# Marc Andreessen — "Our enemy is..." > [!quote] "Our enemy is stagnation." > > "Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness." > > "Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism." > > "Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition." > > "Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels." > > "Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview." > > — Marc Andreessen, "[[The Techno-Optimist Manifesto]]," a16z, 2023-10-16 ## Context Published on the Andreessen Horowitz corporate blog on October 16, 2023, the Techno-Optimist Manifesto was Marc Andreessen's bid to provide intellectual architecture for the Silicon Valley rightward turn — issued the same season a16z was launching the [[American Dynamism]] defense-tech practice, deepening involvement in crypto political spending, and laying the groundwork for its 2024 Trump endorsement (formalized July 2024). The "enemies list" runs as a litany in the manifesto's closing third. Each line is a short paragraph in the original; the lines above are the thesis sentences. In parallel the document names a separate set of things "we believe in" — markets, technology, growth, abundance, adventure, ambition. ## Why this matters This is the **most explicit self-declaration** of the tech-right's political program by one of its two highest-profile VC principals (the other being [[Peter Thiel]], who operates through fewer and more deniable documents). It maps, with unusual precision, the set of institutional checks Andreessen and his aligned capital intend to dismantle or bypass. Three pattern-level throughlines: 1. **Governance institutions named as enemies.** "Bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy" — the enemies list explicitly names the processes that exist to slow or constrain executive power. When [[DOGE Ecosystem]] later moved to gut inspectors-general and fire career civil servants, the Techno-Optimist Manifesto is the ideological bill of goods that authorized it. Andreessen's own role as a "talent recruiter" for DOGE makes the connection direct rather than inferred. 2. **The internal contradiction.** "Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels" sits in a document issued by a firm that runs a $4.5B crypto fund and lobbies aggressively for crypto-favorable regulation, while operating a defense-tech practice that depends on Pentagon contracts. The manifesto is quotable both for what it claims to oppose and for what it actually does — a receipts-level disconnect. 3. **Intellectual continuity with Thiel 2009.** The enemies list is Peter Thiel's "freedom and democracy are compatible" (2009) argument generalized to a broader target set. [[Peter Thiel - freedom and democracy compatible]] is the narrow version; Andreessen's manifesto is the industrialized catalog. Where Thiel named democracy, Andreessen names the full institutional ecology surrounding democratic governance. ## Verification - **Primary source:** "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," a16z.com, October 16, 2023. URL above. - **Attribution:** Authorship is Marc Andreessen solo, published on the firm's corporate blog. - **Quotable caveats:** The manifesto also includes a list of "patron saints" — names Andreessen endorses — including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the 1909 Italian Futurist Manifesto, which was a foundational text for Italian Fascism. This was widely noted on publication (see Techdirt coverage above). When citing the enemies list for receipts use, the Marinetti citation is a useful companion receipt for tracking the manifesto's ideological lineage. - **Excerpting note:** The lines above are selected from a longer enemies section. For completeness, the manifesto also names as enemies "the Precautionary Principle," "risk management," "the Luddite mindset," and specifically — and notably — "'trust and safety,' and 'tech ethics.'" ## Related quotes - [[Peter Thiel - freedom and democracy compatible]] - [[Peter Thiel - competition is for losers]] - [[Curtis Yarvin - RAGE plan]] ## Part of collections - [[Post-Democratic Tech-Right]]