The Silicon Valley should save us the gibberish to do good

If you believe the spin, the reason why Andreessen Horowitz - or A16Z - billions of dollars on the chimeric, cryptocola idea of ​​"Web3" puts too much money and does not do enough for the user.

You may be wondering whether one of the greatest risk capital funds of the Silicon Valley tries to tear as much money and power as possible, but no, that's really you you take care.

"My hope is that we through web3. "Facebook, Instagram.. You have found a way to get other people to create their content and basically take all the money," he said.

This is amusing. Isn't A16Z the heart of Big Tech after it has benefited massively from Web2? Is co -founder Marc Andreessen not still on the board of Meta - the company that belongs to both Facebook and Instagram - and does not still have shares worth several million dollars? And in general, it is not about Venture Capital about generating returns? Why does this company - and the technology sector in a broader sense - need to insist on the fact that its authorization to exist will save the world if they are actually simply to earn as much money as possible? Should it be wrong to say that?

Dixon went even further. Web3, he said, would not simply follow the old Google mantra "was not angry"-which was tacitly abandoned a few years ago-because this is dependent on falling people.

to run the Internet on blockchains instead and to introduce new financial incentives in the form of crypto token would actually mean that this idea was installed in the system: "This is a very, very important concept in Web3: 'Can't be angry' instead of 'Don't be angry'."

This is of course an absurd idea, as a quick look at some of the projects shows in which the A16Z cryptofond munds have invested. While Dixon insists that this new vision of the Internet "data is controlled by users", one of his investments, WorldCoin, has collected biometric data from people in developing countries against crypto tokens and was accused of misleading marketing. The CEO of Worldcoin told Buzzfeed News that the company would "improve" communication and marketing.

The extractive practices of a mainstream investment, coinbase, helped the crypto exchange, in 2021 to achieve profits of $ 3.6 billion.

The truth is that the high demands of A16Z are part of a culture in which we all participated. After the financial crisis, we have demonized the "vampire inkfish" banks so that the money earnings were considered ugly and immoral. Keyword young graduates of Business Schools - the boys are most likely to ask for a job with "purpose" - avoid investment banking for the Silicon Valley, which not only offered them free beer and table tennis panels, but also the opportunity to make the feeling of moving something.

"Big Tech said: 'We are better than finance'," says Martin Walker, director of banking and finance at the Center for Evidence Based Management. "They were more socially conscious and you could get everything for free.

Also since the ESG explosion, investors want to find out that they put their money into projects that do good-whether it is true or not, is open.

All of this means that companies spend more of their resources for optics, so that they have less time and money to concentrate on something that could actually be worth. We live in a society that is obsessed with how things appear that there are more than six "flacks" - as my job calls PRS - for every journalist.

By awaiting companies that companies have to tell us that they exist to do good in the world instead of making profit, we make them better in telling ourselves lies. This makes it more difficult to distinguish facts from fictions and thus to account for these companies.

From the giants of Silicon Valley to the fraudsters of the crypto casino, the world of technology should try to deal with ourselves a little more honestly with ourselves and with us. We should allow you to tell ourselves directly - if we do not do this, we are complicit in the development of a culture that does not appreciate the truth and in which the critical border between reality and falsification is increasingly blurred.

jemima.kelly@ft.com