In April, Andreessen Horowitz launched Monitoring the Situation, or MTS, billing it as “the first timeline-native news network that’s always on.” The venture capital giant promised a 24/7 firehose of breaking news delivered straight to X. It sounded like a genuine attempt to reinvent how we consume information. What it actually revealed was something far more troubling: how technology money creates media not to inform the world, but to talk to itself.
According to reporting from Business Insider, MTS isn’t alone in this strategy. OpenAI recently acquired the popular tech podcast TBPN for nine figures. Before that, Andreessen Horowitz itself bought the podcast network Turpentine. These moves follow a long pattern. Airbnb, Casper, and Uber all launched their own magazines. Robinhood acquired a newsletter for young investors. Stripe publishes a quarterly magazine for software engineers. Every major tech player seems to want a media microphone these days.
But MTS appeared different. It promised to be always-on, full-stack, competitive with traditional news networks. A week of watching it exclusively painted a different picture entirely.
The Machinery Breaks Down Immediately
The first problem was existential: the “always on” network wasn’t actually on. When a viewer tried tuning in at 7am, they found a blank screen and a message reading “We’re off air right now.” The network operates only during Pacific workday hours, the exact opposite of when most people watch news. The future of media, it turns out, keeps a nine-to-five schedule.
What aired during those limited hours revealed deeper issues. The debut episode opened with the hosts reading posts about themselves on X for fifteen minutes straight. The digital equivalent of a news anchor reading his own fan mail. Later segments featured interviews that weren’t really interviews at all. When Balaji Srinivasan, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, appeared on the show, he spoke almost completely uninterrupted for two hours while the hosts sat silently, occasionally lobbing softball questions his way.
The core format resembled less a news network and more a Twitch stream. Hosts would screen-share their laptops and read headlines aloud. In one segment covering Tim Cook’s departure from Apple, a host simply read Apple’s press release, pulled up Cook’s Wikipedia page, and read from that too. This wasn’t news reporting. This was someone else’s timeline scrolling, narrated live.
A Masterpiece of Vertical Integration, and Its Problem
What MTS represents is what media researcher Rodney Benson from New York University calls an “amenity” for Andreessen Horowitz. As Benson explained it, you can use media to diffuse ideas and promote other business interests without worrying about whether it actually makes money. It’s vertical integration at its finest.
The guest list made this clear. During the week MTS was on air, guests included several current and former Andreessen Horowitz partners, founders of at least five startups the firm invested in, and Marc Andreessen himself. One host, Sofia Puccini, is a fellow in Andreessen Horowitz’s New Media Fellowship, described as a “Thiel fellowship for the terminally online.” The show broadcasts on X, a platform Andreessen Horowitz invested $400 million in when Elon Musk acquired it. MTS even debuted on April 20th, a date the tech world seems to treat as sacred.
This raises an uncomfortable question: what happens when an industry tries to run its own news operation? Eric Newcomer, who writes about business in tech, put it bluntly. “It’s mostly the industry talking to itself.”
When Passion Meets Amateurism
There were genuinely good moments on MTS. A conversation between journalist Taylor Lorenz and Srinivasan, the two former online antagonists, produced surprising common ground on privacy issues. The segment had potential. But even this bright spot struggled. Despite being billed with dramatic chyron language (“Wikipedia vs. Grokipedia”), a 90-minute conversation somehow failed to maintain any real energy.
The hosts themselves range from 21-year-old Theo Jaffee (whose LinkedIn still displays his SAT score: 1590) to slightly older personalities, most without journalism training. This gives MTS an undeniable charm. Audio glitches, outdated ticker information, constant Gen Z slang, dead air between segments. You feel like you’re watching friends have a conversation rather than watching a news operation.
But that’s precisely the problem. What feels intimate also feels amateurish. Many segments amount to little more than “Twitter for the illiterate,” as the source material describes it. Someone scrolling and reading headlines aloud. One segment literally involved a host screen-sharing a New York Times liveblog about the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial and narrating it in real time.
The Pattern Repeats
Andreessen Horowitz has been down this road before. Five years ago, the firm launched Future, a tech publication billed as “for participants rather than observers.” It shut down after eighteen months. The lesson seemed clear: owning the media is one thing. Actually running a media operation is another.
The startup world has echoed this skepticism. Crypto entrepreneur Jason Yanowitz told MTS hosts directly: “Media is a pretty shitty business. No offense. I think MTS is going to be great.” The subtext was obvious. What’s great for the tech industry isn’t necessarily what’s good for media.
The Viewership Reality Check
MTS launched to 280,000 viewers, a respectable number that nonetheless pales compared to CNN’s 900,000 during primetime that same month. By May 1st, about 8,400 people watched the livestream. That’s not humiliating for a brand-new show, but it’s telling. Most viewers were likely already believers in the Andreessen Horowitz worldview.
This is where the real problem emerges. If MTS is indeed just the tech industry talking to itself, what’s the point? An echo chamber of their own ideas? A place where they can ask their own questions and answer them themselves? The growing ecosystem of tech media, including MTS, TBPN, Pirate Wires, and podcasts like “All In,” creates spaces where the tech world can evangelize without interruption or counterargument.
What Gets Lost When You Only Listen to One Room
After a week of MTS, something became clear. Watching only tech media creates a warped reality. AI becomes an infinite frontier. American dynamism becomes the only moral imperative. The entire world outside tech ceases to exist.
When the reporter behind the original Business Insider story finally closed the MTS tab and opened the New York Times on Friday evening, the rest of the world rushed back into view. It was May Day. Workers protested for their rights. Congress feuded over war authorization. The federal government issued a ruling on abortion pills. None of it had appeared on MTS. All of it had been missed inside the tech world’s dreamworld.
This isn’t an accident. It’s the inevitable result of an industry building its own media infrastructure. When you control the microphone, you control what stories get told and which ones disappear. MTS might fail or succeed as a venture. Either way, it’s already proven something worth remembering: money can build platforms, but it can’t buy credibility, and it definitely can’t hide what happens outside the room when everyone stops listening.
