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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

• 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.
    • deogeo 7y ago
      You call it government cronyism, I call it regulatory capture and legalized bribery by corporations. When all you demand of business is that they seek to increase profits, but you demand of government that it protect everyone (including itself) from said businesses, enforce contracts, enact and enforce just laws, and provide all sorts of other services... of course you'll end up seeing business as perfect and government as flawed.
      • wallace_f 7y ago
        I didn't say businesses do not have flaws, nor that this cronyism was not consistent with bribery or regulatory capture.
    • Analemma_ 7y ago
      Subsidies are not inherently bad; the public is allowed to decide if there’s something it genuinely wants to subsidize and thus have more of than would be dictated by pure market forces, even if that means paying extra. The problem with subsidies is that they are usually a) not decided on democratically and b) for things we don’t actually want more of, like fossil fuel production. But children are a perfectly reasonable thing to want to subsidize, since without them we go extinct.
    • namdnay 7y ago
      > And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism The good news is that this is a very simple hypothesis to test: look at the price of meds and healthcare in a range of developed countries, and correlate with government involvement (or not) in provision of said meds and healthcare
  • philwelch 7y ago
    A lot of computer culture has been replaced with different people.
  • smabie 7y ago
    Not that libertarianism is the same as conservativism but most of everyone becomes more and more conservative as they age. Moreover, the young computer guys are now middle-aged/old computer guys and are probably making significantly more money than when they were younger. Personally, I've gotten more and more libertarian (though maybe less isolationist in terms of foreign policy) the more and more taxes I am forced to pay. Every time I see my paycheck and the taxes I pay I die a little-bit inside. Though if I could even decide where a small fraction of my taxes went, I think I would be a lot happier with the whole situation.
    • ianai 7y ago
      I especially don’t mind the local taxes. But all taxes are part of civic duty. I mean I’d rather be the financial contributor to the government than some foreign or private interest. Both of those should be considered bribes. My money goes without ties.
      • malvosenior 7y ago
        This is an extremely rosey view of the government. Private interest groups aren’t bombing people after all. There are a ton of amoral ties to how your taxes are spent.
        • pmoriarty 7y ago
          The government and corporations can not be clearly separated. People from the one go to work for the other regularly[1], often as a reward for serving one-another's interests. They constantly scratch each other's backs, such as politicians awarding fat contracts to corporations and then being rewarded with a high paying job at the same corporation when they retire, or just outright bribery in a variety of forms. Governments also regularly hire highly placed executive from corporations to regulate industries. History is full of examples of the military used to protect private (including corporate) interests, which are often seen by the ruling class as virtually synonymous with national interests. Protecting oil in the Middle East is one obvious example, but so is protecting banana corporations in South America, nevermind older examples such as using the military for colonialism and to further the slave trade. Media corporations have been highly complicit in provoking and defending war. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was infamous for boasting for his paper's ability to start wars, saying, "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war." Later media magnates (like Fox News' Rupert Murdoch) and outlets have been no less influential. Private individuals who've made their fortunes in corporations, like the Koch brothers and Peter Thiel, can also have an enormous influence on politics and the government through their donation, advocacy, and having the ear of powerful politicians. The military-industrial complex is yet another good example where corporations and governments are deeply intertwined, to the point of corporate interests having massive influence on both domestic and national security policy. It is a truism that political representatives in many states can't vote against military spending for fear of getting kicked out of office by their constituency, who depends on this military spending for their jobs (and their profits). There's endless corruption, bribes, billions of dollars going "missing", and kickbacks in the military as well, to the benefit of private individuals and corporations. Many politicians also own a lot of stock in military contractors and companies like Halliburton which benefit from both military spending and then reconstruction spending after the wars they authorize. This is yet another massive conflict of interest. So when you favor corporations over governments, don't be so sure they're not two heads of the same beast. [1] - Trump himself is probably the most famous current example, since he's top corporate executive and business owner at the pinnacle of political power in the US while having massive conflicts of interest between his economic and corporate interests and those of his political office, but this happens all throughout government in every administration (though usually not quite so brazenly).
  • AlexB138 7y ago
    That may be true for you, but it's not universally. Having kids, including a daughter, has made me a lot more cautious of our authoritarian government and what it means for my children's future.
• 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).