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The phrase \u201ctouch grass\u201d has become the internet\u2019s way of telling someone to log off and rejoin the real world. Erik Torenberg, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, thinks the phrase has it exactly backward \u2014 and that getting the philosophy right has enormous economic consequences.<\/p>\n
In a new essay published through a16z, Torenberg makes a sweeping argument: the internet isn\u2019t encroaching on real life. It has\u00a0become\u00a0real life. And what looks like a cultural provocation is, on closer reading, a business thesis about where value will be created in an economy being remade by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe internet is real life,\u201d Torenberg writes. \u201cAnd navigating life means navigating the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Upstream of everything<\/p>\n
The evidence Torenberg marshals ranges across culture, politics, language, and media. News now \u201cexists to summarize things that have already happened online.\u201d Music is being restructured by TikTok\u2019s 15-second clip format, the way radio once defined the verse-chorus arrangement. Politicians are fluent in meme-speak \u2014 J.D. Vance discouraging \u201cblackpilling\u201d \u2014 because their staffers and constituencies are shaped by internet discourse. Even language no longer merely spreads through the internet: it\u00a0originates\u00a0there.<\/p>\n
The deeper claim is philosophical. Torenberg argues there is no such thing as an unmediated human existence \u2014 and never was. \u201cFrom the beginning of history, we\u2019ve used technology to mediate between ourselves and the world,\u201d he writes. Domesticating horses, inventing currency, building governments \u2014 each was a mediating layer between humanity and raw nature. The internet is simply the newest and most expansive version of that ancient process, humans learning to interface with technology. \u201cEven real life is not \u2018real life.’\u201d<\/p>\n
A historical echo<\/p>\n
It is a thesis that finds an unlikely illustration in a separate essay published the same week by George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok. Writing on his blog\u00a0Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok makes the increasingly familiar argument for the AI age that the Luddites \u2014 famous for smashing looms in early 19th-century England \u2014 were, in a sense, the first people to attack AI. But unlike most, he links the loom to its unlikely descendant: the computer.<\/p>\n
The Jacquard loom, introduced in France around 1805, used a chain of punched cards to control weaving patterns, a design that Charles Babbage borrowed directly for his Analytical Engine and that eventually traced a line to the modern computer. He quotes from Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and, many think, the world\u2019s first computer programmer, roughly 100 years before computers existed: \u201cThe Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tabarrok thanked Anthropic\u2019s Claude for assistance in pulling his post on the Luddites together, and he clarified to Fortune that he was familiar with the link between the loom and Babbage\u2019s Analytical Engine, but Claude helped him connect more dots: Manchester, the epicenter of both the Industrial Revolution and many Luddite riots, was also home of the Manchester Mark 1, the first electronic stored-program computer, where Alan Turing, father of modern computing, was hired to program it.<\/p>\n
The loom is, in other words, a perfect illustration of Torenberg\u2019s mediating-layer argument. It didn\u2019t replace the weaver\u2019s embodied existence \u2014 it inserted itself between the weaver\u2019s skill and the finished cloth, restructuring what \u201cweaving\u201d meant and who could do it. Tabarrok argues that \u201cprogrammable looms brought\u00a0patterned clothes to the masses, surely a good thing in the long run, economically speaking, but surely also with some short-term pain during the transition to the new interface. Extending this to Torenberg\u2019s argument, the internet has done the same thing to nearly every domain of human activity, at incomparably greater scale.<\/p>\n
To be sure<\/p>\n
Not everyone will accept the leap from \u201cthe internet shapes everything\u201d to \u201cthe internet\u00a0is\u00a0real life.\u201d Critics would note that Torenberg conflates influence with identity: a hammer shapes a house without being the house. Embodied experience \u2014 grief, illness, hunger, the irreducible fact of a body \u2014 still refuses to fully migrate online. The danger in collapsing the distinction is that decisions get made based on what is loud and visible in a feed rather than what is true in aggregate human experience.<\/p>\n
Torenberg anticipates the objection, and his response is pointed: even telling someone to \u201ctouch grass\u201d is itself internet-native language. The critics, he argues, have already proven his point: \u201cWhen someone tells you that you are \u2018extremely online,\u2019 or need to \u2018touch grass,\u2019 they are\u2013intentionally or not\u2013confessing that\u00a0they too\u00a0have had their brain colonized by internet cliches.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where, what, and who<\/p>\n
What makes the essay more than a cultural argument is the economic framework it implies \u2014 one that maps onto three questions economists are urgently asking about the AI economy.<\/p>\n
Where\u00a0is the new economy organized? Torenberg\u2019s answer is unambiguous: the internet is now the primary mediating layer through which all experience, culture, and meaning flows. The business that helps people navigate that layer becomes critical infrastructure. That is the explicit bet behind\u00a0Monitoring the Situation, the live online news channel a16z is backing as a direct extension of Torenberg\u2019s thesis.<\/p>\n
What\u00a0becomes scarce within that layer? University of Chicago behavioral economist Alex Imas has made the complementary argument: as AI commoditizes information, content, and cognitive labor, what becomes economically valuable is the relational layer \u2014 the things with an irreducibly human element. His \u201crelational sector\u201d thesis holds that tomorrow\u2019s middle-class consumption patterns will resemble those of the wealthy today, with people paying for human connection the way only the rich currently do. As he told Fortune recently, \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of jobs right now that have a relational component, which will become relational jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is Torenberg\u2019s cultural argument translated directly into labor economics: if AI is commoditizing everything automatable within the internet\u2019s mediating layer, then what\u2019s scarce is authentic human navigation of that layer \u2014 precisely what Torenberg\u2019s media network is selling.<\/p>\n
Who\u00a0captures the gains? This is where Tabarrok\u2019s Luddite analogy cuts. The Luddites lost, he writes, not simply because programmable looms were better, but because the British military violently suppressed them and Parliament made frame-breaking a capital crime. As Tabarrok has separately noted, real British wages were flat from 1780 to 1840 while output per worker doubled; life expectancy in 1840s Manchester was 26. The gains finally broadened after 1840, and not through the market \u2014 they came through the Factory Acts, unions, and the hard construction of countervailing political power. As one commenter on Tabarrok\u2019s post put it: \u201cThe gains were real. The distribution of those gains was not inevitable \u2014 it was enforced.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first thing that people think about when they think about reducing work is unemployment,\u201d\u00a0Alex Tabarrok\u00a0recently told\u00a0Fortune. \u201cBut reducing work could mean, you know, a shorter work week. It could mean a longer retirement, a longer childhood, more holidays.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is the question Torenberg\u2019s essay, by design, leaves unanswered. Torenberg identifies\u00a0where\u00a0the new economy is organized. Imas identifies\u00a0what\u00a0becomes valuable within it. Tabarrok\u2019s history identifies\u00a0who\u00a0decides \u2014 and warns that the answer has never been determined by markets alone. If the internet is real life, and a16z holds significant infrastructure around how the internet-as-real-life is understood, the distribution question becomes pointed in ways that no amount of philosophical elegance can dissolve.<\/p>\n
Torenberg did not respond to a request for comment. <\/p>\n
For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n
#internet #isnt #real #life #top #real #life #a16z #philosophy #investment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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