Open Letter to Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) I was saddened but unsurprised to observe that your recent Techno-Optimist Manifesto received more than its share of negative coverage in America and Europe. Your armchair critics in the press highlighted how they’d read your 5,000-word manifesto “so [we] don’t have to”, and, smug in their luxury beliefs, lambasted your audacity in defending or—God forbid—promoting capitalism and free markets, the very foundations they owe their comfortable lives to. You had surely hoped for a better class of critics, but as a self-made man in this twilight of Western civilization where could you have aspired to find them? It could not have been in the tech press, which now bears little resemblance to, say, Wired as we knew it back in the ‘90s. No, these were the kind of journos who painted the night sky “dystopian” after Starlink redefined connectivity, and who maligned the test launches of Starship—the most powerful rocket ever built—as “failures”. Nearer to me, over here in Dubai, they called the Burj Khalifa—the tallest skyscraper on the planet, reaching over half a mile into the sky—“a frightening, purposeless monument”.