Mark Andreessen’s Dangerous Dorm Room Eugenics
After co-authoring the Mosaic web browser and co-founding and flipping Netscape, Marc Andreessen converted millions into billions though the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. In that time, he also become a super-genius, consuming vast quantities of popular science and Ayn Rand-adjacent sociopathy and transmuting it into a power-justifying philosophy. Joining with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a host of other wealthy secondary-source thinkers, Andreessen, along with his TESCREAL brothers, believes a transhuman utopia, or, more accurately, a near utopia, is the destiny of our species, and that AI is our vehicle. But this will only happen, Andreessen warns, if progress is not limited by bureaucratic constraints, particularly those imposed by environmentalists. Oh, also only if smart people like himself start having more children.
In the decades following Reconstruction, a decade-plus (1863-1877) effort by Congress to enfranchise and empower the 4,000,000 formerly enslaved people who resided in those states, American history textbooks, academic histories and popular histories constructed a narrative that provided white citizens absolution by positioning Reconstruction as a “tragic era” of “scalawags” and “ignorant negroes” manipulated by invaders from the North, “carpetbaggers,” who “swarmed” South after the Civil War to pillage and humiliate.
To our Rachel Carson-tuned ears, the word conservation means allowing nature to hold sway, to designate areas as wetlands, protected habitats and forever wild, to be humble and accept that nature is usually smarter than we are. But to biology textbook authors in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, influenced by the eugenic ideas of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and others, conservation meant something else entirely. It meant first, preserving select symbols of American virility, like the redwood tree, the bison, and most importantly, their own “great race,” and second, managing the rest of nature – forests, water resources, wildlife, and soil – so that it could be exploited maximally without collapse.
After a 96-year embargo (thanks, 
A visionary naturalist in the early 1940s on the order of Rachel Carson, by the 1960s, college biology professor Gairdner B. Moment devolved into a reactionary critic of the emerging culture of environmentalism he had helped spawn, and is remembered today as the scientist who wanted grizzly bears eliminated.