The balls on this guy. The sheer cynical audacity of trying to market yourself as a "defender of privacy" when you serve on the board of a company so antithetical to privacy that they're under federal supervision for twenty years [1] is breathtaking. Please tell me no one on Hacker News is dumb enough to fall for this.
My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned some breathless, excited editorial about "the future of media", and at one point he talked about the editorial/advertising firewall as a relic that needed to be abandoned. It was so slickly inserted that you could almost forget what he was really saying: that news desks need to be prevented from reporting things that companies rather they didn't.
Every time a VC tries to tell me "what's wrong with the media", I reach for my gun. Everyone: they're not your friends. They're not trying to help you. Their overriding concern is nurturing the value of their investments, and that sometimes means silencing people who report inconvenient truths.
My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned some breathless, excited editorial about "the future of media", and at one point he talked about the editorial/advertising firewall as a relic that needed to be abandoned. It was so slickly inserted that you could almost forget what he was really saying: that news desks need to be prevented from reporting things that companies rather they didn't.
Every time a VC tries to tell me "what's wrong with the media", I reach for my gun. Everyone: they're not your friends. They're not trying to help you. Their overriding concern is nurturing the value of their investments, and that sometimes means silencing people who report inconvenient truths.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees...
(reposted from other submission)