Licking

In the New Yorker, Tad Friend manages to get VC Marc Andreessen to tell us how he really feels about people who think tech is increasing inequality. Andreessen tells Friend: “Ordinary people love the iPhone, Facebook, Google Search, Airbnb, and Lyft. It’s only the intellectuals who worry.” Friend adds:

He raised counter-arguments, then dismissed them: technology would solve any environmental crisis hastened by an expanding economy, and as for the notion that, as he said, “ ‘You American imperialist asshole, not everyone wants all that technology’—well, bullshit! Go to a Chinese village and ask them.” Technology gives us superpowers, makes us smarter, more powerful, happier. “Would the world be a better place if there were fifty Silicon Valleys?” he said. “Obviously, yes. Over the past thirty years, the level of income throughout the developing world is rising, the number of people in poverty is shrinking, health outcomes are improving, birth rates are falling. And it’ll be even better in ten years. Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism—it’s the Eden-collapse myth over and over again—and then you look at G.D.P. per capita worldwide, and it’s up and to the right. If this is collapse, let’s have more of it!”

Referring to a US appeals court ruling striking down bulk collection of Americans phone meta-data, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) tells his counterpart Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), “How can you authorize something that’s illegal? You can’t. You shouldn’t.”

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci shows up in the Huffington Post pointing out how most of the tech press (including Wired, The Verge and Mashable) missed the importance of last week’s Facebook study on its contribution to the echo chamber.

It’s better than “Macaca.” Here’s one way to deal with campaign trackers: In New Hampshire, a Rand Paul staffer licked the camera lens of a Democratic super PAC video tracker, Jordan Phelps and Chris Good report for ABC News.

Computer scientist Ed Felten of Princeton is returning to government service at Deputy White House CTO under Megan Smith, and Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing says this is “Good News.”

In Civicist, Matt Stempeck shares some advice he picked up at the Omidyar Network’s “Building the Business of Civic Tech” event: Go to Industry Conferences.”

And An Xiao Mina draws on a recent visit to Hong Kong to explain “Why We Need a Global Civics.”

A 16-year-old blogger in Singapore who shared a video praising the death of the country’s authoritarian founding father Lee Kuan Yew has been arrested and jailed for two weeks, reports Ryan Pearson for the AP.