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Marc Andreessen Pro-Colonialism Tweet Riles India Tech World

• piratebroadcast 11y ago
  Andreessen is such a drama queen. I said something clever and a little critical to him on twitter once and he blocked my ass. He runs his mouth off and says stupid shit all the time.
  • TheCowboy 11y ago
    The tone of your comment comes off as drama. When it doesn't include the details of the tweet, people are left guessing. If no mention of the other things you find questionable are explained, then it's just flaming. This isn't to defend him, but to suggest this style doesn't help solve the problem of sloppy social media commentary.
    • geofft 11y ago
      Marc Andreessen has a well-documented record of blocking people liberally for very little reason: https://medium.com/@aminatou/to-marc-andressen-6d09239f0065 https://medium.com/@aminatou/to-marc-andressen-6d09239f0065 https://twitter.com/triketora/status/677597576183480320 https://twitter.com/triketora/status/677597576183480320 http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-block-twitter/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-b... https://blogdotitrendcorporationdotcom.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/til-that-marc-andreessen-likes-to-block-people-who-disagree-with-him/ https://blogdotitrendcorporationdotcom.wordpress.com/2014/05... And, confusingly enough, doesn't really respect other people's blocks: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/622911480841699328 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/622911480841699328 I can anecdotally confirm that piratebroadcast's claim is not unusual, as I got blocked sometime after this tweet: https://twitter.com/geofft/status/458371450052022273 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/458371450052022273 To be fair, maybe I should have attempted some substantive discussion instead.
      • mikeash 11y ago
        I don't see what's wrong with this, specifically. It's his account, he can block whoever he wants. People take this stuff way too personally. I've blocked a few people simply because I don't like their stuff in my feed. One of them bugged me for months afterwards to unblock him, even though it's completely inconsequential and I don't say much interesting anyway. IMO this is a flaw with twitter. Blocks are two-way: I don't see their stuff, and they don't see my stuff. But whenever I'm blocking someone, it's just because I don't want to see their stuff. There's no reason to tie those together. In any case, how a person manages their own Twitter account is their business. If they use it to say something ridiculous then by all means attack it, but going after them merely for blocking people is ridiculous.
        • cookiecaper 11y ago
          >IMO this is a flaw with twitter. Blocks are two-way: I don't see their stuff, and they don't see my stuff. But whenever I'm blocking someone, it's just because I don't want to see their stuff. There's no reason to tie those together. Twitter tried to fix this and it was a PR disaster for them. http://archive.is/YMJCg http://archive.is/YMJCg
          • mikeash 11y ago
            Well of course it was a PR disaster, they "fixed" it by removing the original blocking functionality altogether! Both "don't show me their stuff" and "don't show them my stuff" are useful, they just shouldn't be bundled.
            • cookiecaper 11y ago
              I don't think "don't show them my stuff" is a legitimate option for a publication and broadcast platform like Twitter. It's so simple to evade the blocks that all it does is promote sockpuppetry, which just complicates attempts to control all that "harassment" (which, more often, is actually just simple disagreement) that Twitter users are concerned about. If you don't want your tweets to be publicly visible, set your account to private. If you do want your tweets to be publicly visible, keep your account public. Those are the two valid options. "Blocking" someone from seeing your tweets just puts them an extra click away (the "logout" button). It's online security theater.
• factorialboy 11y ago
  Extremely stupid tweet by Andreessen. He probably doesn't even realize that, like most ignorant people. FYI it was socialism that held back the Indian economy during the 70s and 80s. And it was colonialism that drained the country's wealth for over two hundred years. Here, Mr. Andreessen, educate yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=bengal+famine https://www.google.com/search?q=bengal+famine
  • tosseraccount 11y ago
    Mughal Empire , sectarianism and caste system crippled India, not Britain.
    • vowelless 11y ago
      Were the mughals invaders and colonisers like the British? Did they "leave" after their demise? I thought they basically became part of India, especially with their artistic and religious influence on the people.
      • tosseraccount 11y ago
        Mughals were the Mongols who converted to Islam and invaded India.
        • oblio 11y ago
          And they were a small ruling caste that was assimilated by the locals, for the most part. So the previous comment was quite accurate. The Mughals of Babur were far removed from the Mughals of Bahadur II.
          • tosseraccount 11y ago
            Manchu Qing Dynastsy was foreign invaders that "got assimilated", too. Chinese people were glad to get rid of them and okay with Britain countering their presence.
    • 11y ago
• azzafazza 11y ago
  Finally he gets caught out for saying stupid shit. Every thing this man says is self serving (which is fine) but he tries to disguise it as profound knowledge. Ben Evans is 10x worse however, he is one idiotic twat.
  • SpeakMouthWords 11y ago
    One of Evans' favourite debate tactics is to tweet something brimming with subtext, then when someone calls him out on it, takes a literal approach to what he said. It's infuriating.
    • azzafazza 11y ago
      You summed up exactly what I thought it in my head about his Tweets, he is positively juvenile.
      • w1ntermute 11y ago
        Evans has been called out for his idiotic behavior before[0]. From what I can tell, his only contribution to a discussion is to say the most banal things (ex: there will be 5B smartphone users in 2020) in a way that makes them sounds original. 0: http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/benedict-evans-wants-to-make-sure-you-know-what-he-said http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/benedict-evans-wants-to...
        • azzafazza 11y ago
          I hadn't seen this, thanks for sharing.
        • MaysonL 11y ago
          That buzzer would be more meaningful if any of those tweets were linked or dated.
  • justinsingh 11y ago
    By 'says' in your comment, I hope you mean 'tweet'. Andresseen has said and done many smart things.
• yalogin 11y ago
  Knowing the sentiment in tech about keeping internet free from external interests, I don't know how he could support Facebook's plan like this. On top of that he was condescending towards India by bringing up "poor" and "morality" when instead he should have commended India for not falling for the trap. He is entitled to his opinions about colonialism. People that care about it will respond.
  • k-mcgrady 11y ago
    >> "Knowing the sentiment in tech about keeping internet free from external interests, I don't know how he could support Facebook's plan like this." He's a pretty big investor in Facebook. That's why he's willing to ignore the net neutrality implications - because it benefits him.
    • fwn 11y ago
      Because everyone with a different opinion on the most beneficial infrastructural policy is driven by pure self-interest. ..basically the pop culture version of a regulatory debate.
      • tetrep 11y ago
        > ...the most beneficial infrastructural policy... That's a nice objective view of free basics. I honestly believe, as I believe the parent to your comment does, that free basics really is bad for the internet and that none of the big players supporting it, e.g. the board of Facebook, are ignorant of the massive walled garden effect that they expect and hope it will create. At this point I think it's pretty close to an evil plan. Imagine a privately run "public" transit system that dropped you off inside buildings with no exterior doors. You'd be hard pressed to argue that the creators of such a system would not be aware of the effects it would have om the businesses inside such buildings, much less that they're creating this network out of the kindness of the hearts to honestly just give people who are in need access to transportation. (little straw-many but i reallt hate the idea and implementation of free basics)
• pluma 11y ago
  Man wrote words on Twitter. This is news now.
  • justaman 11y ago
    I'm still hoping that journalism recovers from the new paradigm that came with the dawn of the internet...
  • rorykoehler 11y ago
    Influential people's opinions have always been news. The medium they use to disperse those opinions is irrelevant.
• geomark 11y ago
  So Free Basics has been in India for about a year already. Are any of the grand claims about it supported by the data? I like data.
  • nileshtrivedi 11y ago
    Facebook has never shared data. This is what one can figure out from bits and pieces from PR releases: https://medium.com/@sumanthr/a-data-driven-argument-on-why-marc-andreessen-is-wrong-about-free-basics-c472184b9682#.uf0w8qi8t https://medium.com/@sumanthr/a-data-driven-argument-on-why-m...
• british_india 11y ago
  There is one salient example: fresh water in India. In 1947, the British departed with 24/7 pressurized water across the developed parts of India. Now, the British-built water system has all but collapsed. Instead of pressurized water, the water comes weakly and only intermittantly. What difference does that make, you ask? Well, if a pressurized system leaks, the leak causes water to leave the pipe. In a non-pressurized system--coupled with the user-side pumps that are used to pull in more water--leaks flow INTO the water line, bringing contamination with it. Couple that with the common practice of placing fresh water and sewer lines in the same trench and everytime somebody pumps that water toward them, they are pulling in fecal matter that leaked from the adjacent sewer lines, which also leak. That's why Indians often cannot drink their water without going through reverse osmosis. This is just an example of how India frittered away a resource the British brought them.
  • ilurkedhere 11y ago
    Interesting... Did the British also leave with the knowledge of how to maintain it?
  • oblio 11y ago
    I doubt even the Indians themselves are debating that the British brought many new technologies to India or that they maintained them well. Something which the later Indian administrations did not do as well. But when, in the end, the whole system was a huge scam meant to get resources out of India and into Britain, everything comes into a larger perspective.
  • geofft 11y ago
    Hm, I'm curious to see more about this. I was a young child when I last visited my family in India, many years ago, but I don't remember a particular need to filter water. And if I google 'india reverse osmosis', the second result (the first is a sales site) is a Times of India article about how it's a scam: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Reverse-osmosis-Need-or-waste/articleshow/46648223.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Reverse-osmosi...
  • npalli 11y ago
• tomp 11y ago
  Tweet in question: > “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?” The context is: India’s telecom regulator this week blocked Facebook's free, but limited internet service.
• nileshtrivedi 11y ago
  What Marc, Benedict and everybody else is (conveniently) ignoring is that Facebook does NOT bear the bandwidth cost of FreeBasics. So the whole thing about "giving something for free" is disingenuous. Indian telcos, Indian consumers and Indian public pay for FreeBasics. Fair of them to decide whether they want this scheme or not.
  • manojlds 11y ago
    One of the main arguments is that the "them" doesn't include the people who would actually be benefitted.
• jccc 11y ago
  I don't particularly like the guy, but is there a campaign of deliberate misinterpretation going on? Yes, probably a really stupid thing to say, and perhaps wrong for many reasons. No, he did not say India should have kept Britain as its colonial power, or any of the other incredible interpretations now flying around the Twittersphere. Jonny Axelsson: Anti-semitism not the opposite of semitism. Now whether anti-colonialism is a thing is another thing. Americans, esp. right-wing, have Humpty Dumpty appoach to redefining words but in context is clear: @pmarca referred to the post-colonial anti-colonial mix of nationalism, socialism, abuse/power that afflicted many ex-colonies Marc Andreessen: Exactly. https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/697281882401026048 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/697281882401026048 [Please disagree with Andreessen's point, not with my point that he really didn't say take India back to British colonialism but said something else that perhaps is almost as stupid.]
  • cynicalkane 11y ago
    This exactly. What's going on here is the internet hate machine has found a new target, and is eager to assign the least generous possible interpretation so they can feel good about themselves, look nice and self-righteous to their friends, get up votes, and so on. If you want to attack a man, maybe it's best to figure out what he was trying to say first. Some of the comments even in this thread are disgusting, and they are getting plenty of upvotes; and I find it curious how a community that usually decries this sort of thing becomes so quick to engage in it.
    • metaphorm 11y ago
      why are you so eager to leap to Marc Andreesen's defense? surely the man can speak for himself.
  • k-mcgrady 11y ago
    Although I think you may be right in your interpretation how is maintaining net neutrality by India 'anti-colonialist'?
    • jccc 11y ago
• geomark 11y ago
  I think this thread might need a refresher on how to disagree [1]. Already a few DH0 offenses. [1] http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
  • geofft 11y ago
    Of course, that document was written by another VC who likes to run his mouth on Twitter. So there's a legitimate discussion to be had about whether that document is poisoning the well of criticism. Marc Andreessen is an extraordinarily influential person in tech, and that influence is based on his reputation. If a nobody like me tweeted something dumb, everyone would just ignore me. Nobody ignores Andreessen, though. Maybe it would be better for the world if his Twitter feed and mine were treated similarly, but that's not how the world works, and we have to respond to the world as it is. Furthermore, part of his continuing influence, 20 years after Netscape, is the continuing impression that he is a clear thinker about issues facing the tech world. (See, elsewhere in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11072721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11072721 .) There are two valid discussions at play here. The first is whether Free Basics is a good idea; the second is whether Andreessen is in fact the insightful thinker he appears to be. (The specific subdiscussion about whether rejecting Free Basics is a form of anti-colonialism, incidentally, is only valid if we take it as a given that Andreessen's ideas are worth listening to in the first place.) For the second one, a record of him just not being a good or well-informed thinker is in fact refuting the central point of that argument.
    • xiaoma 11y ago
      >Of course, that document was written by another VC who likes to run his mouth on Twitter. So there's a legitimate discussion to be had about whether that document is poisoning the well of criticism. This comment itself is further argument that more people here could stand to read it. You've literally ignored the ideas within and just made an ad hominem argument based on the author instead.
      • manish_gill 11y ago
• 3ris3d 11y ago
  wow! considering the millions (if not billions) he has made from the hard work of people from India, he sure is a shameless @55h013
• fwn 11y ago
  While probably not a smart tweet I am not sure if people just buzz about it for entertainment reasons or maybe really did not understand what he wanted to say. ..because I think the message in its context is only that using the anti-colonialism gesture is not a useful policy trick to counter facebooks free basics initiative for Indians. On the other hand it's twitter. And they have to be outraged about something.
• div0 11y ago
  "Denying world’s poorest free partial Internet connectivity when today they have none, for ideological reasons, strikes me as morally wrong." - Mr Andreesen, given how rich you are, you need to be really careful when you talk about morals. (Quote from Bible omitted)
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• ericzawo 11y ago
  While I admire Mr. Andreessen a lot for his work as an entrepreneur and investor, we're witnessing a very real amplification of the consequences behind the expression "don't meet your heroes." The difference here is that Marc is abnormally outspoken. It would be dubious to assume that similarly ignorant opinions about large swaths of the world are not also shared by some of the biggest minds in tech.
• jacquesm 11y ago
  Damage control stations! Really, what on earth was he thinking when he wrote those tweets. And it's not the first time he pulls a gaffe like this either.
• peteretep 11y ago
  > Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic > for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now? I assumed anti-colonialism meant the license raj, protectionism, central planning, import substitution, and other illiberal policies brought in in 1947, that were sold at the time as being anti-colonial. Can someone tell me what it actually means, or is the suggestion that these policies weren't economic suicide?
• Zigurd 11y ago
  A casual glance at your social media feeds would have told you at least two things: 1. In India, the public rejected a massive PR campaign designed to create support for Free Basics, and went in the opposite direction; 2. That nobody from India in the US tech business thought Free Basics was a good idea. In light of that, how Marc Andreesen thought it was a good idea to wrap his defense of Free Basics in a defense of colonialism is beyond imagining. But it does illustrate how certain stars of the tech world, some of whom have their claques on HN, can get pretty far disconnected from the real world.
  • Riod 11y ago
    The interesting thing about the luminaries of tech is that they are willing to publicly display their prejudices and ignorance. You don't see leaders in finance or airlines doing this with similar regularity.
• imartin2k 11y ago
  Looking at the amount of opinionated tweets that he writes every day, it is statistically inevitable that he at one point writes something which gets him in trouble. This simply must have been taken into account by him from the beginning when starting to use Twitter the way he does. How can he do that? He simply knows that this, like almost anything controversial people say or do, will blow over.
• mikeash 11y ago
  In addition to the idiotic comment about colonialism, I'm curious about this new phrase he used: "partial Internet connectivity." That's a rather Orwellian choice of words, and appears to be flying under the radar while everybody gets upset at the other stuff. Let's call it what it really is: connectivity to a couple of services which also happen to be connected to the Internet. "Partial Internet connectivity" is about on the same level as "partial pregnancy."
  • fwn 11y ago
    Someone not sensitized by the net-neutrality debate would probably call a slow, spotty or censored internet connection still internet. But as frontiers are already pretty straight, qualitative differences in internet access already constitute a difference to what the net-neutrality side would be willing to accept as part of what can be called "internet". This makes it funny that you name his wording "Orwellian" while subliminally reproducing this carefully crafted and politically loaded understanding of what qualifies as internet. It in fact already is seeking political influence on a grammatical level.
    • mikeash 11y ago
      Fair, I accept that slow, spotty, and maybe even censored internet connections might qualify as "partial Internet connectivity." But that's not at all what we're talking about here, right? The service in question allows connecting to just two sites or something?
      • vram22 11y ago
        No, IIRC, not just two sites. But just a few sites, may be in the range of 10, which is not at all the same as all Internet sites, and letting the users decide which (of the many other useful sites) they can access.
  • throwaway2048 11y ago
    "partial Internet connectivity." which is fully profitable to him as a Facebook investor.
• xiaoma 11y ago
  Twitter is an amazing machine of outrage, misunderstanding and hatred. It allows the benign comment to be taken as an offense and it amplifies genuine offensiveness, bullying, witch-hunting and harassment. There are some wonderful things Twitter does, especially around real time news of non-controversial events such as natural disasters, but if the service is a net positive for the world, it's by the slimmest of margins.
  • cookiecaper 11y ago
    Amazing how restricting all communication to 2-sentence soundbites leads to misunderstanding and loss of nuance.
• numair 11y ago
  First, a disclosure: I hate Facebook, I think Free Basics is evil, and I think Marc Andreesen says a lot of stupid shit. That being said, this whole uproar is just more proof that social media is totally, utterly broken. Let me explain. While I think Marc is on the board of an evil company and that his thought process on this matter is incredibly ignorant, I really appreciate the fact that he shares his point of view. I don't just appreciate it, I respect it. Maybe he's got a point. Maybe he doesn't. I won't know unless I hear what he's got to say, and then spend some time thinking it through. This is what intelligent, thinking people do. Before they turned into kettle pots of blind activism, this is what people went to college to learn to do. This is what makes living in a free-speech democracy so great -- people say totally crazy shit, some people agree, some people don't, it's all good. Maybe the education system broke down or something, but people are no longer capable of dealing with viewpoints that differ from their own. They immediately label the person with whom they disagree, shame them (look at all of those screen grabs! Oh my!), and broadcast their displeasure to the world. We live in a world where people are supposedly taught to embrace those with different views -- that you and your best friend and your daughter's husband and your next door neighbor might not actually have the same exact views, but you can still be friends and get along just fine -- but this sort of tempered nuance attracts zero attention in a click-like-share world. Tolerance gains no attention in the world of social media; "disgust," "outrage," and other such intolerant reactions attract a crowd of views. People should be thanking Marc Andreesen, the Facebook board member, for being so utterly candid about his thought process. Those in disagreement should cite facts to educate him. I'm sure he has his own facts that form his opinions (and surely, he does). Maybe his opinions won't change, and maybe those of the dissenters won't either. You know what, that's okay! That's LIFE. Life isn't about being right, it's about being alive. You can think Marc is a total moron on the India topic and still be his friend. We don't all have to agree on everything. It's WEIRD if we did -- there's nothing real about it. As I like to say, "a friend with whom you've never disagreed is a potential enemy you never knew you had." Social media justice isn't justice, it's a modern-day mockery of the freedom of thought we fought so hard to attain. This shit is broken, folks. I don't know why Marc bothers with it, but I guess he is one of those people who thinks social media is the future of human discourse. I'm not. And that's okay.
  • deleted 11y ago
• mohsinr 11y ago
  Do Mr. Andreessen realize what colonialism was like in India? Following two incidents are enough to educate what a gift british colonoalism was for India: 1. Firing on Poor people http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/jbagh.html http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/jbagh.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre 2. Artificial Famine took Millions of Lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
• jsprogrammer 11y ago
  > India’s decision to block a free Internet service from Facebook Inc. How does Bloomberg lead with this "fact"? Facebook's offering is not Internet service, but a whitelisted pipe. Does Bloomberg normally willingly eat up and repeat corporate propaganda?
  • nileshtrivedi 11y ago
    The "free" part is also not "from" Facebook. The telco (Reliance in India's case) bear the bandwidth costs.
• ordbajsare 11y ago
  The Truth About Empire - and Western Colonialism! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGERS905pPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGERS905pPk
• morgante 11y ago
  This headline is simply incorrect and unfair to Andreessen. Yes, it was a stupid tweet, but it does not mean that Andreessen is "pro-colonialism." I think the anti-communism of the McCarthy era was idiotic and contrary to American values. Does that make me pro-communism? Only if you're a Republican.
  • cookiecaper 11y ago
    And so what if Andreessen is pro-Colonialism? It seems to have nothing to do with his performance as a VC or his early record as a tech entrepreneur, which is why he's noteworthy. He's not running for political office, so his political beliefs shouldn't really make a difference. We need to be willing to accept a diversity of belief instead of feigning shock and manufacturing outrage to try to lend undue credence to our own ideas of social equality; doing that is really just an admission that the argument is on shaky ground to start with and that you don't want to allow anyone to attempt to challenge it (for fear that the ground will crack and cause the shaky belief to collapse).
• return0 11y ago
  Yay let's everyone miss the point of his tweet and focus on what language is allowed in social media, because that's all that matters.
• m52go 11y ago
  Anyone interested in a concise, passionate, but well-researched account of India's situation while it was under foreign rule should check out Will Durant's The Case For India. It's eye-opening.
• pluma 11y ago
  What good have the Romans ever done for us?
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• chvid 11y ago
  I guess you need to pick your words with care; and not to be too direct if you want to say: 1. The "ruling" really is just protecting existing telcos' businesses. 2. Something about India being held back by corruption and bad politics. (Not that I agree with the above.) What would happen in USA if a big Chinese company set up free over mobile network access to select websites?
  • vram22 11y ago
    Good question. Interested to see if there is any answer.
    • trowawee 11y ago
      I mean, I think we can make a decent guess. If Tencent came over to the US and offered free wifi, but it was limited to Baidu, WeChat, and QQ services, every tech celebrity in this country would flip their shit and the government would declare it illegal.
      • vram22 11y ago
        Exactly. Yet Indians are being told that it is "for their good".
• dropdatabase 11y ago
  Well that escalated quickly
• navinsylvester 11y ago
  Freebasics is a poorly disguised but bold move to colonize Internet in developing countries. A brief prequel: http://blog.savetheinternet.in/what-facebook-wont-tell-you-about-freebasics http://blog.savetheinternet.in/what-facebook-wont-tell-you-a... Freebasics campaign was so flawed and the desperation in willfully misleading people was not even on an acceptable moral terms. Facebook spent a whooping 100 Crore INR for promotion and used the term "Free Internet". More about this here: http://blog.savetheinternet.in/what-facebook-wont-tell-you-about-freebasics http://blog.savetheinternet.in/what-facebook-wont-tell-you-a... Andreessen/zuckerberg is setting a very bad example here. These tweets are a testimony to the desperation and an act of trying to flex muscle. Tech industry luminaries are least expected to be willfully trying to rob the basic rights of a common man. Sadly we would remain silent partners to the spoiling fabric - if we don't vehemently oppose.
  • navinsylvester 11y ago
    *second link should point to this: http://scroll.in/article/802128/indias-internet-regulator-just-called-facebooks-free-basics-campaign-crude-and-dangerous http://scroll.in/article/802128/indias-internet-regulator-ju...
• typon 11y ago
  "Why won't you just lie down and let us control your internet?" It's always annoying when poor countries act all uppity in the face of mega corporations.
• tosseraccount 11y ago
  China blocked Google with Baidu. Russia did it with Yandex. Japan did it with Yahoo Japan. Big countries can block global monopolies like Facebook.
• danans 11y ago
  The best reply to such simplistic pro-colonialist comments about India is this graph compiled by British economist Angus Maddison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison#/media/File:1_AD_to_2003_AD_Historical_Trends_in_global_distribution_of_GDP_China_India_Western_Europe_USA_Middle_East.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison#/media/File:1_A... Basically, India and China together represented the largest percentages of the world's GDP, until they were colonized, after which their contribution plunged. Of course, the decline was multifactorial - colonialism wasn't just one specific thing, and there were seeds of instability that colonists took advantage of - but the larger historical trend seems pretty clear.
• JetSetWilly 11y ago
  So if India hadn't been colonised it would have industrialised in the 1840s, remained competitive in world trade, and never have had any internal political troubles and never ever jail opponents of the mughal empire? Somehow I doubt that.
  • intended 11y ago
    Yes? The geographic borders would be different, that's about it. Let's not forget that British trade policy was designed to extract raw material cheap from India, and then dump finished goods at low rates, and remove indigenous industries. The sub continent is like Europe. If allowed to be on its own, people would have modernized and gotten on with the business of making money. So why is that hard to imagine?
    • JetSetWilly 11y ago
      It is hard to imagine because the industrial revolution required a huge number of pre-requisites most of which don't seem to be present in the India of the 18th century, but which were present in Britain. In fact it is the very absence of these pre-requisites that meant Britain was in a position where it was even able to colonise India. To blithely state that if Britain hadn't colonised India that India would have inevitably maintained its share of world GDP and trade, in the face of the huge revolutions in industry, commerce and thought taking place in Europe, stretches all credibility. In fact if Britain hadn't colonised India, some other European nation would have instead. If India had industrialised first, then I'm quite sure the Mughal empire would have stretched to continental Europe in time.
      • Riod 11y ago
        Britain first used their military power to seize India. They then blocked the Indians from manufacturing a vast variety of manufactured goods and forced farmers to produce certain cash crops (like cotton), to be sold only to the British at fixed prices. They then imported those raw materials to their home country and then exported finished goods to India. They basically captured themselves a monopoly which kickstarted the industrial revolution. It's telling that it was Britain and not Germany where the revolution happened. A bit of reading would tell you this..
• navinsylvester 11y ago
  How has this slipped from front page so soon when the topic is still hot. Please forgive my ignorance. What is the logic behind it?. I have faith we are not elitist.
  • dang 11y ago
    It was heavily flagged by users. Flagging makes posts drop in rank. It was also penalized by HN software called the 'flamewar detector' which reacts to overheated discussions, which this certainly is.
    • navinsylvester 11y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. It's high time HN brings in more transparency to the whole system. I am sure the current system can be totally rigged since there is zero clarity. HN need to adopt badges to denote each major upward/downward state transition. Users can notice discrepancy and help fine tune the system(not just flamewar detector). Better solution would be to open source few parts which play a role in fixing rank. As a community driven success story - users are not here to serve elitism nor to serve someones personal pocket. The sooner HN realizes the importance of clarity and willingness to work with community - the longer it will respected.
• wrs 11y ago
  The idiotic spectacle of otherwise intelligent people attempting to pursue a complex argument in 140-character fortune cookies is so abhorrent to me. More than anything he has actually said, Marc Andreesen's move to Twitter as the vehicle for his pronouncements has made me lose a lot of the respect I had for him. How can anyone think Twitter is appropriate for this?
  • kafkaesq 11y ago
    How can anyone think Twitter is appropriate for this? Marc chose to do us a favor, and show us his true colors last night. And Twitter was the perfect vehicle for that.
    • trowawee 11y ago
      That's actually kinda the wonderful thing about Twitter. It's a really quick and easy way to let everybody know what you're really thinking (i.e., it's a really quick and easy way to show your ass to the entire world).
• tenpoundhammer 11y ago
  These people are shining a bright light on their own ignorance. I have worked with many Indians through out the years, and they are fiercely independent, inventive, and hard working. As a people and as a nation Indians are incredibly smart and thoughtful, it's incredibly disparaging for an outsider to claim that the Indian people don't know what's best for themselves. Under colonial rule the Indian people, their wealth, and their culture were plundered and forever destroyed, now they are seeing a similar attack coming from facebook. They are smart to carefully guard their people from corporate interests who are seeking only to exploit them. All in all the ruling class has the same arguments now as they have always had, "What's best for everyone is what's best for me" and they are always hurt when everyone doesn't agree.
• thebakeshow 11y ago
  Unrelated, but why does bloomberg hijack my back button to make it more difficult to leave their site?
• navinsylvester 11y ago
  I saw a producthunt post about how dysfunctional and elitist it had become. Wish we have some clarity regarding YC too. I can't seem to understand the logic behind when they move away an item from front page and on what basis. I am documenting but can anyone with experience explain the logic. I wouldn't have bothered but Andreessen has a lot of clout and not only me even others would love to understand the logic to clear the air.
• xufi 11y ago
  I feel like besides what he said, which was not well thought out of at all. India has bigger problems. I've visited it a few times and always come across how a few major cities (Bangalore/Mumbai) are the go to cities, while the government doesn't care about the outstanding issues such as the poverty rate/electricity fiasco and how that's affecting things like agriculture. I remember watching a documentary about how farmers were complaining their crops were being reaped by government ministers but nothing could be done due to the overly bureaucratic judicial system which it's self is a mess
• la6470 11y ago
  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-10/marc-andreessen-pro-colonialism-tweet-riles-up-india-tech-world http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-10/marc-andre... Looks like he apologized Now what he said is bad but my grandfather who was a freedom fighter kind of said the same thing in his last years because he could not get his award money of Tamra Patra from the hands of the politicians and bureaucrats.