7 ms·

Did the Suits win the Internet?

62 points by scarhill 9y ago

markbnj 9y ago
> At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business. But you do need large amounts of capital to move packets all around the globe like magic, so naturally the suits won the Internet.
- HillRat 9y ago
  This is true -- I feel like the author has forgotten just how expensive it was to acquire hardware and software back in those days. You could easily blow half a million to a million on gear and licenses for a solution that today we would implement for pennies on the compute hour with open-source software. Even a low-end dev server would set you back north of $25K, to say nothing of other costs, such as provisioning T3s for the office when dialup was still the norm. (And traffic costs for sites of even modest size were a real concern.) While it was cheap to get into the game at an individual level (a PC, Notepad, and a couple of O'Reilly books sufficed), the costs to stand up a professional, scalable operation with the necessary tools and talent took meaningful CAP/OPEX investment. (Which is why we also were able to institute the less-laudable norm of blowing massive stacks of cash on meaningless toys and parties -- they were a relatively minor line item next to everything else.) So, yeah, the suits were running stuff from the beginning -- they may have been government, military, academia, or corporate, but someone had to front that cash. While I certainly buy into the belief that platform monopolies and morally-murky business models are of grave concern, I love the fact that a kid can stand up a SaaS business in a weekend on a DO droplet and never have to beg for a seed investment.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I'd love to read this, but the site can't work without javascript, which I have disabled in my browsers, and the source contains nothing but some opaque, obfuscated JS blob. Does anyone have a link to a plain text version of this article?
- et-al 9y ago
  It's surprisingly just 3 short paragraphs. I don't know what the author is running on their blog. Try this mirror: http://archive.is/PWI5v http://archive.is/PWI5v
- new299 9y ago
  Here's the full text, it's very short. The first part is a blockquote incase that's not clear... Alan Kay says, "...this was just like two years before going to PARC. I finished my PhD. I started thinking about this. I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.” Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds. …how successful is the iPhone? It’s about as successful as you can get, so that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of television in our time. Around 1995, the Suits discovered the World Wide Web. Their reaction: this is going to be television on steroids! Media giants will rule the earth, as the Internet becomes a vehicle for mass entertainment. At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business. Instead, personal computers, with access to the Net, were putting the means of production in the hands of the individual. Government would be powerless to control or censor the Net. As of now, doesn’t it seem like the Suits were right? Maybe they thought that some of the old media powerhouses would do better than they have done, and maybe they didn’t foresee upstarts like Facebook. But the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment than those of us on the Geek side would have expected.
- RandomInteger4 9y ago
  Why have you disabled javascript?
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    Mostly to try to avoid javascript vulnerabilities, to limit exposure to ads and tracking, and to have a nice consistent web experience without all the design annoyances of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?). When I've talked about this before, some people have asked "what javascript vulnerabilities?" I've answered that question here: [1] More details about how I browse the web here: [2] [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519
macintux 9y ago
Tangential at best, but in 1998 or so I was working at a large company with a small, nimble Internet team. We had a website before most companies had heard of the Internet, we had Usenet feeds, a class A network... One day the team was invited to lunch, where we were informed that our efforts were appreciated but it was time for the adults to take over. Marketing was stepping in to manage everything properly. Our consolation prize? A motivational screen saver. I long thought that, if they had at least been clueful enough to give us Doom or something on those CDs, maybe the team wouldn’t have felt quite so humiliated.
- rayuela 9y ago
  Oh god so much cringe. If you don't mind me asking, what company was this?
  - macintux 9y ago
    I’d rather not.
ianai 9y ago
First rule of corporate America is the corpies always win in the long run. (Also we’re all dead in the long run)
- threeseed 9y ago
  Second rule of corporate America is that new corporations come along all the time to displace them. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix etc. They never existed a few decades ago and are far more influential than companies like Comcast, NBC, Fox etc. So yes capitalism continues to be the dominant model. But it's not always the same companies in control.
moe4 9y ago
The Geeks vs Suit narrative feels totally bogus to me these days. Both are equally trapped in a consumer culture that they can't escape. The senseless consumption machine assimilates everyone. Until iPhone 86 and Star Wars 123 can't get made cause there are no resources left, Geeks and Suit will continue to serve the machine.
- 3131s 9y ago
  Absolutely. I could live off the average Hacker News user's annual salary for like 15 years. Even if I still lived in the US I would work one or two years, spend 10k / year on living expenses (I have done it before) and take the remainder of my salary to a country with low cost of living and live exactly as I do now -- no car or moto, no big house or fancy apartment, no phone, etc. Is all that stuff really worth years and years of total freedom? I wouldn't change anything about how I live now even if I were a millionaire.
  - saimiam 9y ago
    Do you blog about your experiences anywhere? I'd like to read more. (Totally serious request in case it comes off as otherwise.)
    - 3131s 9y ago
      I have thought about it before but haven't ever. I am happy to give you a few more details though. I am able to spend so little because I live in a very central area of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. My apartment is a spacious 80$ / month concrete box, around 5m x 16m with tall ceilings, natural ventilation, and a balcony facing out into a long alley. Around 100m away is one of the largest markets in the city, and so there is tons and tons of cheap, healthy food in walking distance (e.g. a kilo of mangoes for 0.25$ when in season). The really notable aspect of living here is the sheer population density -- I've estimated that in a 100m radius around me, in dense rows of five story apartments [1], there are probably over 5000 people living together relatively harmoniously. Being somewhat of a shut-in, this is really great for me as every day I see and chat with many neighbors, local vendors, and other familiar faces. I also live within walking distance of the absolutely awesome Olympic Stadium [2] and go there most days to sprint and lift weights with the Cambodian national track team (choosing cheap or free hobbies is pretty key to this lifestyle I suppose). Most everything else that I love doing involves computers, so other than a few laptops, speakers, a guitar, a nice table and chair, a mattress on the floor, etc. I don't really own much. That's not to say there are not difficult moments here. Even though I personally am not struggling financially, it's hard to totally escape the effects of poverty when you are immersed in it. A few years back, for example, a teenage boy killed himself in this neighborhood by jumping from a 5th story balcony, and knowing the backstory I don't think he would have done it if he had the money to escape from his home life. Seeing other people struggle is tough, but of course not nearly as tough as being in that situation yourself. [1] http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/tumblr_ms9t8gMXjn1sglye1o1_1280.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/... (a view looking out from the balcony of my first apartment here) [2] http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/tumblr_ms84g6u8e11sglye1o4_1280.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/... (this is from 4 years ago, days after I arrived, now there is a new field and track!)
fabianhjr 9y ago
For those worried about ownership of the internet and its platforms, do check out https://ioo.coop/ https://ioo.coop/ > If users owned their own social media, they could set terms of service in which they keep control over personal data. I would like to mention it is not about the individual but collective/cooperative ownership of internet platforms. For example, https://social.coop https://social.coop
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
purpleidea 9y ago
Sadly yes. Now it's up to us hackers to use decentralized algorithms and encryption to take it back. Thankfully, these are fairly understood nowadays. And when we write this code, ensure it's got a healthy amount of copyleft built-in because multi-national software companies that live off of proprietary are afraid that this will eat their lunch the way Linux and GNU did.
- PhaseMage 9y ago
  TCP/IP centralizes. Why am I stuck with one ISP? Scalable Mesh is the solution. I just GPL'd my project I'm working to build: https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch
  - Godel_unicode 9y ago
    No. TCP/IP can work just fine over multiple ISPs, Google "asymmetric routing". Also, look into cloud load balancers like cloudflare, then realize you can use A records to load balance over more than one of those with multiple different backends. The problem is physical diversity of connection at any one location, not some perceived weakness in TCP/IP.
    - PhaseMage 9y ago
      I assert that TCP/IP is actually the cause of "[lack of] physical diversity of connection in any one location". A second (or third) ISP isn't going to suddenly show up at my house because it doesn't make economic sense. In the same way that two railroad lines don't get built between the same two cities. A real scalable mesh protocol could change the economic calculation.
      - spc476 9y ago
        That are two things that really killed the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet---NAT and firewalls. Both work to make a true peer-to-peer connection difficult.
- 9y ago
ryanmarsh 9y ago
The suits always win. Get back to work.
rendall 9y ago
I have so many questions. If anyone can help me out, I'd appreciate it. Has "the architecture of the web" really changed away from "peer to peer" towards - what - centralized or top-down? In what respect? Is the existence of Netflix and Facebook a threat to 1990s style Geekdom? Don't these modes of approach exist side-by-side? "the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment" Setting "mass entertainment" aside for a moment, it seems to me there are larger industries catering to other needs than the 90s ever dreamed: scientific inquiry, literacy, accessibility, communication, environmental protection, disaster awareness and relief, poverty alleviation, among others have all risen because of the internet. Those, and mass entertainment too, have all been driven by the interests and focus of Geeks, as I see it. Am I wrong? Did I misunderstand something?
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  Totally agree. It's always super amusing to me when people argue that we need to get rid of e.g. Facebook because it's stifling creativity. The problem isn't Facebook, it's the fact that average people want to be (or feel they need to be, which sums to the same thing) on the biggest platform. Facebook's existence isn't preventing other social networks from taking off, human nature is. Go start your own social network, I guarantee the Facebook police will not kick in your door and shut you down.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
    Nope they'll knock on your door with a fat check. Seriously though the changes being proposed and enacted in the regulatory environment around social networks mean that there is a danger the real police will kick down your door if you run a moderately successful social network.
- PhaseMage 9y ago
  Nothing has changed technically. TCP/IP has consistently caused the centralization of power. The 90's Geeks didn't build the protocol, DARPA did (decades prior). We wanted anyone to be be able to be a first-class citizen of the Net. But we ended up beholden to our Monopoly ISPs. TCP/IP only gives first-class status to ISPs, not to us. BGP doesn't scale if we all tried to have our own first-class routers. Yes, things are getting better in all sorts of industries; a similar boom occurred with the wide-scale deployment of the 19th century Railroads. But things got better still with the deployment of automobile roads. I propose we do the same with a globally scalable mesh network.
gt_ 9y ago
As it goes, the literal "suits" are gone, replaced with hoodies, and it's onto another cultural abstraction of revolt. I am quite hopeful in the long term but the prize is beyond the eyes. Symbolic revolution is the glaring fear of post-capitalist theory, and the past couple decades glorifying Silicon Valley's sneakers-at-the-office antics falls right in line.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 9y ago
What a lazy and childish article. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk etc etc. These people and so many others have had significant impacts on the internet we see today and now they are just "suits" ? And why do we need to group people like this ? Many technical people have been responsible for negative elements of the internet which the "suits" fought against. And vice versa.
patkai 9y ago
The distinction between suits and nerds/geeks is blurrier than ever. Think about Zuck, you can probably take a photo of him in a t-shirt, a hoody and a suit on the same day. However, I think there is a pretty big difference between people who feel it's worth learning things for the sake of understanding and those who only work on sellable things. OTOH, there is a little suit in all of us, possibly suppressed. And who knows, maybe there is a little hoody in the suits as well!
ryanqian 9y ago
Make a good life, geeks, You deserve it.
williamle8300 9y ago
Yes. The W3C committee just railroaded the DRM spec last week..

62 points by scarhill 9y ago

> At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business. But you do need large amounts of capital to move packets all around the globe like magic, so naturally the suits won the Internet.

HillRat 9y ago
This is true -- I feel like the author has forgotten just how expensive it was to acquire hardware and software back in those days. You could easily blow half a million to a million on gear and licenses for a solution that today we would implement for pennies on the compute hour with open-source software. Even a low-end dev server would set you back north of $25K, to say nothing of other costs, such as provisioning T3s for the office when dialup was still the norm. (And traffic costs for sites of even modest size were a real concern.) While it was cheap to get into the game at an individual level (a PC, Notepad, and a couple of O'Reilly books sufficed), the costs to stand up a professional, scalable operation with the necessary tools and talent took meaningful CAP/OPEX investment. (Which is why we also were able to institute the less-laudable norm of blowing massive stacks of cash on meaningless toys and parties -- they were a relatively minor line item next to everything else.) So, yeah, the suits were running stuff from the beginning -- they may have been government, military, academia, or corporate, but someone had to front that cash. While I certainly buy into the belief that platform monopolies and morally-murky business models are of grave concern, I love the fact that a kid can stand up a SaaS business in a weekend on a DO droplet and never have to beg for a seed investment.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I'd love to read this, but the site can't work without javascript, which I have disabled in my browsers, and the source contains nothing but some opaque, obfuscated JS blob. Does anyone have a link to a plain text version of this article?

et-al 9y ago
It's surprisingly just 3 short paragraphs. I don't know what the author is running on their blog. Try this mirror: http://archive.is/PWI5v http://archive.is/PWI5v
new299 9y ago
Here's the full text, it's very short. The first part is a blockquote incase that's not clear... Alan Kay says, "...this was just like two years before going to PARC. I finished my PhD. I started thinking about this. I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.” Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds. …how successful is the iPhone? It’s about as successful as you can get, so that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of television in our time. Around 1995, the Suits discovered the World Wide Web. Their reaction: this is going to be television on steroids! Media giants will rule the earth, as the Internet becomes a vehicle for mass entertainment. At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business. Instead, personal computers, with access to the Net, were putting the means of production in the hands of the individual. Government would be powerless to control or censor the Net. As of now, doesn’t it seem like the Suits were right? Maybe they thought that some of the old media powerhouses would do better than they have done, and maybe they didn’t foresee upstarts like Facebook. But the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment than those of us on the Geek side would have expected.
RandomInteger4 9y ago
Why have you disabled javascript?
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Mostly to try to avoid javascript vulnerabilities, to limit exposure to ads and tracking, and to have a nice consistent web experience without all the design annoyances of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?). When I've talked about this before, some people have asked "what javascript vulnerabilities?" I've answered that question here: [1] More details about how I browse the web here: [2] [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519

macintux 9y ago

Tangential at best, but in 1998 or so I was working at a large company with a small, nimble Internet team. We had a website before most companies had heard of the Internet, we had Usenet feeds, a class A network... One day the team was invited to lunch, where we were informed that our efforts were appreciated but it was time for the adults to take over. Marketing was stepping in to manage everything properly. Our consolation prize? A motivational screen saver. I long thought that, if they had at least been clueful enough to give us Doom or something on those CDs, maybe the team wouldn’t have felt quite so humiliated.

rayuela 9y ago
Oh god so much cringe. If you don't mind me asking, what company was this?
- macintux 9y ago
  I’d rather not.

ianai 9y ago

First rule of corporate America is the corpies always win in the long run. (Also we’re all dead in the long run)

threeseed 9y ago
Second rule of corporate America is that new corporations come along all the time to displace them. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix etc. They never existed a few decades ago and are far more influential than companies like Comcast, NBC, Fox etc. So yes capitalism continues to be the dominant model. But it's not always the same companies in control.

moe4 9y ago

The Geeks vs Suit narrative feels totally bogus to me these days. Both are equally trapped in a consumer culture that they can't escape. The senseless consumption machine assimilates everyone. Until iPhone 86 and Star Wars 123 can't get made cause there are no resources left, Geeks and Suit will continue to serve the machine.

3131s 9y ago
Absolutely. I could live off the average Hacker News user's annual salary for like 15 years. Even if I still lived in the US I would work one or two years, spend 10k / year on living expenses (I have done it before) and take the remainder of my salary to a country with low cost of living and live exactly as I do now -- no car or moto, no big house or fancy apartment, no phone, etc. Is all that stuff really worth years and years of total freedom? I wouldn't change anything about how I live now even if I were a millionaire.
- saimiam 9y ago
  Do you blog about your experiences anywhere? I'd like to read more. (Totally serious request in case it comes off as otherwise.)
  - 3131s 9y ago
    I have thought about it before but haven't ever. I am happy to give you a few more details though. I am able to spend so little because I live in a very central area of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. My apartment is a spacious 80$ / month concrete box, around 5m x 16m with tall ceilings, natural ventilation, and a balcony facing out into a long alley. Around 100m away is one of the largest markets in the city, and so there is tons and tons of cheap, healthy food in walking distance (e.g. a kilo of mangoes for 0.25$ when in season). The really notable aspect of living here is the sheer population density -- I've estimated that in a 100m radius around me, in dense rows of five story apartments [1], there are probably over 5000 people living together relatively harmoniously. Being somewhat of a shut-in, this is really great for me as every day I see and chat with many neighbors, local vendors, and other familiar faces. I also live within walking distance of the absolutely awesome Olympic Stadium [2] and go there most days to sprint and lift weights with the Cambodian national track team (choosing cheap or free hobbies is pretty key to this lifestyle I suppose). Most everything else that I love doing involves computers, so other than a few laptops, speakers, a guitar, a nice table and chair, a mattress on the floor, etc. I don't really own much. That's not to say there are not difficult moments here. Even though I personally am not struggling financially, it's hard to totally escape the effects of poverty when you are immersed in it. A few years back, for example, a teenage boy killed himself in this neighborhood by jumping from a 5th story balcony, and knowing the backstory I don't think he would have done it if he had the money to escape from his home life. Seeing other people struggle is tough, but of course not nearly as tough as being in that situation yourself. [1] http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/tumblr_ms9t8gMXjn1sglye1o1_1280.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/... (a view looking out from the balcony of my first apartment here) [2] http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/tumblr_ms84g6u8e11sglye1o4_1280.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/... (this is from 4 years ago, days after I arrived, now there is a new field and track!)

fabianhjr 9y ago

For those worried about ownership of the internet and its platforms, do check out https://ioo.coop/ https://ioo.coop/ > If users owned their own social media, they could set terms of service in which they keep control over personal data. I would like to mention it is not about the individual but collective/cooperative ownership of internet platforms. For example, https://social.coop https://social.coop

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

purpleidea 9y ago

Sadly yes. Now it's up to us hackers to use decentralized algorithms and encryption to take it back. Thankfully, these are fairly understood nowadays. And when we write this code, ensure it's got a healthy amount of copyleft built-in because multi-national software companies that live off of proprietary are afraid that this will eat their lunch the way Linux and GNU did.

PhaseMage 9y ago
TCP/IP centralizes. Why am I stuck with one ISP? Scalable Mesh is the solution. I just GPL'd my project I'm working to build: https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  No. TCP/IP can work just fine over multiple ISPs, Google "asymmetric routing". Also, look into cloud load balancers like cloudflare, then realize you can use A records to load balance over more than one of those with multiple different backends. The problem is physical diversity of connection at any one location, not some perceived weakness in TCP/IP.
  - PhaseMage 9y ago
    I assert that TCP/IP is actually the cause of "[lack of] physical diversity of connection in any one location". A second (or third) ISP isn't going to suddenly show up at my house because it doesn't make economic sense. In the same way that two railroad lines don't get built between the same two cities. A real scalable mesh protocol could change the economic calculation.
    - spc476 9y ago
      That are two things that really killed the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet---NAT and firewalls. Both work to make a true peer-to-peer connection difficult.
9y ago

ryanmarsh 9y ago

The suits always win. Get back to work.

rendall 9y ago

I have so many questions. If anyone can help me out, I'd appreciate it. Has "the architecture of the web" really changed away from "peer to peer" towards - what - centralized or top-down? In what respect? Is the existence of Netflix and Facebook a threat to 1990s style Geekdom? Don't these modes of approach exist side-by-side? "the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment" Setting "mass entertainment" aside for a moment, it seems to me there are larger industries catering to other needs than the 90s ever dreamed: scientific inquiry, literacy, accessibility, communication, environmental protection, disaster awareness and relief, poverty alleviation, among others have all risen because of the internet. Those, and mass entertainment too, have all been driven by the interests and focus of Geeks, as I see it. Am I wrong? Did I misunderstand something?

Godel_unicode 9y ago
Totally agree. It's always super amusing to me when people argue that we need to get rid of e.g. Facebook because it's stifling creativity. The problem isn't Facebook, it's the fact that average people want to be (or feel they need to be, which sums to the same thing) on the biggest platform. Facebook's existence isn't preventing other social networks from taking off, human nature is. Go start your own social network, I guarantee the Facebook police will not kick in your door and shut you down.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
  Nope they'll knock on your door with a fat check. Seriously though the changes being proposed and enacted in the regulatory environment around social networks mean that there is a danger the real police will kick down your door if you run a moderately successful social network.
PhaseMage 9y ago
Nothing has changed technically. TCP/IP has consistently caused the centralization of power. The 90's Geeks didn't build the protocol, DARPA did (decades prior). We wanted anyone to be be able to be a first-class citizen of the Net. But we ended up beholden to our Monopoly ISPs. TCP/IP only gives first-class status to ISPs, not to us. BGP doesn't scale if we all tried to have our own first-class routers. Yes, things are getting better in all sorts of industries; a similar boom occurred with the wide-scale deployment of the 19th century Railroads. But things got better still with the deployment of automobile roads. I propose we do the same with a globally scalable mesh network.

gt_ 9y ago

As it goes, the literal "suits" are gone, replaced with hoodies, and it's onto another cultural abstraction of revolt. I am quite hopeful in the long term but the prize is beyond the eyes. Symbolic revolution is the glaring fear of post-capitalist theory, and the past couple decades glorifying Silicon Valley's sneakers-at-the-office antics falls right in line.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

threeseed 9y ago

What a lazy and childish article. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk etc etc. These people and so many others have had significant impacts on the internet we see today and now they are just "suits" ? And why do we need to group people like this ? Many technical people have been responsible for negative elements of the internet which the "suits" fought against. And vice versa.

patkai 9y ago

The distinction between suits and nerds/geeks is blurrier than ever. Think about Zuck, you can probably take a photo of him in a t-shirt, a hoody and a suit on the same day. However, I think there is a pretty big difference between people who feel it's worth learning things for the sake of understanding and those who only work on sellable things. OTOH, there is a little suit in all of us, possibly suppressed. And who knows, maybe there is a little hoody in the suits as well!

ryanqian 9y ago

Make a good life, geeks, You deserve it.

williamle8300 9y ago

Yes. The W3C committee just railroaded the DRM spec last week..