Socialism is not necessarily authoritarian. The other side of socialism is anarchism, or libertarian socialism, which has a long tradition on the internet. In f

Socialism is not necessarily authoritarian. The other side of socialism is anarchism, or libertarian socialism, which has a long tradition on the internet. In fact IETF is an anarchist organization originally, with a motto along the lines of "no kings, no presidents, no voting, consensus and running code". The whole Free Software movement, to which ESR more or less belongs (though he created more liberal "open-souce" branch), is also socialist. Neither free software nor open source is individualist, it is impossible for a lone "hacker" create anything significant without using a vast amount of Free Software. W3C has mostly followed IETF style governance (consensus), and switching to more formal voting procedure has only led to adoption of DRM as a web standard. Fun fact, there is an RFC stating that the Internet is a cooperative anarchy: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1726.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1726.txt For an introduction into IETF-style anarchy see: https://www.wired.com/1995/10/ietf/ https://www.wired.com/1995/10/ietf/ On W3C: https://cyber.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/reg... Murray Rothbard even said in his books that the word "libertarian" was used by "libertarian socialist" first. It is only recently that capitalist and extremely individualist views became popular among hackers. Hackers were always anarchist, but only recently anarchy started to mean extreme liberalism, essential point of which is absolute private property, including copyright. For more on anarchist view on "libertarian" views, read Anarchist FAQ. Ironically, you can install it with "apt-get install anarchism" on any Debian-based distro.