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.

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 d...