Mark Andreessen’s Dangerous Dorm Room Eugenics

February 2, 2025 [updated April 12, 2025]

Seeking to cement their status, a new generation of “super geniuses” is reanimating a pseudoscience that, when last deployed, helped pave a path to the Holocaust.

After co-authoring the Mosaic web browser and co-founding and flipping Netscape, Marc Andreessen converted millions into billions through 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 [1] brothers, believes a transhuman utopia, [2] or, more accurately, a near utopia, [3] is the destiny of our species, and that AI is our vehicle. [4] 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 him start having more children.

It’s all old wine in new bottles.

Calls for an IQ-based meritocracy coupled with calls for the upper classes to have more children are, despite Andreessen’s vehement protests to the contrary, nothing but warmed-over eugenics, a bundle of reactionary supposedly science-based self-justifications concocted by the wealthy and implemented by those seeking their favor. It is a cut-and-paste ideology spit out as if an AI was set to plagiarize all the biology textbooks, marriage manuals, popular magazine articles, and other works of reproductive apocalypticism published across the twentieth century.

Though easy to mock, Andreessen’s neo-eugenic ideology is incredibly dangerous. When last ascendent, it justified the forced sterilization of millions of people and the murder of millions more. Even if we’re not heading toward another Holocaust (and the jury is still out), the very idea of dividing human populations into the gifted, intelligent, and favored on one side, and the “lucky” beneficiaries the gifted’s technological brilliance on the other, will, at the very least, lead to ongoing exploitation and the continued stunting of human potential. [5]

PROTESTS TO THE CONTRARY

Andreessen, despite his faith in gene-influenced social superiority and the need to selectively breed more intelligent humans, insists he is not a eugenicist, and he thinks he has found a very clever way to make that case. He explained it all during his appearance in 2022 on the Joe Rogan podcast.

There’s a long history in elite Western thinking about this question of whether there should be kids, who has kids. A hundred years ago, all the smartest people were very into eugenics. And then later on that became something called population control. And then in the ‘70s it became something called degrowth. And now we call it environmentalism and we basically say as a result, human beings are bad for the planet, not good for the planet. [6]

Do you get that? If modern environmentalism is anti-growth and anti-natalist, and Andreessen is pro-growth and pro-natalist, he cannot be a eugenicist. But it doesn’t take a super genius to spot the problem. It’s called the fallacy of the antecedent. If not A, then not B. If not a cat, then not a dog. If not a neo-Malthusian population control advocate, then not a Nazi.

A favorite story of Andreessen’s is of the famous bet between biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, and economist Julian Simon,  [7] author of The Ultimate Resource. Ehrlich was forced to pay up when the price of five commodities – copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten – did not increase in inflation-adjusted dollars over a 10-year period as he wagered they would. For Simon, this suggested that Ehrlich’s catastrophism was more science fiction than science, an updated variant of Malthusian eschatology. Simon made his career by preaching, puckishly, that whatever apocalyptists think, the opposite is probably the truth. Fear of industrial pollution was nothing more than a moral panic. Lead exposure didn’t lead to a decrease in IQ. More people meant more human interactions, leading to more creativity and the development of less harmful technologies.

Actually, on that last point, a case can be made, as the great Marston Bates, once a population alarmist himself, surprisingly concluded. And who knows, maybe Woody Allen’s joke in Sleeper that future scientists would find cigarette smoking the healthiest activity people can partake in, might yet be found correct.

But Andreessen bundles Simon’s ideas with his own Modern Library v2.0 list. In a series of Superman-level logical leaps, he claims in succession: cultural evolution is progressive, technology is the driver of progress, technological innovation is the product of an intellectually superior meritocracy, and salvation lies in unleashing that meritocracy so that it can spread of human consciousness and beneficent intelligence to the stars.

Powering Andreessen’s utopianism is his priestly knowledge of AI, or at least the AI that is sure to emerge, sometime, soon (assuming bureaucrats or the mob don’t get in the way). To highlight this dangerous silliness, it is illustrative to compare the fantastical (and fascistic) claims made by today’s supposed masters of AI to the grossly exaggerated claims made by science popularizers and social theorists upon the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics.

When rediscovered at the dawn of the twentieth century, biologists like Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor (ERO), along with virtually every life scientist who came of age in the century’s first two decades, were pitching their knowledge (or their most certainly soon-to-be acquired knowledge) as the answer to everything, every social ill, every racial division, every class hierarchy. By crediting “good genes” for the social advantages enjoyed by the wealthy and high status, and “bad genes” for everything from alcoholism to criminality to sea-faringness to nomadism to shiftlessness, eugnicists could salve the social anxieties of the rich and powerful, and not incidentally, access major donor dollars, the lifeblood of emerging advanced degree-granting institutions like Johns Hopkins, Clark University, and Stanford.

EUGENICS AND POPULATION CONTROL: A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY

Andreessen wants us to believe that “de-growth” has been eugenics’ throughline. But it is not de-growth that connects eugenicists across time. Eugenicists have always tapped a fear among those in power that their power was slipping, that “natural evolutionary progress” was being stymied by political meddling, and that proactive measures were necessary to counter these trends.

In fairness, Andreessen is correct in stating that the population control movement was an outgrowth of the eugenics movement. However, he is not correct in stating that population control, bundled with degrowth or otherwise, was central to eugenic ideology, at least not before the 1950s, and never as it related to wealthy white people. Yes, some eugenicists did worry about a future day when either natural physical limits or imposed political limits would flatten the population growth curve. But, prior to World War II, they rarely worried about resource exhaustion, or the population trends of rest of the world for that matter. Instead, they worried about immigration from countries of “poor stock,” Eastern Europe and the Southern Mediterranean mostly, and differential reproduction, the idea that lower classes would outbreed and swamp the upper classes. The thinking went if there were indeed limits to total global population, the “problems” of immigration and differential reproduction would need to be addressed before the country got full. This idea was expressed clearly by the person who coined the word eugenics in 1870, Sir Francis Galton, in his foundational text, Hereditary Genius:

The time may hereafter arrive, in far distant years, when the population of the earth shall be kept strictly within the bounds of number and suitability of race, as the sheep on a well-ordered moor or the plants in an orchard-house; in the meantime, let us do what we can to encourage the multiplication of the races best fitted to invent and conform to a high and generous civilization … (357).

Interestingly, Galton went on to suggest that Britain should not blanketly exclude immigrants out of fear that all new immigrants would require state support but should allow immigration by those who could contribute to the advance of British civilization. Elon Musk attempts to make the same case when he argues in favor of H-1B visas. But it has proven politically impossible in Western cultures, at least to date, to both claim people of supposed merit are being outbred by those of lower merit without that argument intersecting racist ideologies. For example, in the U.S., Galton’s ideas were instrumentalized by the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which, following the racial prejudices of its day, continued a ban on most immigration from Asia while enacting severe restrictions on immigration from all countries except Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Nordic states.

But while eugenicists like Madison Grant were able to successfully lobby Congress and get immigration to the U.S. restricted and “solve” half the eugenic problem, domestic reproductive management, the key according to eugenicists for addressing the drop in fertility within the upper classes, proved a more difficult issue. In The Fruit of the Family Tree (1924), Albert Wiggam wrote, “Thousands of women are shouting “birthcontrol” to-day simply because they do not want to play the game of carrying on this vast scheme of organic evolution toward a happier and better race.” Birth control, it was worried, would give women agency and allow them to enjoy sex without consequences, and poor would be too ignorant to follow whatever practice was necessary to prevent conception anyway. At the same time, it was proving difficult to convince upper-class women, who were enjoying the liberating sisterhood of higher education, to recommit to reproductive service.

Eugenics as a science lost much of its steam by the late 1930s, as it proved a dry well for research. The so-called science of “racial betterment” advanced by Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin of the ERO could show no results, and the ERO, originally funded by the E. H. Harriman fortune via a grant from Mary Harriman, and later the Carnegie Institution, closed in 1939 after all foundation funding was pulled. Importantly, a new anthropology, established by Franz Boas, advanced by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, and popularized by Ashley Montegu, challenged the reality of racial categorizations central to the eugenics mission.

There was a concerted attempt by more socially liberal hereditarians in the 1930s, Julian Huxley (co-coiner of the term ‘transhumanism’) [8] chief among them, to frame a “reform eugenics,” suggesting eugenic management should still be a long-term goal, but that a social “leveling up” would first be required if one were to identify the truly genetically favored. Popular science enthusiast Amram Scheinfeld’s 1939 You and Heredity, (see related article) along with Frederick Osborn’s 1940 Preface to Eugenics, helped establish an ideological foundation upon which socially liberal biologists like Huxley, Bentley Glass, and Hermann Muller could rebuild their defense of eugenics after the “setback” of the very public “misapplication” of its principals by Germany and other fascist regimes. Scheinfeld offered a best-selling “cake and eat it too” philosophy – you can’t judge the individual, but you can generally judge the group – offering the slippery rationalization Osborn, Glass, and others would employ to defend biology-based social management policies over the next three decades.

World War II did change things. [9] To returning soldiers and the public that had followed their deployments via radio, newsreels, and newsprint, the world suddenly seemed a lot smaller, and, for the first time, notably finite. Two books published in 1948, William Vogt’s The Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet, raised the alarm about finite resources. Embraced within a general Cold War panic, these writers demonstrated how ecology, a science previously considered soft and vaguely feminine, could be masculinized, instrumentalized, and, critically, attract foundation support.

The population threat, however, was not considered a domestic problem. The threat, identified most directly by Dixie Cup magnate and pamphleteer, Hugh Moore, was the stress of growing populations in poorer, hungrier, and browner countries. Population-exacerbated poverty would lead to social unrest, and social unrest would drive people toward communism. Moore predicted that if global sterilization efforts were not implemented by the U.S. government and international foundations, two-thirds of the world would “fall” into the Soviet Union and China’s sphere of influence by 1977.

The 1960s and early 1970s were the holocaust years of foundation-funded sterilization, with governments in India, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and Honduras accepting foreign assistance to coercively sterilize millions of men and women. [10]

But then something funny happened. A reassessment of progressionist assumptions swept across biology, anthropology, economics, and the social sciences in general, driven by a strengthening in the feminist critique. It turned out that second-wave feminism put the first real nails in the eugenic coffin by promoting personal empowerment, not technology (which may partially explain the “scorn for women” expressed by so many tech-bros). This is not to say the green movement is not still infected to a degree by neo-eugenic ideology, particularly when it targets the populous poor as a dangerous source of future carbon. But there are many strong voices that say the debate over population control should be erased from the movement’s agenda, as it is inexorably entangled with racism, classism, sexism, and other conservative prejudices. [11]

PRONATIALISM, THEN AND NOW

“The American is beginning to suspect that some of our racial immigration is of low racial value. Just as there are families on a low mental level, so there may be peoples on a low mental level.
– Samuel Jackson Holmes, professor of zoology at the University of California, 1923 [12]

“Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can.”
– Marc Andreessen, 2023 [13]

Marc Andreessen wants to see more babies born. So does J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, pronatalist influencers Hannah Neeleman and Malcolm and Simone Collins, Peter Thiel (the not-so-secret money behind the Collins’s pronatalist.org), most “Trad Wives,” the current U.S. Secretary of Transportation (as of February 2025), virtually all Christian Nationalists, and if we want to add in a little guilt by association, the late child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. On Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, Andreessen, again using his opposite logic, stated, “Right now there’s a movement afoot among the elites in our country that basically says anybody having kids is a bad idea, including having elites have kids is a bad idea because of climate.” As is typical, he cited no sources and offered zero nuance. Elon Musk, in a tweet announcing the birth of his 12th child, X Æ A-Xii, wrote, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” But of course, globally, there is no collapsing birth rate. Yes, the rate of growth is moderating, but the global population is still increasing. So, the concern doesn’t seem to be about a general population decline, but a decline in birth rates among those Andreessen and his fellow techno-bros judge meritorious.

Of course, if one truly believed that intellectual superiority was not linked to race or ethnicity but instead was simply a genetic dice roll at birth, the obvious solution to any country’s “underpopulation problem” would be to lower barriers to immigration and offer everyone an education. Instead, we get the same old line that the “best” – defined as those who have made the most money and anyone who looks like them – must get to work and reproduce. For men like Musk and Epstein, this means impregnating as many women who will accept their “gifts” as possible. For others, it means the same positive eugenics marketing and coercion that resulted in the ideal suburban 7-person cis-gender household of 1960 [14] and demonized, often criminalized, everyone else.

EPILOGUE

So what happens when AI has mined all published creativity and recursively turned that treasure into intellectual mush and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) proves a dry well like genetic essentialism before it? If history is any guide, Andreessen, Musk, and Theil, following the path of Julian Huxley, Hermann Muller, Frederick Osborn, and others, will adjust their rationalizations and move the goal posts. But there is a differential danger. While the last generation of eugenicists faded as their grants and book royalties dried up, this generation has accumulated an obscene level of independent wealth, enough to wreak significant havoc as they attempt to hold back the uncomfortable thought that, just maybe, they aren’t super geniuses after all.

REFERENCES

[1] Gebru, Timnit and Émile P. Torres. “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence.” First Monday. April 1, 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636. (Accessed February 3, 2025); Truthdig “The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares.” Truthdig. June 5, 2023. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/. (Accessed February 2, 2025).

[2] Andreessen, Marc. “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen Horowitz. October 16, 2023. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/. (Accessed February 2, 2025).

[3] Ibid. To quote, “While not Utopian, we believe in what Brad DeLong terms ‘slouching toward Utopia’ – doing the best fallen humanity can do, making things better as we go.”

[4] Ibid. To quote, “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.”

[5] See Substack authored by Jamie Hoerricks, Phd, “Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Oligarchy Manifesto” – https://autside.substack.com/p/marc-andreessens-techno-oligarchy. (Accessed February 2, 2025). Far more clearly (and openly and generously) than this author, Hoerricks confirms and brilliantly critiques Andreessen’s eugenics.

[6] Ongweso, Edward, Jr. “Why Are Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen Obsessed With Birth Rates?” Vice. July 13, 2022.

[7] McAfee, Andrew, Marc Andreessen, and Sonal Chokshi. “The Environment, Capitalism, Technology.” Andreessen Horowitz. October 3, 2019. https://a16z.com/podcast/a16z-podcast-the-environment-capitalism-technology/. (Accessed February 2, 2025).

[8] Taplin, Jonathan. “How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic Reality.” Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/musk-thiel-zuckerberg-andreessen-alternate-autocratic-reality?

[9]The transition from a proudly racist pre-war eugenics to the ultimately unsuccessful post-war attempt to hammer the square peg of eugenics into the round hole racial equality can be tracked by in the changes made to the biology textbook series, Rand McNalley’s Dynamic Biology series. See, Ladouceur, Ronald. “The Day Eugenics Died.” Textbook History. https://textbookhistory.org/the-day-eugenics-died/. (Accessed February 2, 2025).

[10] See, Connelly, Matthew. 2010. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Cambridge, Belknap Press.

[11] The modern debate is captured no place better than the online journal Climate and Capitalism. Of particular note are the articles and commentary of Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College and author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control.

[12] Holmes, Samuel J. 1923. Studies in Evolution and Eugenics, pp. 210-11. New York: Harcourt.

[13] Andreessen, Techno-Optimist Manifesto. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/.

[14] See, Kline, Wendy. 2001. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley: University of California Press.