Balaji on How Tech Truly Wins Media

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

We want to build Googles and Facebooks and AI and giant companies, giant cryptocurrencies and now internet communities. What they want to do is they want to exert authority over others. What is the reason for the hostility between media and tech? So for them, the best thing they can do is to put a man out of work. And for us, the best thing we can do is we can put a man on the move.

Erik Torenberg (0:24)

Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Balaji Srinivasan, entrepreneur, investor, and author of The Network State, to talk about one of our longest running shared topics, the conflict between tech and legacy media. We get into the rise of Go Direct, the financial collapse of journalism, the media's political capture, and how crypto and AI might offer a path to rebuild trust, on chain, and on our own terms. Balaji calls for a total rethink of what truth infrastructure looks like and why tech needs to play offense. Let's get into it. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. Please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Balaji, another day, another journal hit piece. We were sort of talking offline about Mark and Ben's Evolution of Media episode. And let me just more broadly reflect, you know I've been friends and collaborators for the last 10 years. And one of the topics we've spent a lot of time talking about is the media. Sort of the state of the media, what needs to be fixed about the media, and how to do that. And we, with your leadership, have actually been a part of that trend and that evolution. And so I wanted to take the opportunity to talk to you, kind of reflect about that evolution, and talk about where we still need to go.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:59)

Yeah. Well, okay. So there's so much I can say on this. I'm going to show one graph that, of course.

Erik Torenberg (2:08)

It wouldn't be a Balaji Podcast if we didn't start with a graph.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:11)

Yes, exactly. This shows that, essentially, newspaper revenue rose to like $70 billion in the year 2000 And then right after the financial crisis, it just suddenly collapsed over the course of like four or five years. And Google went vertical and Facebook went vertical, right? And the thing about this is, this was the internet disrupting blue America. Okay. There's a similar graph for manufacturing that shows China disrupting red America, almost at exactly the same time, right? So just to focus on this one, though, for a second, once you see the internet disrupting blue America, because media is like a core thing for them, this is actually what led to wokeness. Because, you know, you've heard the saying, go woke, go broke, right? Yeah. But in their case, it was actually go broke, go woke. Okay. Not my original coinage, but applied to this graph, it's relatively original because wokeness was, what happened was they just fell off a cliff like this. And from 2008 to 2012, tech was just part of the Democrat Party. It was like, you know, Steve Jobs is there. And there's actually this article from 2012 on the Atlantic, like the nerds go marching in with tech helping to reelect Obama. And Facebook was helping Obama. Yeah, exactly. All that stuff was basically solidly on the Democrat side up until 2012 After the 2012 election, right after Obama's inauguration, you can date it to right after that. Because even in 2012, like New York media and so on was saying, there's no such thing as a brogrammer.

You can Google that article. So in 2012, tech was part of the coalition, so there's no reason to attack them. After the inauguration in 2013, and it's literally that spring and summer, the knives came out and media started attacking tech. There are these articles, would you just look at all these rich people, whereas actually in Slate, that was before they got radicalized. They're saying, it's actually bad to attack people just for the sake of being rich. It was before all media had updated to actually tech is our enemy now, right? But unless you understand the economics of it, I don't think one can understand why the journal suddenly went crazy. Now, the thing is, we're now in 2025, right? It is now 17 years after the collapse in media revenue, right? So somebody who was born then, who was 18 years old, you're playing like multiplayer video games, like Quake or whatever, you know, all the new stuff, you know, MOBAs, right? You can get spawned into the middle of something where everybody's shooting at each other, right? That's what like the Gen Z kid is today. Okay, so for the structure of someone who's 18 years old, the war with the journos has basically been a feature of their entire existence, okay? But it actually wasn't like that because in the 90s and the 2000s, the journos were secure enough in their economic position because you could write like four or six articles for Time magazine a year and get paid a nice salary and travel around the world. Did they kill? Yes, they killed, but they didn't feel the need to kill all the time. It's funny because of these ways I'm putting it, Nellie Bowles actually did a thing for Barry Weiss a few years ago, and it's like learning how not to kill, okay?