Max Read in Slate is all a-twitter, asking, “What Is ‘The Current Thing’?”
A vacuous meme? A sly insult? The secret key to the Discourse?
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As is often the case with the memes adopted by the would-be intellectuals of the tech right, Andreessen and his ilk have been treating this silly bit as a grand key to understanding American politics and discourse. Richard Hanania—one of those weird right-wing randos who appear on the scene out of nowhere every few months, suddenly raised to Twitter prominence for some occult algorithmic/dark-money reason that we will never get a good answer about—wrote a long newsletter in which he endorses opposing The Current Thing as a “heuristic”: “I would argue that a probabilistic approach suggests that we should be anti-current thing.” Andreessen, meanwhile, is captivated by it as a description of processes that he sees everywhere:
“[W]ould-be intellectual of the tech right, [Marc] Andreessen” co-authored the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, founded Netscape, and later co-founded legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Slate columnist “Max Read is the author of Read Max, a newsletter about technology and culture, and is a former Gawker and New York magazine editor.”
They’re worried.