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A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

In 1993, Marc Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also worked at the US-government funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications. With a colleague, the young software engineer authored the Mosaic web browser, which set the standard for cruising the information superhighway in the 1990s.

Andreessen went on to cofound Netscape Communications, making a fortune in 1999 when the company was acquired by AOL for US$4.3 billion.

Since then, through his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the outspoken billionaire has become one of the most influential wallets in Silicon Valley. His investments – in companies including Facebook, Foursquare, Github, Lyft, Oculus and Twitter – have definitively shaped tech over the past 15 years. (He once described his approach as “funding imperial, will-to-power people”.)

Because of all this, it’s worth paying attention to Andreessen’s recent “techno-optimist manifesto”. Opening with the

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UltraRAM Breakthrough Brings New Memory and Storage Tech to Silicon

UltraRAM Breakthrough Brings New Memory and Storage Tech to Silicon

New Computer Technology

Graphene, unlike silicon, lacks a ‘band gap’ — a rate of current flow that is so low that it causes the material to drop to zero conductivity. The best-of-both-worlds technology is one that’s non-volatile, fast to access, and cheap to create. As part of the newly expanded ten-year IBM Quantum Development Roadmap, IBM plans for this system to also house IBM’s future generations of quantum processors.

Sat down with outgoing CTO Martin van den Brink to talk about the company’s rise to dominance and the life and death of Moore’s Law. Viewed through a longer lens, the political pushback against Big Tech’s power is not surprising. Although sparked by the 2016 American presidential election, the Brexit referendum, and the role social media disinformation campaigns may have played in both, the political mood echoes one seen over a century ago. Silicon Valley was once indeed a place where people without family … Read more