The deeper claim is philosophical. Torenberg argues there is no such thing as unmediated human existence—and there never was. “From the beginning of history, we’ve used technology to mediate between ourselves and the world,” he writes. Domesticating horses, inventing currency, building governments—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: “Even real life is not ‘real life.’”
In a follow-up email to Fortune, Torenberg refined the philosophical claim. Mediating attention and perception, he noted, is not unique to the internet—governments, currency, organized religion, and even horses all did that in their own ways. “If you believe that language is partly a technology, rather than an entirely in-built aspect of the human animal,” he added, “then it would certainly count as well.” What makes the internet distinct isn’t the fact of mediation but its scale and what he called its “bespokeness”—the degree to which a person can lose themselves in a fully personalized experience. It is that combination, he argued, that makes the online/offline dichotomy the real illusion, not the internet’s claim to be real life.
Tabarrok thanked Anthropic’s 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’s 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.
The loom is, in other words, a perfect illustration of Torenberg’s mediating-layer argument. It didn’t replace the weaver’s embodied existence—it inserted itself between the weaver’s skill and the finished cloth, restructuring what “weaving” meant and who could do it. Tabarrok argues that programmable looms brought patterned 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’s argument, the internet has done the same thing to nearly every domain of human activity, at incomparably greater scale.
Not everyone will accept the leap from “the internet shapes everything” to “the internet is real life.” Critics would note that Torenberg conflates influence with identity: A hammer shapes a house without being the house. Embodied experience—grief, illness, hunger, the irreducible fact of a body—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.
What makes the essay more than a cultural argument is the economic framework it implies—one that maps onto three questions economists are urgently asking about the AI economy.
Torenberg was careful to note, however, that MTS is formally a separate entity—a16z is a minority investor alongside several other individuals and organizations. He pushed back on any suggestion of inherent conflict between being an investor in part of that mediating layer and analyzing it honestly. “The only way for MTS to be successful at what it wants to do is for it to be an open and honest channel of information,” he told Fortune. “The information is all out there already, so it’s not as if other people can’t take the idea and run with it.” The theoretical tension, he argued, would be less between investing and philosophizing than between investing and sharing one’s true insights publicly—either because of competitive risk or the temptation to talk about one’s book. He believes transparency serves the ecosystem better.
Who captures the gains? This is where Tabarrok’s 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 up to age 26. The gains finally broadened after 1840, and not through the market, but through the Factory Acts, unions, and the hard construction of countervailing political power. As one commenter on Tabarrok’s post put it: “The gains were real. The distribution of those gains was not inevitable—it was enforced.”
That is the question Torenberg’s essay, by design, leaves unanswered. Torenberg identifies where the new economy is organized. Imas identifies what becomes valuable within it. Tabarrok’s history identifies who decides—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.
Torenberg did not respond to a request for comment.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
