By God, the guano billionaires—they had grit! They had vision! They were the last screaming lunatics with the guts to shovel mountains of bird shit into the cannons of empire and make the world kneel before their stinking altars. And I’ll be damned if I don’t respect them more than that pallid husk of a man, Marc Andreessen, who sits in his Malibu fortress, droning on about innovation while peddling the same warmed-over tech gospel like a televangelist selling eternal salvation.

These guano men—no, these titans of nitrate—knew the score. They didn’t hide behind algorithms and self-congratulatory TED Talks. They fought wars over islands crusted with centuries of seabird droppings, for God’s sake! They carved their fortunes from the hard, white crust of life itself. There’s something primal about that, something raw and ancient. You couldn’t fake it. You had to earn it.

Picture it: swashbuckling Peruvian magnates with bat guano under their nails, sailing the open seas in clunky schooners loaded with enough fertilizer to make the world bloom—or explode. These men didn’t “disrupt” industries with apps. They built empires on filth, on decay, on the grotesque bounty of nature’s digestive tract. And I salute them for it.

Meanwhile, there’s Andreessen, perched atop his throne of venture capital like a bloated owl stuffed with bad ideas. His legacy is a litany of hollow promises: “the internet will set you free!” No, Marc, what you’ve built is a gilded cage, a dystopia where human misery is quantified in clicks and ad impressions. The guano billionaires at least left us something tangible: fertile soil, booming crops, the literal shit of life.

You think you would respect such a… era-breaking, ponzi innovators in a ponzi world? But hell? I’d rather get drunk with a guano birdshit billionaire anytime of the day. The guano billionaires, at least, have the decency to deal in real shit, and you can respect that. But peddling blueprints for burning your money on vaporware. Well the joke’s on you. This guy is a z-list revanchist full of ressentiment — an aristocrat of the digital age, clinging to a past where his brand of “genius” might have meant something. Now he’s just a bitter tech-bro, resenting everyone and throwing tantrums not shaping the world but whining about it.

Sure, guano magnates were bastards—they had to be. But they didn’t sell you a dream of democratized knowledge only to harvest your data like a parasitic leech. No, they sold you a sack of dried bird crap and dared you to complain. And the world thrived because of it!

So yes, I’ll take the guano kings over Silicon Valley’s self-satisfied sycophants any day. At least they smelled like the Earth. At least they worked. And when the final reckoning comes, when Andreessen’s digital empire crumbles into the void, I hope there’s a statue of some forgotten guano tycoon standing tall on a nitrate-streaked island, his gaze fixed on the horizon. A true monument to madness and muck—more than Andreessen could ever dream of.