16 ms·

“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999)

107 points by Hooke 7y ago

dfee 7y ago
It seems like an interesting topic, but I could only read so much before it read like the author was getting paid per word. > It's easy, as many do, to dismiss the computer culture as merely an adolescent subculture whose values and principles hardly matter beyond the video game market. But, while certainly not at the center of today's power structures, the computer culture can be understood as standing in complex relations to the hegemonic bloc in the Gramscian sense.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Yeah it resembles a thought disorder with verbosity. If you told me it was generated by a Markov Chain as a prank I would believe you. Combined with shallow "namecheck" references everywhere with nary an explanation of /how/ they are connected. There is a fundamental cluelessness and shallowness to it all made more apparent by the papering over with the flesh of a few sacrifical thesauruses.
1996 7y ago
Maybe when this was written, but now? Most of the comments I read on HN advocate for some sort of government intervention - whether it is breaking up Facebook or Google or the evil of the day, or giving everyone a Universal Basic Income, or having more stringent laws against whatever someone dislikes. Regardless of the merits of each proposition and each school of thoughts, I'd say computer culture is no longer libertarian.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  A lot of computer culture is now 20 years older. Libertarian philosophy has less appeal when you start having kids, especially daughters, need blood pressure meds and have obligations like starting to think about caring for aging parents.
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    HN is a lot more diverse now, with people from all over the globe, including places a lot less conservative than Silicon Valley. There are a lot more people from outside the computer industry here too these days. They offer a fresh perspective. There's also been a lot more negative press about technology companies in recent decades, and a lot of the techno-utopian optimism that was so prevalent in the early days of the internet is harder to maintain in the face of, say, the rise of the surveillance state and ever the growing inequality that technology and technologists have enabled. The world is turning in to a technological dystopia and people are starting to wake up to it.
    - ianai 7y ago
      The next market down turn might help this. It seemed like FOSS projects benefited quite a bit during the GR. People without work had time to contribute to projects and build names for themselves.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I'm still a techno-utopian in my hand, in the sense that I believe advancements in technology are a crucial part of building a better world. However, the years I worked in the industry made me realize that a lot of companies have a tendency to oversell their technology to ridiculous extent, while at the same time not even caring about using it to create a better world, seeking only fast profit instead. So count me as one who woke up to realize that our industry isn't moving us towards an utopia, no matter what marketing texts say.
    - umeshunni 7y ago
      > places a lot less conservative than Silicon Valley. Or places a lot more conservative than Silicon Valley.
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    Because government subsidizes kids. And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism, even if they then give you welfare to help pay for the cronyism, for example: https://prospect.org/health https://prospect.org/health Edit: This is on the borderline of not even offering an opinion, but a statement of facts; but I guess go ahead and downvote facts you do not want to hear because they disagree with your politics.
- api 7y ago
  I had the same reaction. 90s libertarianism is largely dead and it seems like most of the tech people I know have gone either authoritarian left or authoritarian right ("alt-right," NRx, etc.).
  - 1996 7y ago
    It is sad that libertarians have become a tiny minority, even in computer culture. I don't care too much about people having different opinions from mine. Good for them to be far left or alt right if it makes them happy. I just wish we libertarians were not an endangered species in North America (and extinct in the rest of the world)
    - ianai 7y ago
      Move to Nevada. All I ever really heard espoused there were libertarian ideals - with few exceptions, even in the city.
      - chungy 7y ago
        Nevada's been overrun with authoritarians too (especially ones that want to escape what authoritarianism has done to California).
      - kortilla 7y ago
        Nope. Harry Reid is evidence that the majority is pretty much bog standard NIMBY establishment Democrats. He destroyed nuclear energy by reneging on Yucca mountain.
    - sagichmal 7y ago
      It's not sad, at all. Libertarianism is a naive, self-refuting ideology, anachronistic and immoral. The less of it the better.
      - 1996 7y ago
        Thanks for denying my right to have a different opinion from yours, while I respect your freedom Thanks too for bringing that imperialism in the last free realm that remained
- mirimir 7y ago
  It depends what you mean by "computer culture". There's the business culture (Silicon Valley etc). There are the engineers who work for those firms. And then there are the users. Since Eternal September, the users are largely just regular folks. Who are more or less clueless about "computer culture". Except for the geeks, anyway. Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right". But the business culture is largely libertarian. And some of it, such as Facebook and Uber, is almost anarcho-capitalist. What's largely missing is the cypherpunk commitment to freedom, privacy and anonymity. Edit: I should have said "some engineers are still basically libertarian". Sorry.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Don't discount the engineers who work surrounded by the "business culture" and perhaps even live in SV, but don't like that culture. Myself, I'm very much against the libertarian business culture of SV. I used to like all the cool tech companies talking about changing the world; nowadays, I recognize that for those companies, technology is only an exhibit in their PR strategy, and what they do is just rob other humans out of money, privacy, dignity, or all three at the same time. As far as the tech culture goes, I increasingly find myself agreeing with FSF on things. I'm too young to have experienced the early culture first-hand, but from what I read, it wasn't all that business-libertarian. Yes, it was anti-authoritarian and encouraged asking for forgiveness instead of permission, but it was all in service of intellectual pursuits - hacking societies to make money wasn't considered kosher for hackers.
    - Zak 7y ago
      I think it was a sort of business-libertarian. Hacking society to make money wasn't necessarily frowned upon, but imposing real costs or harms on others to make money certainly was. Of course, it also wasn't a monoculture, and it's probably hard to pin down a concrete set of beliefs that represents the state of hacker-libertarianism in 1999. An end-run around a taxi medallion system that results in bad service, high prices, and profits for investors who have a million dollars to buy one and rent it out to drivers? Good. Spamming competitors with fake requests to disrupt their business, and spying on users with location tracking? Not good.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- turk73 7y ago
  Yes, frankly I find most of you to be a bunch of wusses who lack all ability to reason because you haven't been taught history. I think this goes way beyond the threat that Facebook and Google present. I think we are facing global totalitarianism. Technology can make or break the human race. Technology is cold and cares not at all for what the outcome will be. The same as the Terminator wouldn't pity you or me dying in any way at all. We have unleashed a Biblical level Beast of our own making and we didn't even need an evil AI underneath it at all. The evil AI is us but we clearly aren't in control of it. Right now the US is being re-settled with far more pliant, less uppity residents. They come from nations already in the grip of total authority. I work with many people like this. I can't stand them--I absolutely have no use for people who refuse to question authority. I actually hate the company I work for as I see it act exactly like the Soviet Union did! It's amazing, we even have Kommisars (people watching us).
theothermkn 7y ago
ITT: People who would be surprised by the following bits from the Conclusion section of the fine article: "As a political formula, the romantic libertarianism that the computer culture offers as an alternative is as powerful as it is wrong-headed." "It needs to be made clear that the pleasant anarchy of the internet is not the just the product of an absence of control, but that it was built upon a foundation of support from nonprofit research universities and their costly and fragile culture of open intellectual exploration." "Computer obsession bespeaks, I think, a fear of the political, of interconnectedness, a distorted wish to escape the unpredictability and unknowability of relations with others that comes from being social creatures." I could hardly imagine a better display of the solipsistic assuredness of the denizens of HN, libertarian or otherwise, than that so many have just assumed that that the article sided with libertarianism and proceeded to discuss from there, apparently without even having skimmed.
- balfirevic 7y ago
  > I could hardly imagine a better display of the solipsistic assuredness of the denizens of HN, libertarian or otherwise, than that so many have just assumed that that the article sided with libertarianism and proceeded to discuss from there, apparently without even having skimmed. There are currently 4 top-level comments (one of which is yours) and 25 total comments. None of the top level comments make such an assumption (some speak kindly of libertarianism, but do not claim that the article does), and as far as I can see neither the most (if any) of the non top-level ones. What was it that you said about solipsism?
deogeo 7y ago
Always relevant when discussing libertarianism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nickik 7y ago
  As a libertarian, not very impressed with this write-up. It repeats a couple of common criticism that are 100s of years old without attempting to argue or understand the other side plus not applying the same criticism to his own side in the a consistent matter.
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
This essay is a cautionary tale, more than a writing about the political influences of early computer culture.
jimbo1qaz 7y ago
The URL points to a footnote and should be changed to http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html
- tlb 7y ago
  Fixed, thanks.
CDSlice 7y ago
Somewhat meta but I don't think I've seen a relatively popular story here that has the majority of the comments gray before this one. Did this article strike a nerve or something?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Janeman544 7y ago
  Anything "Libertarian" tends to get flagged in this hippie town.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  Anything political here (I’ve noticed) leads to people flagging anything remotely rude. I try to do my part by vouching for the good, but dead, comments.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    If only being polite were all that is necessary to not get down-voted! I've just decided I'm up-voting everything. I don't care if I agree, disagree, hate it, don't even read it. Vote-inflation, FTW.
mr_toad 7y ago
Young people today don’t see the internet as a disruptive libertarian force. To them it’s just another tool of the establishment. So if you don’t see so many wide-eyed idealists around, it’s probably because they see you as too old. They have their own hangouts, and we’re not invited.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- z3phyr 7y ago
  Hangouts as in afk?
ppod 7y ago
I'm not sure what to make of this article, but on a related note: the economics of software just seems to get weirder and weirder. I guess most US developers are fairly politically liberal, although probably a good chunk are libtertarian. I'm sure the SV vote averages out Democrat though. From the outside though, tech companies are viewed as dangerous, neo-liberal, privacy-threatening, all the worst forms of capitalism. And yet the entire foundation (and a good part fo the main structure) of every data based product is based on open-source libraries in python, R, C, and Javascript that was written often for no pay, or as an academic or side-project. And they aren't even patented! They often aren't even really properly credited! What does an economic theory of this even look like? Show me the incentive and reward and value-creation structure of a pandas developer?!
- billfruit 7y ago
  The view of tech companies as dangerous, and privacy-threatening,(while there are certainly issues) is presented in an inflated matter by the hyperbole loving main stream press, who feels their role as gatekeepers of ideas and news is threatened.
  - kgwxd 7y ago
    I get the opposite impression. It's pretty clear at this point that if it's closed source, cloud based, or riddled with telemetry (open or closed source); your privacy is out the window; and media isn't presenting any concern but the minimum, re-spewing the same PR copy companies use to justify their acts to the semi-aware.
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Those two are oddly correct - old media is largely too illiterate to report on those issues so instead they just incessantly repeat bullshit about "destroying democracy" and "selling your data".
- z3phyr 7y ago
  Software itself is not the primary product though. I argue that Open Source has paved the way for advertisement and services companies (traditionally non tech companies) to call themselves tech companies and gain an advantage in their respective spheres of buisness. Software has eaten the world, and now nobody is hungry. They do not care about core software or it's beauty. They don't care about hacking in true sense. In that way, they are probably exploitive.
roenxi 7y ago
This essay says little, although it is indicative of the uncertainty in the 90s as people tried to figure out exactly what was going on. 'Computer Culture' doesn't exactly have a lineage. By nature of the challenges that are faced in computing there is a high concentration of systems-thinkers who enjoy thinking about entire systems in their totality. This group of people are going to at least see the draw of libertarianism - as a philosophy it advocates a robust and highly fault tolerant system. Athoritarianism is a bad system because at some point a critical part becomes corrupt and then it delivers worse outcomes for pretty much everyone. One area the essay tries to pick up on this but doesn't quite manage is the detour past IP law. There are people in the computer world who recognise that IP law has created a system that is clearly terrible. Trademarks are fine, copyright and patents have substantially hindered the development of good software. It isn't encouraging new ideas, it is delaying fast-follow-up of ideas that were always going to be discovered very quickly when someone turned their mind to a problem. Systems thinkers would naturally unite against a system so bad at delivering its stated outcome. The Open Source movement is indicative of what happens when people with system thinker ideals are left in charge (ie, people like Stallman and Torvalds). People who have dedicated their lives to understanding data organisation aren't necessarily the ones who should be running the world; but the libertarian undertones aren't primarily about escaping from the world, they are a natural discovery on the path of someone looking at politics from a whole-system perspective and trying to optimise.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
indigochill 7y ago
As it describes Xanadu, it sounds like this is an actual use case for a blockchain implementation? > The logarithmically increasing demands on computing resource that such a perfect system would demand (each alteration recorded, each reading generating compensation for each author, a complete record or all such transactions accessible to all throughout the system) may have been its technological Waterloo; in conventional economic language, the system would probably drown in its own "transaction costs."
maire 7y ago
I initially found this article disconcerting since in 1999 I would have described Computer Culture as closer to socialist than to libertarian. At that point in time Silicon Valley was still strongly influenced by HP culture which included giving back to the community and employee ownership of the company (stock options). Both of these are socialist concepts. I got my insight into the authors thinking when he described EFF as a libertarian organization. Then a lightbulb went on in my head. I personally would not describe EFF as libertarian but I can see why someone would interpret it that way. EFF is based on a distrust of oligarchies and a distrust of governments ability to make technical decisions. Ah. Silicon Valley back then still viewed itself as the underdog and not as the alpha dog. Remember that for decades tech was dominated by IBM and suddenly it was dominated by Microsoft. The horrible antitrust case of Microsoft vs Netscape was in 1998. No wonder the tech culture distrusted government! In 1999 the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility was still going strong. They also had a similar goal of EFF of limiting technical invasion of privacy. I look at everything they tried to stop - and it all went through. I can't say that I trust government any more today than back then. The tech giants have changed and they still have an undue influence on government. Distrust of oligarchs is shared between both the far left and the far right.

107 points by Hooke 7y ago

dfee 7y ago

It seems like an interesting topic, but I could only read so much before it read like the author was getting paid per word. > It's easy, as many do, to dismiss the computer culture as merely an adolescent subculture whose values and principles hardly matter beyond the video game market. But, while certainly not at the center of today's power structures, the computer culture can be understood as standing in complex relations to the hegemonic bloc in the Gramscian sense.

Nasrudith 7y ago
Yeah it resembles a thought disorder with verbosity. If you told me it was generated by a Markov Chain as a prank I would believe you. Combined with shallow "namecheck" references everywhere with nary an explanation of /how/ they are connected. There is a fundamental cluelessness and shallowness to it all made more apparent by the papering over with the flesh of a few sacrifical thesauruses.

1996 7y ago

Maybe when this was written, but now? Most of the comments I read on HN advocate for some sort of government intervention - whether it is breaking up Facebook or Google or the evil of the day, or giving everyone a Universal Basic Income, or having more stringent laws against whatever someone dislikes. Regardless of the merits of each proposition and each school of thoughts, I'd say computer culture is no longer libertarian.

Ensorceled 7y ago
A lot of computer culture is now 20 years older. Libertarian philosophy has less appeal when you start having kids, especially daughters, need blood pressure meds and have obligations like starting to think about caring for aging parents.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  HN is a lot more diverse now, with people from all over the globe, including places a lot less conservative than Silicon Valley. There are a lot more people from outside the computer industry here too these days. They offer a fresh perspective. There's also been a lot more negative press about technology companies in recent decades, and a lot of the techno-utopian optimism that was so prevalent in the early days of the internet is harder to maintain in the face of, say, the rise of the surveillance state and ever the growing inequality that technology and technologists have enabled. The world is turning in to a technological dystopia and people are starting to wake up to it.
  - ianai 7y ago
    The next market down turn might help this. It seemed like FOSS projects benefited quite a bit during the GR. People without work had time to contribute to projects and build names for themselves.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I'm still a techno-utopian in my hand, in the sense that I believe advancements in technology are a crucial part of building a better world. However, the years I worked in the industry made me realize that a lot of companies have a tendency to oversell their technology to ridiculous extent, while at the same time not even caring about using it to create a better world, seeking only fast profit instead. So count me as one who woke up to realize that our industry isn't moving us towards an utopia, no matter what marketing texts say.
  - umeshunni 7y ago
    > places a lot less conservative than Silicon Valley. Or places a lot more conservative than Silicon Valley.
- wallace_f 7y ago
  Because government subsidizes kids. And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism, even if they then give you welfare to help pay for the cronyism, for example: https://prospect.org/health https://prospect.org/health Edit: This is on the borderline of not even offering an opinion, but a statement of facts; but I guess go ahead and downvote facts you do not want to hear because they disagree with your politics.
api 7y ago
I had the same reaction. 90s libertarianism is largely dead and it seems like most of the tech people I know have gone either authoritarian left or authoritarian right ("alt-right," NRx, etc.).
- 1996 7y ago
  It is sad that libertarians have become a tiny minority, even in computer culture. I don't care too much about people having different opinions from mine. Good for them to be far left or alt right if it makes them happy. I just wish we libertarians were not an endangered species in North America (and extinct in the rest of the world)
  - ianai 7y ago
    Move to Nevada. All I ever really heard espoused there were libertarian ideals - with few exceptions, even in the city.
    - chungy 7y ago
      Nevada's been overrun with authoritarians too (especially ones that want to escape what authoritarianism has done to California).
    - kortilla 7y ago
      Nope. Harry Reid is evidence that the majority is pretty much bog standard NIMBY establishment Democrats. He destroyed nuclear energy by reneging on Yucca mountain.
  - sagichmal 7y ago
    It's not sad, at all. Libertarianism is a naive, self-refuting ideology, anachronistic and immoral. The less of it the better.
    - 1996 7y ago
      Thanks for denying my right to have a different opinion from yours, while I respect your freedom Thanks too for bringing that imperialism in the last free realm that remained
mirimir 7y ago
It depends what you mean by "computer culture". There's the business culture (Silicon Valley etc). There are the engineers who work for those firms. And then there are the users. Since Eternal September, the users are largely just regular folks. Who are more or less clueless about "computer culture". Except for the geeks, anyway. Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right". But the business culture is largely libertarian. And some of it, such as Facebook and Uber, is almost anarcho-capitalist. What's largely missing is the cypherpunk commitment to freedom, privacy and anonymity. Edit: I should have said "some engineers are still basically libertarian". Sorry.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Don't discount the engineers who work surrounded by the "business culture" and perhaps even live in SV, but don't like that culture. Myself, I'm very much against the libertarian business culture of SV. I used to like all the cool tech companies talking about changing the world; nowadays, I recognize that for those companies, technology is only an exhibit in their PR strategy, and what they do is just rob other humans out of money, privacy, dignity, or all three at the same time. As far as the tech culture goes, I increasingly find myself agreeing with FSF on things. I'm too young to have experienced the early culture first-hand, but from what I read, it wasn't all that business-libertarian. Yes, it was anti-authoritarian and encouraged asking for forgiveness instead of permission, but it was all in service of intellectual pursuits - hacking societies to make money wasn't considered kosher for hackers.
  - Zak 7y ago
    I think it was a sort of business-libertarian. Hacking society to make money wasn't necessarily frowned upon, but imposing real costs or harms on others to make money certainly was. Of course, it also wasn't a monoculture, and it's probably hard to pin down a concrete set of beliefs that represents the state of hacker-libertarianism in 1999. An end-run around a taxi medallion system that results in bad service, high prices, and profits for investors who have a million dollars to buy one and rent it out to drivers? Good. Spamming competitors with fake requests to disrupt their business, and spying on users with location tracking? Not good.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
turk73 7y ago
Yes, frankly I find most of you to be a bunch of wusses who lack all ability to reason because you haven't been taught history. I think this goes way beyond the threat that Facebook and Google present. I think we are facing global totalitarianism. Technology can make or break the human race. Technology is cold and cares not at all for what the outcome will be. The same as the Terminator wouldn't pity you or me dying in any way at all. We have unleashed a Biblical level Beast of our own making and we didn't even need an evil AI underneath it at all. The evil AI is us but we clearly aren't in control of it. Right now the US is being re-settled with far more pliant, less uppity residents. They come from nations already in the grip of total authority. I work with many people like this. I can't stand them--I absolutely have no use for people who refuse to question authority. I actually hate the company I work for as I see it act exactly like the Soviet Union did! It's amazing, we even have Kommisars (people watching us).

theothermkn 7y ago

ITT: People who would be surprised by the following bits from the Conclusion section of the fine article: "As a political formula, the romantic libertarianism that the computer culture offers as an alternative is as powerful as it is wrong-headed." "It needs to be made clear that the pleasant anarchy of the internet is not the just the product of an absence of control, but that it was built upon a foundation of support from nonprofit research universities and their costly and fragile culture of open intellectual exploration." "Computer obsession bespeaks, I think, a fear of the political, of interconnectedness, a distorted wish to escape the unpredictability and unknowability of relations with others that comes from being social creatures." I could hardly imagine a better display of the solipsistic assuredness of the denizens of HN, libertarian or otherwise, than that so many have just assumed that that the article sided with libertarianism and proceeded to discuss from there, apparently without even having skimmed.

balfirevic 7y ago
> I could hardly imagine a better display of the solipsistic assuredness of the denizens of HN, libertarian or otherwise, than that so many have just assumed that that the article sided with libertarianism and proceeded to discuss from there, apparently without even having skimmed. There are currently 4 top-level comments (one of which is yours) and 25 total comments. None of the top level comments make such an assumption (some speak kindly of libertarianism, but do not claim that the article does), and as far as I can see neither the most (if any) of the non top-level ones. What was it that you said about solipsism?

deogeo 7y ago

Always relevant when discussing libertarianism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nickik 7y ago
As a libertarian, not very impressed with this write-up. It repeats a couple of common criticism that are 100s of years old without attempting to argue or understand the other side plus not applying the same criticism to his own side in the a consistent matter.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

This essay is a cautionary tale, more than a writing about the political influences of early computer culture.

jimbo1qaz 7y ago

The URL points to a footnote and should be changed to http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html

tlb 7y ago
Fixed, thanks.

CDSlice 7y ago

Somewhat meta but I don't think I've seen a relatively popular story here that has the majority of the comments gray before this one. Did this article strike a nerve or something?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Janeman544 7y ago
Anything "Libertarian" tends to get flagged in this hippie town.
colejohnson66 7y ago
Anything political here (I’ve noticed) leads to people flagging anything remotely rude. I try to do my part by vouching for the good, but dead, comments.
- generalpass 7y ago
  If only being polite were all that is necessary to not get down-voted! I've just decided I'm up-voting everything. I don't care if I agree, disagree, hate it, don't even read it. Vote-inflation, FTW.

mr_toad 7y ago

Young people today don’t see the internet as a disruptive libertarian force. To them it’s just another tool of the establishment. So if you don’t see so many wide-eyed idealists around, it’s probably because they see you as too old. They have their own hangouts, and we’re not invited.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
z3phyr 7y ago
Hangouts as in afk?

ppod 7y ago

I'm not sure what to make of this article, but on a related note: the economics of software just seems to get weirder and weirder. I guess most US developers are fairly politically liberal, although probably a good chunk are libtertarian. I'm sure the SV vote averages out Democrat though. From the outside though, tech companies are viewed as dangerous, neo-liberal, privacy-threatening, all the worst forms of capitalism. And yet the entire foundation (and a good part fo the main structure) of every data based product is based on open-source libraries in python, R, C, and Javascript that was written often for no pay, or as an academic or side-project. And they aren't even patented! They often aren't even really properly credited! What does an economic theory of this even look like? Show me the incentive and reward and value-creation structure of a pandas developer?!

billfruit 7y ago
The view of tech companies as dangerous, and privacy-threatening,(while there are certainly issues) is presented in an inflated matter by the hyperbole loving main stream press, who feels their role as gatekeepers of ideas and news is threatened.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  I get the opposite impression. It's pretty clear at this point that if it's closed source, cloud based, or riddled with telemetry (open or closed source); your privacy is out the window; and media isn't presenting any concern but the minimum, re-spewing the same PR copy companies use to justify their acts to the semi-aware.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Those two are oddly correct - old media is largely too illiterate to report on those issues so instead they just incessantly repeat bullshit about "destroying democracy" and "selling your data".
z3phyr 7y ago
Software itself is not the primary product though. I argue that Open Source has paved the way for advertisement and services companies (traditionally non tech companies) to call themselves tech companies and gain an advantage in their respective spheres of buisness. Software has eaten the world, and now nobody is hungry. They do not care about core software or it's beauty. They don't care about hacking in true sense. In that way, they are probably exploitive.

roenxi 7y ago

This essay says little, although it is indicative of the uncertainty in the 90s as people tried to figure out exactly what was going on. 'Computer Culture' doesn't exactly have a lineage. By nature of the challenges that are faced in computing there is a high concentration of systems-thinkers who enjoy thinking about entire systems in their totality. This group of people are going to at least see the draw of libertarianism - as a philosophy it advocates a robust and highly fault tolerant system. Athoritarianism is a bad system because at some point a critical part becomes corrupt and then it delivers worse outcomes for pretty much everyone. One area the essay tries to pick up on this but doesn't quite manage is the detour past IP law. There are people in the computer world who recognise that IP law has created a system that is clearly terrible. Trademarks are fine, copyright and patents have substantially hindered the development of good software. It isn't encouraging new ideas, it is delaying fast-follow-up of ideas that were always going to be discovered very quickly when someone turned their mind to a problem. Systems thinkers would naturally unite against a system so bad at delivering its stated outcome. The Open Source movement is indicative of what happens when people with system thinker ideals are left in charge (ie, people like Stallman and Torvalds). People who have dedicated their lives to understanding data organisation aren't necessarily the ones who should be running the world; but the libertarian undertones aren't primarily about escaping from the world, they are a natural discovery on the path of someone looking at politics from a whole-system perspective and trying to optimise.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

indigochill 7y ago

As it describes Xanadu, it sounds like this is an actual use case for a blockchain implementation? > The logarithmically increasing demands on computing resource that such a perfect system would demand (each alteration recorded, each reading generating compensation for each author, a complete record or all such transactions accessible to all throughout the system) may have been its technological Waterloo; in conventional economic language, the system would probably drown in its own "transaction costs."

maire 7y ago

I initially found this article disconcerting since in 1999 I would have described Computer Culture as closer to socialist than to libertarian. At that point in time Silicon Valley was still strongly influenced by HP culture which included giving back to the community and employee ownership of the company (stock options). Both of these are socialist concepts. I got my insight into the authors thinking when he described EFF as a libertarian organization. Then a lightbulb went on in my head. I personally would not describe EFF as libertarian but I can see why someone would interpret it that way. EFF is based on a distrust of oligarchies and a distrust of governments ability to make technical decisions. Ah. Silicon Valley back then still viewed itself as the underdog and not as the alpha dog. Remember that for decades tech was dominated by IBM and suddenly it was dominated by Microsoft. The horrible antitrust case of Microsoft vs Netscape was in 1998. No wonder the tech culture distrusted government! In 1999 the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility was still going strong. They also had a similar goal of EFF of limiting technical invasion of privacy. I look at everything they tried to stop - and it all went through. I can't say that I trust government any more today than back then. The tech giants have changed and they still have an undue influence on government. Distrust of oligarchs is shared between both the far left and the far right.