In the grand tradition of high-speed internet discourse, we have reached the inevitable event horizon where tech journalists stop criticizing software and start questioning the existence of the human soul. The latest target? Marc Andreessen. The diagnosis? He’s a “philosophical zombie.”

According to the thinkers at *The Verge*, Andreessen is the living embodiment of David Chalmers’ famous thought experiment: a creature that looks like a human, acts like a human, and writes 5,000-word manifestos like a human, but lacks that special, sparkly “internal life” we’ve all agreed is the baseline for being a “real boy.”

First, let’s address the sheer intellectual bravery it takes to suggest that a man who helped build the first widely used web browser (Mosaic) and has been arguably the most vocal person on the internet for three decades has “nothing going on upstairs.” It’s a bold claim to make about someone who spends his free time penning “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Usually, when someone lacks an inner life, they take up golf or watch *The Masked Singer*. They don’t generally attempt to re-engineer the global economy through venture capital and high-octane Twitter threads.

The article assumes that because Andreessen’s logic is cold, hyper-rational, and relentlessly focused on accelerationism, he must be devoid of *qualia*—the subjective experience of “what it is like” to be. It’s the ultimate “I’m more empathetic than you” flex. If you don’t share the author’s specific brand of existential dread regarding AI, you must be a hollow shell. It’s a convenient way to win an argument: you can’t debate a zombie, after all. You can only bury them in a shallow grave of snarky metaphors.

Furthermore, the piece suggests that Silicon Valley has “invented” this state of being. This is a fascinating bit of historical revisionism. Stoicism has existed since the 3rd century BC, and people have been calling wealthy industrialists “soulless” since the first steam engine emitted its first puff of soot. Claiming Andreessen is a “new innovation” in zombie-ism is like claiming Elon Musk invented the tunnel. It’s an old concept with a shiny, venture-backed PR firm.

The irony here is thicker than the margins on a SaaS contract. The author uses David Chalmers—a philosopher who literally deals in the “hard problem of consciousness”—to suggest that Andreessen is a hollow automaton. Yet, the hallmark of the philosophical zombie is that they are *indistinguishable* from a conscious person. If Andreessen is functionally identical to a human with a soul, then for all intents and purposes, he *is* one. That’s the whole point of the thought experiment! You can’t “prove” he’s a zombie any more than he can prove the author isn’t a complex LLM trained exclusively on Brooklyn-based indie zines and leftover bitterness from the 2010s.

Let’s be real: calling a tech mogul a P-zombie is just the 2024 version of calling your boss a “suit.” It’s a way to dehumanize someone whose worldview is so alien to your own that you’d rather believe they are a biological glitch than admit they simply have different priorities—like, say, building the future instead of writing about why the future is scary.

If Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie, he’s the most productive one in history. He’s out there funding the next generation of nuclear fission and AI while the rest of us are busy debating whether he feels the “redness of a rose” or the “bitterness of a poorly brewed pour-over.” If this is what being a zombie looks like—founding Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz—maybe we should all stop “feeling” so much and start optimizing. At the very least, a zombie doesn’t get a headache from reading pretentious philosophy metaphors in tech blogs.