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Not OP, but I sense perhaps a limitation of HN; articles with comments where the comment is the submission get conflated with submissions about the article itse
by niftich 10y ago
Not OP, but I sense perhaps a limitation of HN; articles with comments where the comment is the submission get conflated with submissions about the article itself.
(EDIT: the submission's URL has now been changed from a particular reddit comment at https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlinspike_receives_rwc_levchin_price_2017/dc11s2h/?sh=c7c0de08&st=IXZ2E3ZY https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin... to a different announcement about the prize. The rest of my post as it originally stood follows.)
Reproducing the subject matter of the submission for discussion's sake:
dionyziz says:
I think Moxie decided not to be recorded for his acceptance speech. He said something very nice during his speech however, and I'll try to phrase it like he did:
If you watch videos of politicians giving speeches in the 1930's, you observe the fascist leaders who gladly accept an applause from the audience because they have earned it. They feel they are responsible for it, that they are the creators of history. On the contrary, if you observe a communist leader, they will applaud with the audience in every chance. This is because they have a different belief system, that of historical materialism, that history is a force of its own, unstoppable and inevitable, that drives what is happening in the world equipped with the momentum of what has happened in the past. These leaders feel they are simply the bearer of history, the tool that history chose to run its course, so they applaud together with the audience for history.
Similarly, today, we have a similar force, and that is technology. I once had the chance to meet Mark Zuckerberg. When I met him, a thought occurred to me: I could, right there... kill him. [audience laughs] I never thought I would get so close. But would that really change anything? Us technologists are the bearers of technological momentum. We make things happen, because the time has come for them to happen. And now is the time for strong encryption and crypto.
[audience applauds together with Moxie]
- woah 10y agoI shouldn't judge based on a remembered, secondhand, out of context quote, but this sounds kind of... pretentious.
- justinpombrio 10y agoYou might have read it backwards: the message was very humble. Moxie was saying that he didn't deserve credit for what he had built, because if he had not built it someone else would have. So his work was best thought of as a product of history, rather than a product of Moxie.
- snowpanda 10y agoThat's because it is pretentious and politically loaded. The guy acts like he cured cancer and tries to throw in his political ideologies. Meanwhile he's stubbornly defending WhatsApp and dismissing any criticism of the security flaw featured in The Guardian. Or any work towards a Signal without Google Play Services. Or most forms of criticism really. Unfortunately, most people on here follow along with anything he says, no matter how bad advice it is. Which is most likely why he won the award.
- girvo 10y agoI think we must have read two different speeches, because the one I read was Moxie stating that the invention of Signal was an inevitability, not him taking credit for it. But then it kind of sounds like you have an axe to grind on this topic?
- tptacek 10y agoThe Levchin Award recipients are determined by the RWC Steering Committee, which this year was Dan Boneh, Aggelos Kiayias, Brian LaMacchia, Kenny Paterson, Tom Ristenpart, Tom Shrimpton, and Nigel Smart. I think we can safely assume Moxie's popularity on HN had very little to do with persuading these people.
- idlewords 10y agoRedditors one and all!
- sk5t 10y agoOn the contrary, while it conveys some difficult ideas, I find it quite humble to acknowledge that one's individual contribution to technology is not an act of genius but of inevitability.
- leafpile 10y agoI first heard that applause story from Žižek (but it might not have originated with him?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgl0Oy5wx8#t=13m33s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgl0Oy5wx8#t=13m33s
- yan 10y agoMoxie explicitly gave Zizek credit in his speech.
- huhtenberg 10y agoNice backstory, factually incorrect. Applauding with an audience is not a part of a communist leader repertoire. Neither Brezhnev, Khruschev nor Stalin applauded with an audience. They always accepted the ovations for themselves. I suspect it might be different in China, but even then it has less to do with a philosophical view on how history unfolds and more with demonstrating fake humility to the crowd.
- SagelyGuru 10y agoApplauding with the audience may have been meant as a sign of humility or marxist fatalism. However, by Occam's razor, it comes across as what it looks like: the speaker applauding himself.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]