Marc Andreesen: Venture Power Capitalist
From Mosaic Browser, thanks to Al Gore, to the Metaverse, thanks to Nick Clegg, Marc Andreesen 2022 is the new Joseph Kony 2012: The scapegoat complex that justifies anything on the internet
Having decoded the background to the third silent founder of Mosaic Browser, Delon Dotson, in a previous post, and established that Internet Hall of Famer Eric Bina probably wasn’t just a ‘programmer’ because programmers don’t serve terms of active duty, let’s focus on Marc Andreesen: current director of Meta Platforms (Facebook) and general Partner of Andreesen Horowitz (lead investor in Bored Apes Yacht Club).
Marc was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa and then raised, from the age of two, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. According to the official book regarding Jim Clark and Marc Andreesen who founded Mosaic/Netscape as a business concern in 1994, Marc’s father, Lowell, worked for a ‘seed company’ and Marc’s mother, Patricia, worked for Land’s End clothing, which was started as a mail order and catalogue business in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, founded in Chicago, Illinois. This Wisconsin-Illinois connection also tracks well with Marc Andreesen’s formative years: from New Lisbon to the University of Urbana-Champaign. What makes Cedar Falls, Iowa and New Lisbon, Wisconsin unique is that they are both small towns with military airbases. Cedar Falls, Iowa, a town of of 40 000 people, is serviced by Waterloo Regional Airport, which is also US Army airbase and National Guard recruiting center. New Lisbon, Wisconsin is located six miles from Volk Field National Guard Air Base.
Zooming in on Volk Field National Guard Air Base we find it to be home to a branch of the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs, and is also known as Volk Field Combat Readiness Training Center (CRTC), it was assigned CRTC status in 1989 but has also has been a permanent field training site since 1954. It is supported by the Wisconsin National Guard and is the location of the Wisconsin National Guard Museum.
Combat Readiness Training Centers are a relatively new concept in warfare that resulted from the redundancy of conventional warfare after World War Two. Given the realities of modern warfare, and the realities of nuclear weapons, ICBMs, space weaponry, hyper-sonic drone missiles et cetera, conventional war has been rarely fought by NATO unless against women and children in Iraq or donkey farmers in Afghanistan, and even then NATO failed in its stated objectives. Therefore CRTC is the sandbox playground within which the Military Industrial Complex justifies all pork barrel projects and backhanders between congressional representatives and lobbyists and whatnot. The latest CTRC exercise to take place at Volk CTRC was ‘Operation Northern Lightning’ which appears to have involved testing the capabilities of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II (hence the name), a project that has thus far cost the American taxpayer $1.7 trillion over its life-cycle. Thus Volk Field CTRC has been a massive center for military spending since at least 1989.
Prior to 1989, however, the Volk Field Wikipedia page describes that it was put on high alert for signs of sabotage during the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962). This means that Volk Field is not just an important training center, it is a key site with respect to the strategic national defense of the United States of America in a nuclear war. This mean that Volk Field either contains strategic command bunkers, nuclear ICBM silos or acts as a launchpad for aircraft fitted with nuclear weapons or any mixture thereof. This is not the typical Bumblefuck domestic US military base: it is strategically important in numerous ways in terms of survive-ability in a global thermonuclear war and is a key center for proving concept in terms of $trillion scale Military Industrial Complex budgets related to advanced situational awareness, signalling and electronic warfare technology.
Wisconsin had one node in the 1982 ARPANET: the precursor to the internet created by DARPA (then called ARPA) and the Department of Defense to ensure continuity of government and information sharing in the event of nuclear war. ARPANET started in California and Utah in 1969, before expanding to power and academic centers on both coasts with a few inland nodes by 1977.
The ARPANET directory of 1979 appears to contain a coded address for Volk Field, which will have been able to have been relayed by competent signals engineers. Entries like this aren’t a coincidence in address books such as this.
By 1982, The University of Madison, Wisconsin starts to operate its own ARPANET node. This University was at its height when funded by the US Military until the Vietnam War, when the Sterling Hall bombing and the general fall out of the effects of the war took the shine off. The Department of Military Affairs of Wisconsin is split between Madison, Wisconsin and Volk Field CRTC.
The World Economic Forum, of all sources, contained a map of CSNET, the expanded ARPANET,
The CSNET project had three primary components: an email relaying service (Delaware and RAND), a name service (Wisconsin), and TCP/IP-over-X.25 tunneling technology (Purdue). Initial access was with email relaying, through gateways at Delaware and RAND, over dial-up telephone or X.29/X.25 terminal emulation. Eventually CSNET access added TCP/IP, including running over X.25.
X.25 allowed for ARPANET to expand over the standard telecommunications network, and with this technology we can see on the map below that a location called ‘Wisc-IBM’ was added to the CSNET (highlighted in red) in between Madison, Wisconsin and Minneapolis, Minnesota on a PhoneNet connnection (umn-cs). This location can only be Volk Field National Guard Airforce Base: it is the only significant location in that area. In addition to this: IBM developed a ARPANET technology called ‘WISC-Net’, some details of which are still retained by Google (blockchain backup here). WISC-Net appears to be software that was developed by ARPA (DARPA) at the University of Madison, Wisconsin in collaboration with IBM to be licensed institutions and organisations participating in CSNET at IBM rates ($17 000) or academic rates ($500). Thus Marc Andreesen’s trajectory from ‘small town in the middle of nowhere to ‘internships with IBM’ now aligns with a much bigger picture and context.
Fast forward to 1989 and Volk Field is designated as a Combat Readiness Training Center and Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, proposes an information management system on March 12, with the first communication via the HTTP protocol proven in mid-November the same year, by which time, a young Marc Andreesen had just turned 18.
Andreesen interned twice for IBM in Austin, Texas while studying computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which hosts the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Andreesen’s connection to IBM is clear vis-a-vis WISC-Net’s use at Volk Field CRTC, but why Austin, Texas is unclear. The University of Austin, Texas was involved in the founding of United States strategic supercomputing, however, vis-a-vis ‘The Report on the Panel of Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering’ led by Peter D. Lax.
The story then picks back up in 1991, as explained in the previous post on the subject, with Mosaic Browser funded directly from the Gore Bill in 1991. But while I followed Delon’s career afterwards via MP3.com, I didn’t mentioned that in the Marc Andreesen was named as CTO of AOL after AOL purchased Netscape, thus from his ‘humble’ beginnings, Marc would have cashed out big time from the January 2000 $350 billion epic flop of a merger between AOL and Time Warner while the lambs were being led to the slaughter of the subsequent bursting of the Dot Com Bubble by the end of that year. This further acted to cement his power as a Power Capitalist working on behalf of the United States Military Industrial Complex.
Marc Andreesen’s further investment and position on the board of Meta Platforms (Facebook) and his investment in Bored Apes Yacht Club make perfect sense within this context. Hacking the brain stems of users to modify their behavior and selling their data to subvert democracy and to attack whistle-blowers is merely an extension of Marc Andreesen’s basis of power. Not only did Marc get Al Gore to sign off on the beginning of his ascent to power, he hired the toe rag Nick Clegg to justify his vision for the ‘Metaverse’: which is completely horrifying, as I have already explained.
Marc Andreesen has no interest in allowing Web3 to flourish, Web3 implemented properly would erode both his own power and the power of the Military Industrial Complex itself, that they have so carefully crafted together for half a century. The bad news is that memetically engineered Nazi Conspiracy Hyperstitions around Web3 currently suit the Silicon Valley power brokers more than an internet that really works for ordinary people, the good news is that Silicon Valley is losing control of the narrative and that people all around the world are currently building the tools and systems in the Web3 paradigm that will overthrow them.