a term sheet next time!
It’s also the sort of pat, slightly contrarian story that dares you to ask obvious follow-up questions. Even if you accept and account for real ideological changes in the Democratic party since the age of peak economic liberalism: Is it possible that anything else happened in the tech industry between 1994 and 2016 that might have complicated its relationship with politicians and the general public? How about the economy in general? Were Republicans and conservatives vehemently criticizing and antagonizing and legislating against the tech industry at any point during this time, and if so, why didn’t it matter? Did — and I’m just spitballing here — an “giant economic boom” actually come to pass, leading to the creation of some of the largest firms on Earth, associated with some of the richest people on Earth, whose exercise of power was felt by nearby institutions and everyday people in rather direct ways? Is it possible that the varied experiences and concerns of hundreds of millions of actual people with these companies — not just the activist impulses of “communist” tech workers whose employers, according to Andreessen, “felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses” — might have had some downstream effects on this unspoken arrangement?
More concisely: Isn’t this at least in part a story of a celebrated underdog industry moving to the center of American life and becoming, with little help needed from the scheming narrative architects in the media and public office, a generic symbol of power rather than disruption? And as galling as that might feel from the inside, isn’t that what the money is for?
Quibbles aside, and for the sake of argument, let’s hold space for Andreessen’s lived experience, and treat this as a specimen of the look-what-you-made-me-do conversion stories we’ve been hearing from elsewhere in the industry – from, for example, Andreessen mentee Mark Zuckerberg, who spent a few hours working out the details of his own tale of surprise and political betrayal with Joe Rogan. As an account of recently history, it raises an important question about the present and future. If this was the old deal, and its dissolution was an unwelcome surprise, what’s the new deal, exactly?
At first glance, it looks a little like the old deal. Clinton-era Democrats had little interest in regulating a new, growing tech industry in part because it was relatively small, but also because they came to power as explicitly business-friendly, post-Cold-War electoral triangulators. In 2025, Republicans are more clearly the party of fewer regulations and lower taxes; they’ve also got a credible claim over growing swathes of mass culture the likes of which they haven’t had since the 1980s. Most importantly, of course, they’re currently in power; accordingly, in terms of tech-elite self-preservation and in-group membership, the “fashionable and appropriate causes” of the time are now conservative — or, more precisely, anti-progressive, taking the form of specific rejections of “wokeness” and DEI. (It’s also understood that you should be maximally hawkish on China, a tendency which they come by honestly, but which is already falling out of sync with President Trump’s incoherent, personal, and almost egregiously corrupt approach to TikTok.)
This shift has been described as a switch from cynical elite “virtue-signaling” to “vice-signaling. Tech barons now declare investing more virtuous than philanthropy. And the transformation of platforms like Twitter, which were full of unworthy critics and antagonists, into platforms like X, where correctly oriented tech figures can once again enjoy a form of constant public praise, or at least rally people against their enemies, and you’ve got a crude approximation of those nostalgic wonder years, at least for the people who were there.
There are less obvious aspects of this new unspoken deal, however, that might also prove relevant. For example: While the new Trump administration is widely expected to reduce regulatory burdens and taxes on small and large tech companies, president has also, on previous occasions, threatened to throw some of his new allies in jail, to investigate and prosecute tech firms on ideological and personal grounds, and to wield threats of regulation in targeted and politicized ways. This new deal also seems to include an awful lot of ego-tending and loyalty-signaling under duress.
In this sense, it resembles the fondly remembered 90s, in which a dynamic, growing industry was largely left alone, less than that it resembles the conservative tech horror story of the last four years, in which a vastly more powerful but still dynamic industry was very much not left alone, trapped between an unpredictable and intransigent government and whipsawing public opinion. Al Gore’s tech nerd mascots have been replaced with Trump’s trillion-dollar mogul collection, placed on proud display during the inauguration, each facing genuine and novel political uncertainty about their respective companies and fortunes: Am I going to get that launch contract, or is Elon going to shut me out? Is “everything now legal” in crypto, post-Trump-meme-coin? Do we have an outside chance of buying into a semi-nationalized TikTok, or will we end up dealing with a competitor half-owned by the United States government? Are we going to be shut out of this AI infrastructure project? What does our chatbot say when you ask it about Donald Trump?
The new “deal” is shaping up to bring the government closer to the tech industry, only with selective deregulation replacing targeted regulation. If its unspoken terms include the assumption that the President’s threats are mostly just blustery negotiating tactics and that the tech industry can maintain a productive partnership, or truce, with the more feral and influential factions of Trump’s base, well: Best of luck with that!
