Tech’s Political Culture: The Libertarianism of Silicon Valley

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Tech’s toxic political culture: The stealth libertarianism of Silicon Valley bigwigs: Who talks like FDR but acts like Ayn Rand? Easy: Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most powerful people, by ANDREW LEONARD, Salon

Marc Andreessen is a major architect of our current technologically mediated reality. As the leader of the team that created the Mosaic Web browser in the early ’90s and as co-founder of Netscape, Andreessen, possibly more than any single other person, helped make the Internet accessible to the masses.

In his second act as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Andreessen has hardly slackened the pace. The portfolio of companies with investments from his VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is a roll-call for tech “disruption.” (Included on the list: Airbnb, Lyft, Box, Oculus VR, Imgur, Pinterest, RapGenius, Skype and, of course, Twitter and Facebook.) Social media, the “sharing” economy, Bitcoin — Andreessen’s dollars are fueling all of it.

So when the man tweets, people listen.

And, good grief, right now the man is tweeting. Since Jan. 1, when Andreessen decided to aggressively reengage with Twitter after staying mostly silent for years, @pmarca has been pumping out so many tweets that one wonders how he finds time to attend to his normal business.

On June 1, Andreessen took his game to a new level. In what seems to be a major bid to establish himself as Silicon Valley’s premier public intellectual, Andreessen has deployed Twitter to deliver a unified theory of tech utopia.

In seven different multi-part tweet streams, adding up to a total of almost 100 tweets, Andreessen argues that we shouldn’t bother our heads about the prospect that robots will steal all our jobs.  Technological innovation will end poverty, solve bottlenecks in education and healthcare, and usher in an era of ubiquitous affluence in which all our basic needs are taken care of. We will occupy our time engaged in the creative pursuits of our heart’s desire.

Global Food Price Fell 3.2% in May

NEW DELHI: Global food prices fell by 3.2 per cent in May, the second consecutive month of fall, on account of a sharp decline in costs of dairy, cereals and vegetable oils, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The FAO’s price index, which measures monthly price changes for a basket of grains, oilseeds, dairy, meat and sugar, averaged 207.8 points last month as compared with 214.6 points in May 2013, falling nearly 3.2 per cent.

Read more at: Economic Times