We are living in a world eaten by software -- software created, owned and operated by Silicon Valley. In this episode, Jamie meets Margaret O' Mara, author of 'The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America' to discuss how Silicon Valley's rejection of the conventional bureaucracies and corporate structures, its turning away from the mainframe towards a decentralized attitude to innovations and development, led to a huge new empire -- one that is radically restructuring the world's institutions.


This episode picks up where we left off in the discussion with @rabble, one of the co-founders of Twitter and Indymedia. Starting with the idea of Silicon Valley as a new empire, restructuring the world's institutions through software, we consider the ideology of this empire, and how it differs from that of the previous order of transnational capitalism.

Have what Evan calls Silicon Valley's 'social libertarian' values survived the terrific enlargement of the second-wave web services like Uber, Facebook and Airbnb into global superpowers?

Finally we discuss @Rabble's work developing Scuttlebutt as a future platform for decentralised community, content distribution and monetisation. Are we moving away from the cycles of centralisation we've seen with platforms like Google and Facebook and towards a cycle of decentralisation?


This is part one of a two-part interview with @Rabble (Evan Henshaw Plath) -- activist technologist, co-founder of Indymedia, and one of the originators of Twitter. We discuss the origins of Twitter in the protest organisation tool TxtMob; Evan's work developing Indymedia and the early days of tech's interaction with activism; how social media is continuing to mutate politics, for better and worse; how the sorting algorithms developed by Big Social are becoming indelibly embedded in our world -- and finally Evan introduces the subject of part two: Silicon Valley's hidden mission to restructure the world's institutions via software.