"With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later"
About this Quote
There’s a quiet victory lap baked into Andreessen’s sentence: the future didn’t just arrive, it arrived on his timeline. The syntax does the persuading. Start-up costs drop, markets expand, and the “result” becomes inevitable - a neat causal chain that turns messy economic history into engineering logic. It’s the entrepreneur’s favorite genre: progress as physics.
The phrase “fully digitally wired” carries the subtext of completion, like a global construction project finally finished. It reframes digitization not as a contested social transformation but as infrastructure destiny. That matters because it smuggles in a value judgment: wiring is good, wiring is modern, wiring is what serious economies do. The people who get rewired - workers, regulators, small businesses, entire communities - vanish behind the satisfying click of a network coming online.
Calling it “the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s” is both credential and absolution. Andreessen, a defining figure of that era’s web optimism, positions himself as witness and inheritor: the dreamers were right, they were just early. “Finally delivered” is telling; it borrows the language of shipping product. The world becomes the long-awaited release.
The context is a post-2008, post-smartphone, cloud-and-platform economy where “lower start-up costs” (open-source software, cheap compute, app stores) really did compress the distance between idea and scale - while also concentrating power in a few gatekeepers. The line celebrates connectivity; it also quietly normalizes the bargain: to be “fully wired” is to be fully legible, measurable, and monetizable.
The phrase “fully digitally wired” carries the subtext of completion, like a global construction project finally finished. It reframes digitization not as a contested social transformation but as infrastructure destiny. That matters because it smuggles in a value judgment: wiring is good, wiring is modern, wiring is what serious economies do. The people who get rewired - workers, regulators, small businesses, entire communities - vanish behind the satisfying click of a network coming online.
Calling it “the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s” is both credential and absolution. Andreessen, a defining figure of that era’s web optimism, positions himself as witness and inheritor: the dreamers were right, they were just early. “Finally delivered” is telling; it borrows the language of shipping product. The world becomes the long-awaited release.
The context is a post-2008, post-smartphone, cloud-and-platform economy where “lower start-up costs” (open-source software, cheap compute, app stores) really did compress the distance between idea and scale - while also concentrating power in a few gatekeepers. The line celebrates connectivity; it also quietly normalizes the bargain: to be “fully wired” is to be fully legible, measurable, and monetizable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|
More Quotes by Marc
Add to List
