The Future is here.
After announcing it was getting into the content game earlier this year, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, launched its Future blog this week to counter what it sees as an increasingly hostile media atmosphere for Silicon Valley.
Gone are the days where many journalists would effectively act as propagandists for the industry. There are still fawning founder profiles and articles that read as though they were copy/pasted from company press releases. But now they exist alongside a greater degree of critical, investigative coverage as the workers at these companies are increasingly given a voice to air their concerns — and the bosses don’t like it.
Beyond Future, a16z is funding alternative media like Clubhouse and Substack. Journalist Eoin Higgins argues the driving force behind these investments is to shape media to serve the billionaires’ interests. For the journalists who won’t back down, they’ll unleash the full power of blue-check Silicon Valley elite, along with their horde of admirers, which is exactly what they did to NYT’s Taylor Lorenz, subjecting her to waves of harassment and abuse.
Axios writes that Future’s goal is to “give its investors a reason to be excited and proud of the innovation they’re helping to finance, rather than be embarrassed by it.” It’s a demonstration of how thin-skinned some of the most powerful people in the world truly are.
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