The internet isn’t just like real life, a top VC says—it is real life. For a16z, that’s not a philosophy, it’s an investment

The phrase “touch grass” has become the internet’s 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—and that getting the philosophy right has enormous economic consequences.

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In a new essay published through a16z, Torenberg makes a sweeping argument: The internet isn’t encroaching on real life. It has become real 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.

“The internet is real life,” Torenberg writes. “And navigating life means navigating the internet.”

Upstream of everything

The evidence Torenberg marshals ranges across culture, politics, language, and media. News now “exists to summarize things that have already happened online.” Music is being restructured by TikTok’s 15-second-clip format, the way radio once defined the verse-chorus arrangement. Politicians are fluent in meme-speak—JD Vance discouraging “blackpilling”—because their staffers and constituencies are shaped by internet discourse. Even language no longer merely spreads through the internet: It originates there.

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.

On the question of whether humanity has reached any equilibrium with this new mediating layer, Torenberg was direct: We haven’t, and may not for some time. He pointed to two forces likely to shape the eventual settlement. The first is cultural: Norms around online speech are still very much in flux. He cited figures like Vice President JD Vance, calling for greater tolerance of aggressive online rhetoric, on the grounds that humans evolved to speak without assuming that their words would be permanently, verbatim recorded for the world to see. The second force is biological. “Some subset of people will get ‘one-shotted’ by technology in a way that prevents them from reproducing,” Torenberg said—citing, as an extreme example, mobile gaming addiction displacing human interaction entirely. He pointed to declining global fertility numbers as one possible signal, suggesting that many people simply find the possibilities the internet has opened up more compelling than starting a family, and that “we’ll see strong selection against whatever genes influence those preferences before we reach equilibrium.” His historical analogy was pointed: “That’s the story of humanity. The Yamnaya’s domestication of the horse didn’t go great for early European farmers.”

A historical echo

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, Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok makes the increasingly familiar argument for the AI age that the Luddites—famous for smashing looms in early 19th-century England—were, in a sense, the first people to attack AI. But unlike most, he links the loom to its unlikely descendant: the computer.

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’s first computer programmer, roughly 100 years before computers existed: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

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