In earlier eras, the manifesto was an important organ of radical political and aesthetic movements; prominent examples in the history of the genre include of course those of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, André Breton, or, more recent, the Dogme 95 group. These days, in which radical political ideas of the Left or the Right have only recently begun to become mainstream again, it is unsurprising that the manifesto seems to be a historical relic.

But the genre received a new entry with Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” published last October on the website of Andreessen Horowitz, perhaps the very bluest of Silicon Valley’s blue-chip venture capital firms. That apparently radical manifestos are now being produced by billionaire technocapitalists might be cause for alarm among our nineteenth- and twentieth-century ancestors. But it really shouldn’t surprise us, at least those who pay attention to the kind of rhetoric coming regularly from Sand Hill Road and its environs. Hardly content with the accumulation of fortunes unprecedented in history and their resulting political power, a small number of our new ruling overlords clearly want to be taken seriously as thinkers, too.

Perhaps the most prominent example of this new phenomenon of the “philosopher-tycoon” is Andreessen, Silicon Valley’s “chief ideologist.” His manifesto has provoked many responses from the tech and business press — much of it spot on, almost all of it negative. But so far there’s been little comment on the intellectual forebears of Andreessen’s manifesto. Examining the history of the ideas that Andreessen is trying to pass off as novel insights for the digital age demonstrates that his manifesto mines a familiar repository of right-wing tropes.