Tech Won't Save Us - VCs Want to Disrupt the Media w/ Eoin Higgins

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Eoin Higgins to discuss why tech companies and venture capital firms are launching their own media verticals, what Marc Andreessen hopes to get out of Clubhouse and Substack, and why Jeff Bezos may have a better approach to media.Eoin Higgins is a freelance journalist and writes on Substack under The Flashpoint. Follow Eoin on Twitter as @EoinHiggins_.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Eoin wrote about what venture capital firms are doing in media and Marc Andreessen’s favoriting of alt-right tweets.In 2016, Marc Andreessen wrote a tweet about colonialism in India that received a lot of backlash.Coinbase started a “media arm” to “become a source of truth” in the face of critical reporting.Anna Wiener recently wrote about how tech may be shifting from a narrative of disruption to one of building institutions (to serve themselves).Sam Harnett critically examined tech journalism and its history, especially with regard to reporting on the gig economy.Zoe Schiffer and Megan Farokhmanesh detailed how venture capitalists used Clubhouse to organize against critical coverage of the industry and go after journalists like Taylor Lorenz.Ed Zitron wrote about how tech journalism’s shift from an enthusiast press to an industrial press was something venture capitalists and powerful people in the industry were not happy about.Support the show

By disrupting the news media, you're disrupting it to your benefit and to make a more sycophantic tech coverage at a time when tech coverage is maybe being a little more skeptical of your claims than you would like. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Owen Higgins. Owen is a freelance journalist who's written for Business Insider, The Intercept, among a number of other publications, and he also writes on Substack under The Flashpoint, and you can find a link to that in the show notes. In April, Owen wrote an article for Business Insider about how wealthy venture

capitalists in Silicon Valley are increasingly investing in and getting involved in media efforts. Last week, Andreessen Horowitz launched its Future blog, which is kind of designed to promote a kind of techno-solutionist, techno-optimistic narrative on Silicon Valley in response to what it perceives as a more critical media, a media that is publishing more critical stories about the tech industry and the companies that it's invested in. And so it wants to kind of push back on that with a positive vision and a positive message. And so in this conversation, Owen and I talk about what these venture capitalists are trying to achieve

with these media investments, what has changed in tech reporting to make them feel that they need to do this, and how this differs from how wealthy people have invested in the media in the past, and in particular, even how there is still a, you know, a different way of trying to get public opinion to reflect the ideas that you want to see in the world as a really wealthy person, as a billionaire. And Owen kind of draws a distinction between what someone like Marc Andreessen is doing with his future blog and his investments in Substack and Clubhouse and things like that, and then what Jeff Bezos is doing by buying the Washington Post and putting a lot of money

into that publication. So I think this is going to be a really interesting conversation and will help to kind of inform us as we think about what wealthy people in the tech industry are trying to achieve when they get involved in these media efforts. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about the other shows in the network by going to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would find it informative or interesting.

Every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is provided free to everybody because the people who are able to support the show choose to do so. So if you like the conversations that I'm having here on the podcast and you want to support the work that I put into making it every week, you can join supporters like Alexander Hemingway and Greg from Humboldt by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Owen, welcome to tech won't save us. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to speaking with you because you wrote this op-ed back in April that looked at a long-running kind of trend that is reaching a really important point

where these billionaires in Silicon Valley are undertaking this backlash to the media or certain people within the media and expressing their desire even more concretely to shape the narratives that people see in a way that would benefit them. But before we get into the core aspects of that, I wanted to get you to kind of give us a bit of a background on tech journalism and just how it has changed in recent years to kind of provoke this kind of elite response toward the criticism and the journalism that is being undertaken right now. That's such a huge topic, right? And I think that from my

vantage point, which, you know, like I'm not primarily a tech journalist, I find aspects of tech very interesting and I'll write about them like, you know, as we'll discuss. So with that caveat, I think that tech journalism is, it's a really vital and important aspect to the news media in the US and around the world today. I think that one of the primary reasons for that is the usefulness of journalism that's about one of the world's most powerful industrial sectors, which is the tech sector. And it's gone up and down. I mean, tech as we know it, like the Silicon Valley kind of tech industry is only a few decades old, right? It's not a long standing industrial sector. It's not like oil or plastics

or cars. These other sectors that have been around for a long time. There are certain established aspects to how they're reported and to how we encounter them in the media. But tech is a little bit different in that it has not been around for a long time, as I said before, and it's still somewhat dynamic. So the coverage has kind of gone back and forth between some of it is very complimentary, some of it isn't. But most of the time, it's kind of written about in an exciting way because it is an exciting industry. It is an exciting business, and it's an exciting topic. So sometimes that coverage can end up being somewhat sycophantic and somewhat like hero-worshipy. And certain members of the tech world get used to this kind of treatment and behavior. And the way that tech has been covered has been kind of shifting, you know, over the last five years to a decade.

And there are people in the tech industry who don't like that. I mean, arguably, this has been going on since before that. You know, we can go into this a little bit later, but obviously Peter Thiel going after Gawker was like a real watershed moment for how tech billionaires were going to treat the media and kind of be a little bit more aggressive towards the media. But by and large, tech has had a pretty favorable ride from tech journalists until relatively recently. And that's kind of where all of this, of what I think we're going to talk about kind of comes from. Yeah, you know, I think that's a good point, right? I talked to Sam Harnett last year about tech journalism in a little bit of a more in-depth way, like the

history of it. And he kind of argued that there's kind of this uncritical strand that comes out of product reviews, you know, back in the early days of the PCs and PC magazines and things like that, that kind of influenced the early coverage as this tech industry kind of grew. And then obviously around 2016, 2015, we have this kind of break where there's this tech clash and there's more critical journalism happening, not saying that it just started at that point, but we start to see more critical perspectives on these tech companies around that time. And naturally, as that has escalated and progressed, I think we've seen more of this, you know, kind of response to it from the people in the industry who grew up with this positive coverage, with this rather uncritical coverage, and are now seeing a different take on what they're doing, who they are, the kind of actions that they're having in the world, and are not seeing how they're being recast, I guess, with this new kind of perspective.

Yeah, I think that's accurate. And I think that, I mean, I'm somewhat sympathetic to people who kind of give it this breathless coverage, just because as a journalist and as a historian, like I understand like how exciting it is to have this dynamic industry that is reshaping the world, right? Like everything that's produced out of the tech sector is exciting and really like pushing a lot of aspects of our society. I don't know if forward is the right word, but it's a very important part of our day-to-day lives. And so I sympathize a little bit with that idea that, you know that you're coming from the world of doing these reviews and stuff, which are kind of like laudatory, and you kind of take that approach

toward tech going forward. I also think that a lot of the shift over the last few years, five, six, 10 years has also come because alongside tech is also venture capital. And I think that it's been harder and harder to kind of separate those two out. And because it's become harder and harder to separate them out, the coverage has kind of changed a little bit to kind of reflect the way that people feel about kind of the negative aspects of venture capital and tech, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. And you mentioned Peter Thiel already, and I'm sure he'll return in our conversation. But in your piece, you also talked about how Elon Musk has kind of sparred with journalists in the past. But to your point about

the venture capital and that kind of angle and the connection between venture capital and tech, one of the people who has played really prominently in this kind of push and this kind of backlash to the media that we're talking about is Marc Andreessen of, you know, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. So who is Marc Andreessen? And why has this critical shift in the media coverage made him so angry? Yeah, so Andreessen is a venture capitalist who got his start in tech in the 90s. He was one of the founders of Netscape Navigator, which was a web browser, I believe. By all accounts, a really brilliant software engineer, tech guy, just kind of new, good at picking winners, I guess, especially with the venture capital stuff, invested in Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest,

Clubhouse, Substack. I mean, like there are all of these companies that Andreessen Horowitz, which is his venture capital fund, you know, has invested in. So he is a billionaire. He's very powerful. He has his fingers in a whole bunch of different tech companies, et cetera.

So that's kind of, you know, who he is. He's not super well-known, kind of outside of the tech slash online world, but he's certainly one of those people who has an outsized influence on a lot of your day-to-day life, right? I think most Americans interact with at least one of the products that he is heavily invested in each day, right? He used to be very accessible to media, and he used to be very happy to do interviews with people. And then a while ago, that changed. He finally started to get some negative coverage. He tweeted some things that were a little off color, specifically about

people from India. The tweet was something to the effect of colonialism was good. And I reported on his Twitter likes back in 2018, and they kind of showed kind of a leaning towards the intellectual dark web, which is this kind of far right pseudo intellectual group of grifters, I guess, who are kind of trying to put an academic sheen on right-wing ideas. These are people like Brett Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, people like this. And the reason that I did that was that myself and my editor at the time thought that it looked to us like he was really sending a message by kind of curating this little feed of all of these like tweets. And they definitely did seem to send this kind of curating this little feed of all these like tweets. And they definitely

did seem to send this kind of message. So the reason that I'm bringing that up is that he's been kind of tilting right for a while. And in recent years, he's kind of started to go after reporters that he doesn't like specifically, like one of his main targets is Taylor Lorenz, the New York Times tech reporter who has mildly criticized, I think, some of his companies, and he's just kind of gone after her since then. So he's an interesting character, I think. He kind of defies really easy pigeonholing. You can't just automatically call him the Ur-villain of Silicon Valley. I think that he's a more interesting character than that, but his politics are definitely on the right, and his reaction to the way that he has been covered in tech media has

been to kind of go scorched earth on those that he feels have been unfair to him. What you described there about his shift toward these right-wing politics and the way that he takes on journalists, especially, you know, Taylor Lorenz, as we've seen in the past months. I don't know how you feel about this, but I feel like there has been a broader shift in that direction. Like, you know, when Andreessen was targeting Taylor Lorenz in that way, it seemed like there were a lot of other venture capitalists as well, influential people in the Valley who were engaging in similar kind of behavior, whether it was toward Taylor or other journalists. You know, I wonder how you feel about that and that kind of shift

that we're seeing with these powerful people taking this really kind of hostile and aggressive tone toward, you know, journalists and other people who would try to criticize them or hold them to account in some way. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that it's important to look at this in its full kind of context, right? This is not just a thing that has been going on in tech, right? This has been going on in some form. It's been going on for forever. But ever since there's been a combative media, the subjects of that combative coverage have always not taken kindly to it. But I think that to look at our current situation, I think that you can really, you can look at the way that the Trump White House and kind of, you know, the right wing has been kind of anti-media for, you know, four or five years. And really like the right wing has been anti-media for a very, very long time, for decades. During the Bush years, there was a member of the White House who told this reporter that reporters could write about reality, but as an empire, the US creates its own reality, right?

So I think that there's been this kind of institutional hostility towards media in a relatively specific way that we've been seeing for quite a while. With tech, I mean, there are interesting wrinkles in how this all kind of works out because people who are in tech are part of an industry that has largely redefined news media around the world. And so on the one hand, they make a lot of money from news media, but they don't like when news media uses the tools that people in tech would probably say that we gave to them, right, to report on the creators of these tools and the people who have kind of set up the media revolution that has kind of come with new tech and online and social media. So there is a specific hostility. And again,

this is just conjecture, right? This is just my impression of what I see, is that there's almost like a feeling of betrayal and anger on the part of these tech billionaires like Andreessen, like Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg and Dorsey. They mostly just don't give interviews. But I think that as far as Andreessen goes, I think there's a very specific anger on his part against the media for the way that Facebook's role in kind of promoting Trump's conspiracy theories during the 2016 election earned Facebook a lot of bad press in a way that it hadn't had before. And I have I have heard that Andreessen is not fond of that. That's like a specific example. I think it's really interesting, though, because it potentially helps to kind of illustrate why, at least in this specific case, you know, why Andreessen would be turning against the media in this way, even if, you know, we might say it's not a good thing,

you know, but at least we can kind of understand why he might be doing it. And to the point you were making there, I did want to talk about some of the investments and interventions that Andreessen Horowitz has been making into media in particular. You know, in the first part of that, I guess I wanted to talk about was the fact that Andreessen Horowitz is one of the firms that has invested in Substack and Clubhouse, two companies that have made a big splash over the past year in particular. Now, obviously, not everything on those platforms are bad. It's offered an opportunity for a lot of people to share their knowledge, their experiences, to do reporting, to get to know people who they might not have known before. You're using Substack,

obviously, as are a lot of other great people. And the functionality of Clubhouse allowed people to get together in a way that was certainly difficult during the pandemic. But at the same time, it seems like this firm and Andreessen in particular probably has a goal motivating the investments in these platforms. So how do you think Andreessen might see, or these VCs more generally, might see the goal of exerting power in the media through platforms like this, through these kind of social media or newsletter platforms? Well, I think that first of all, they're trying to make money, right? I think that that is their primary goal. I mean, Clubhouse, for example, like Clubhouse has really insanely invasive service

agreement. It can spy on you quite a bit. So maybe that's how they make their money from that. So I see how they can like value Clubhouse at a certain amount, even though it doesn't appear to be giving them a return on investment. There know, there's certainly the data mining that they can do. There's also like the idea that as a long-term investment, I think there's something like Clubhouse, this audio-based conversation social media app makes a lot of sense to me. Yes, signups during kind of like the winter second wave

of the pandemic were just like skyrocketing. Now it's leveled off and it's dropping. But I think that as a long-term investment, Clubhouse is smart because it's just like another democratizing social media platform, or at least it's being presented that way. Podcasts are very popular. Social media is very popular. Here's a way to listen to a live podcast and interact with it. What does Clubhouse look like eventually? I don't know. But I think that the basic idea there is a good one. Substack is a little more difficult for me to see exactly where the profit is there. But it does seem like it's aimed at reshaping media and disrupting a little bit the traditional way that newsrooms

have operated. So kind of what I'm getting at here is that something like that is actually beneficial for people like Andreessen, because traditional media has certain institutional power that, you know, somebody with a newsletter does not. And so the more that you can kind of damage that institutional power and that institutional credibility, the better things are kind of long-term for being able to push back on reporting that doesn't shine a positive light on your business

or that you don't like for whatever reason, right? And so you can then kind of use it to push back. So I think that there are like multiple reasons that Andreessen, you know, because we're using him as kind of the test case here, is investing in these companies. But I think that most of the time, like these venture capital guys are investing primarily because of the profit that they stand to gain. And then, you know, there is probably some kind of like long term game that they're playing where they're kind of like looking at how the future of this investment can help them

out in different ways. But it does seem kind of like a lot of this stuff is like a bonus, right? So like, for example, like with Clubhouse, Andreessen felt that Taylor Lorenz from the New York Times was being unfair to Clubhouse. And so the minute that he had an opportunity to attack her for something she said about Clubhouse, as he did in February, I believe, he's then able to pounce on her and attack her and try to discredit her and harass her into basically trying to bully her into not reporting negatively on Clubhouse, or at least that's how it looks right from the outside.

That's how it looks to other reporters. The benefit of doing that seems very clear to me, because what Andreessen is doing there is he's putting everybody on notice. If you report on me in a way that I don't like, I will make your life hell. And that's certainly a tactic. That's the kind of thing where I see more of a one-to-one of what he's doing is trying to reshape media and to ensure that coverage is as favorable as possible. I think what you're saying there makes a lot of sense. If you are a journalist and you know that taking on a certain topic is going to result in a lot of

backlash, a lot of anger that's going to come your way. And you have so many topics that you could potentially cover, maybe you will be disincentivized to go after that one where you know that this really powerful figure is going to send a lot of hate your way. And just to kind of, you know, expand on what you were saying there about the potential for Substack, obviously beyond what Andreessen Horowitz might see in their ability to make a profit off of it in the future, which, you know, seems completely possible in the case of that investment, if it's not already, you know, producing a return for them because of how it's set up. You know, there was also an argument that I saw that beyond affecting the institutional credibility of the media, you know, you're

taking journalists out of that kind of institution where they have the resources that they need. And, you know, there will obviously be some people who will be able to build those resources on their own to create a kind of, you know, means of reporting a small journalistic outfit that will be able to still do these stories. But, you know, in general, there's been an argument that it will become more difficult for journalists to take on these investigative stories, these difficult stories, if they don't have that kind of institutional support. I wonder what you make of that argument as well. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that that is the idea. It's about weakening the institution.

If you just basically gut a newsroom because you can credibly offer a number of star reporters that they'll make more money using your service, then it's like working two ways, right? Like on the one hand, you get these reporters doing work for you instead of a newsroom, which is a competitor to what you're producing. In this case, Substack, right? Like you want people to be writing for Substack. You don't want them to be writing for the Daily Beast or the New York Times or whatever. So there's that direct benefit. And then the second part is that you've also stripped that star reporter from the newsroom. So they don't have that person there anymore. And because they don't have that person there anymore, that means that whoever they have reporting on XYZ topic next time isn't going to come with that built-in audience.

And so that weakens the newsroom a little bit like that. And every little tiny little bit that you're chopping off of it hurts the newsroom more and more. And so I think that that's just kind of like a great little bonus for them and that they just get to break down these institutions. And plus, are people going to go to Substack and then write about why Substack is bad or, you know, why one of their primary investors is bad? Like, maybe, but that seems like not a great use of your time, especially with the money that Substack is throwing around to establish journalists to come onto the platform and, you know, guaranteed revenue deals, you know, and they're not the only people doing this. Obviously, there are other people doing guaranteed

revenue deals too. But with them making these decisions and throwing this money around, I mean, if you're somebody who's writing for Substack, like, are you going to like write something negative about Andreessen and or Substack? Some of us do, but I don't think that that's like the automatic thing that people are thinking of doing. And obviously, you know, like that's not for me, it's not something that like I'm like invested in doing. It's just, you know, if the story comes up, I just think that it's a very it's a very smart model in that by, you know, to use kind of tech speak, disrupting the news media, what you're doing is you're essentially disrupting it to your benefit and to make a more sycophantic

kind of tech coverage at a time when tech coverage is maybe being a little more skeptical of your claims than you would like. Yeah, you know, I completely get that. And I think building on what you said there and what you've been describing, obviously, they're looking for profit in these companies and, you know, hoping that it will disrupt the media in this way that is beneficial to them as well. But in addition to making these investments in companies like Substack and Clubhouse, a number of tech companies now are launching their own kind of media ventures, we might say. Other people might just say, you know, PR rebranded as stories or articles or whatnot. And so, you know, Andreessen Horowitz has launched its future blog, which is, you know,

kind of positioned as being a techno optimistic publication that will feature VCs and executives and other people who are enthusiastic about Silicon Valley, and that idea of technology to publish in this place. And, you know, Coinbase has also launched what it's called its media arm called fact check to push back against critical stories. I believe Stripe is doing something similar. So what do these investments and what do the launching of these kind of media verticals tell you about the desires of these companies or VC firms and their need to kind of push an alternative narrative to what they feel that we're seeing in the mainstream media, I guess? Yeah, so I think that they're certainly interesting. Before these ventures launched, at least the Andreessen Horowitz one, you know, I've been hearing about it for a few months. There was some concern among some sources that I have in the tech industry and in media that, you know, that this might be a genuinely bad sign for tech journalism, journalism in general, you know, holding these

guys accountable for what they do, etc. And Dreesen Horowitz has come out with, you know, its first few articles in its publication. And to say the least, those fears were pretty overblown. It's just not very interesting. Here's the thing is that the way that you've described it is exactly what it is. And if you really just think about it, that is not an interesting thing to read. Who's going to want to read a bunch of tech CEOs, investors, and people enthusiastic about what they're investing in, talk about the things that they're investing in? That's just not an interesting read, unless all you want to read is something positive about the tech industry. And I just don't think that there are enough people out there that really

want that. So who is this really aimed at? I mean, it seems like it's aimed at maybe a million people max. That's not a lot of people, and probably really just a few thousand. So ultimately, what all of these publications are going to do is they're going to make people like the guys at Andreessen Horowitz, the people at Coinbase, etc., feel good when they read them. It's going to make them feel like they're getting the quote unquote real story out there. But ultimately, it's not going to change anything because nobody outside of these little niche communities are going to read this. You're not going to change public opinion because you're writing PR for a bunch of people who think the exact way that you do. The public opinion that you want to change are people who don't think the way that you think. They're the people who are members of the public or people

who are consumers of your products, who you need to engage and hopefully not have them think that you're completely evil because you want them to at least use your product. That's one of the reasons that these guys don't like this scrutiny. It's one of the reasons why they don't like bad press is because ultimately it's going to end up turning the public against their product. And then that ends up hurting their investment. So I guess that's kind of a long way of saying that I just don't really think that there's much to these in-house publications. It seems to me that the people who like the companies and the capital firms, et cetera, who are doing this just don't have a very clear understanding of the business that they're trying to take over. And they don't seem to have a very clear understanding of what people want to read when it comes to basically any topic.

Look, I could be wrong. I'm not a billionaire. I have not made investments for decades in things that people want. So obviously, I'm not going to say that I'm 100% confident in my interpretation of how this is going to go. But it does not seem to me that Futureblog or whatever else that they have going on is going to particularly work in the way that they think it's going to work. Yeah, I'm just nodding my head over here. I completely agree. I think there were fears before these things launched that they could present some kind of alternative that maybe we hadn't seen, or that would be really compelling. But at least in their current form, like, it just seems like who would really read this except for the very people that are creating it themselves, right? Who want to read these sorts of things to

kind of build themselves up and make them feel good about the investments that they're making and what they're doing. And it doesn't seem like it's something that, again, like at least in its current form, would really be appealing to a broader public who's not already kind of influenced by these ideas. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I'll put it this way. I'm going to analogize this as something different. And I'm not going to name names here. But there is a certain kind of pop culture and tech blog that's been around for well over a decade that I used to go. I used to visit pretty much daily. They had a lot of really interesting articles on science and they would have interesting critical articles on science fiction and comic books and pop culture and stuff like this was like, you know, even before like like the marvel movie stuff exploded and they would do tv recaps and stuff like that and it was just it was a really interesting website and you know i didn't like all of it but i liked a lot of it

and i thought that it was it was really fascinating over the last couple years their parent company has gone through some changes and the website now is just basically like a clearinghouse for just PR, mostly like Marvel Cinematic Universe PR, where they never review anything negatively. It just reads like advertisements, basically, for Marvel movies or Marvel TV shows or whatever Disney product there is. Pretty favorable towards DC stuff, too. There's no criticism really there. There's nothing interesting. There's no criticism really there. There's nothing interesting. Like there's no criticism of anything that would like rock the boat or anything.

I visit that website like once a month, maybe now. This used to be a daily thing. The point that I'm trying to make here is that like someone like me is going to be interested in a website about those topics that is relatively like genuinely positive towards that stuff in general, but certainly like takes a critical eye and is in like an interesting look at those topics.

And because they've just turned into PR for Disney and Warner Brothers and these other conglomerates, I just have no interest in reading about them. I have no interest in reading anything when I know that every single review is going to be positive and that it's just going to be all about boosting these powerful companies that are shaping, in this case, pop culture. So I imagine that people are going to have the same kind of reaction towards Andreessen Horowitz's blog or Coinbase's blog. Because what's the point of just reading PR? Like who wants to just read PR? I just I don't see the audience for it. I feel like a lot of people will, even though you didn't state, you know, the actual website, I think a lot of people will kind of resonate with that

sentiment and the feeling that so much of what we read when it comes to these topics, whether it's media, and you know, even when it comes to tech, in many cases, just feels like reworded PR. But I wanted to shift a little bit to go back to something that you said before, you know, you said that you looked at the history of media as well. And that comes through in the op ed that you wrote for Business Insider in April as well. And so I was curious, you know, it's nothing new for wealthy people to be involved in media, and to want to kind of shape the narratives that people see, right, to influence public opinion. You know, Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post, and that is very different from, say, what Marc Andreessen is trying to do with his

investments. But do you see the, I guess, Andreessen approach and the approach to some of these other figures in Silicon Valley as distinct from, you know, the more traditional means of buying newspapers and cable channels? Or do you think that this is just kind of an extension of this broader, you know, desire of people who have power to influence public opinion? I think that it is an extension of people with power trying to shape public opinion, but that it is being done in a particularly Silicon Valley kind of way. And that the way that these guys see the world and the way that they kind of interact with the world is that they reshape industries through. And again,

you know, I'm using their word. I just want people to know that I'm not, I don't like necessarily endorse this interpretation, and again, I'm using their word. I just want people to know that I'm not, I don't necessarily endorse this interpretation, but they're disrupting the industry, right? And also because they're venture capital firms, they're also stripping things down to what they consider most efficient. And so the difference between someone like Andreessen or someone like Peter Thiel or any one of these kind of tech guys that just wants to kind of destroy and rebuild the media, the difference between them and somebody

like Bezos, who is in tech, but his business is different. They're both in tech and they're both kind of involved in kind of destroying and rebuilding industries. But Amazon is just not... I don't really consider Amazon to be comparable to kind of the venture capital stuff that Andreessen does, or at least not exactly the same, because Amazon is a conglomerate. And they're just trying to replace the marketplace. While Andreessen Horowitz and Teal are kind of more, I guess, for lack of a better word, agile, maybe.

They're doing a whole bunch of different stuff and of like tearing down little bits of industry here and there, in hopes of kind of triggering domino effects. Anyway, this is a total digression. But what I'm trying to say is that his way of shaping media coverage is to buy the Washington Post and then to put a ton of money into it, even though it's a losing proposition, because he realizes that the PR effect of kind of, quote unquote, resurrecting this media institution, this venerable institution and turning it into, I mean, you know, Washington Post had a lot of money thrown into it under Bezos. And obviously not all of that has been good. Obviously, you know, the coverage of Amazon, for obvious reasons, leaves a lot to be desired. But, you know, these resources have helped it to do some important coverage of some topics. So that's like one specific way of doing it. But

then, you know, there are these other kind of disruptive way of approaching the media industry like these venture capitalists are doing to just kind of slash and burn and then kind of reset things as PR. I think it shows what their approach is, which, you know, their approach is to kind of, you know, strip down and replace things. But also, I think that it shows that I think Bezos has a better grip on what a long term game is here, in that he can pour tons and tons of money into the Washington Post, which with that cash infusion is just going to keep going for decades, least, if not another 100 years, while something like Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Substack or Clubhouse, something like that is like, I mean, who knows, like maybe Facebook will

be around in 100 years, but I don't think so. There are just some things that are institutions and some things that aren't. And I have a hard time seeing social media as that. And so it's just two different approaches to it. And, you know, I just kind of question if the venture capital is the right one. Yeah, you know, I think that makes a lot of sense, though. And I think drawing that distinction between, you know, what the VCs and what someone like Jeff Bezos is doing, I think provides a really interesting distinction as we try to investigate this further in the future, try to better understand, you know, what these powerful individuals are really trying to do with media and what their goals are. You know, Owen, I really appreciate you taking the time today to discuss what is going on with

these investments and what the VCs are trying to do in the media space. So thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Owen Higgins is a freelance journalist and writes under The Flashpoint on Substack, and you can find a link to that in the show notes. You can also follow Owen on Twitter at at Owen Higgins underscore. You can follow me at at PowerSmarks, and you can follow the show at at TechWon'tSaveUs. TechWon'tSaveUs is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at HarbingerMediaNetwork.com.

And if you want to support the work that I put into making this show every week, you can go to Patreon.com slash TechWon't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.