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.”
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.”
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 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.
Torenberg anticipates the objection, and his response is pointed: Even telling someone to “touch grass” is itself internet-native language. The critics, he argues, have already proved his point: “When someone tells you that you are ‘extremely online,’ or need to ‘touch grass,’ they are—intentionally or not—confessing that they too have had their brain colonized by internet clichés.”
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.
Where is the new economy organized? Torenberg’s answer is unambiguous: The internet is now the primary mediating layer through which all experience, culture, and meaning flows. The business that helps people navigate that layer becomes critical infrastructure. That is the explicit bet behind Monitoring the Situation, the live online news channel a16z is backing as a direct extension of Torenberg’s thesis.
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.
On the pace of change in the space he’s analyzing, Torenberg acknowledged the challenge directly: Even a comprehensive understanding of the internet today would not stay fresh for long. But he argued that uncertainty itself is a subject. He pointed to the Iran war as an example—mass use of AI, among other factors, has shaped public understanding of that conflict in ways that differ sharply from how the Russia-Ukraine conflict was processed four years earlier. “Huge numbers of people becoming convinced that Bibi Netanyahu was killed and that the Israeli government is producing deepfakes of him—that’s a story,” he said. “The uncertainty is a story.” He invoked Baudrillard’s famous provocation that the Gulf War “did not take place.” Said Torenberg: “Maybe the Iran war didn’t take place either. But people still read Baudrillard’s essay.”
What becomes scarce within that layer? University of Chicago behavioral economist Alex Imas has made a complementary argument: As AI commoditizes information, content, and cognitive labor, what becomes economically valuable is the relational layer—the things with an irreducibly human element. His “relational sector” thesis holds that tomorrow’s middle-class consumption patterns will resemble those of the wealthy today, with people paying for human connection the way only the rich currently do. As he told Fortune recently: “There’s a lot of jobs right now that have a relational component, which will become relational jobs.”
This is Torenberg’s cultural argument translated directly into labor economics: If AI is commoditizing everything automatable within the internet’s mediating layer, then what’s scarce is authentic human navigation of that layer—precisely what Torenberg’s media network is selling.
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.”
“The first thing that people think about when they think about reducing work is unemployment,” Tabarrok recently told Fortune. “But reducing work could mean, you know, a shorter workweek. It could mean a longer retirement, a longer childhood, more holidays.”
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.
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