Pandemic Progress
If the Internet Archive is to be believed, Marc Andreessen’s April 2020 coronavirus-driven exhortation It’s Time to Build never actually included that futuristic picture of skyscrapers; it’s in the metadata so that it shows up on social media like Twitter:
What is even more intriguing is when, exactly, the building happened; after all, Andreessen wrote last week in Technology Saves the World:
Last April, I issued a call to our technology industry that it was time to build — and I am so proud of how we delivered. Please join me in an enthusiastic — virtual! — round of applause for all of the amazing workers in our spectacular technology industry who made all this possible. The experience of COVID has made crystal clear both how important our technology is to human flourishing, and how well we can deliver. Technology helped save the world.
Andreessen’s new essay was published on Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) much-ballyhooed new media property Future; you will recall much of the media establishment losing its mind over the announcement in January; I argued in Publishing is Back to the Future that the announcement seemed to be part of a much larger shift in media from a world of scarcity, where newspapers were profitable thanks to geographic monopolies, to one of abundance, where publications succeeded based on their ability to attract audiences who could visit any website on the Internet:
