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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 t

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.
- mirimir 7y ago
  > what they do is just rob other humans out of money, privacy, dignity, or all three at the same time. That's what I meant by saying anarcho-capitalist. > 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. At first, yes. It was anti-authoritarian and idealistic. Very much a "power to the people" thing. The prospect of commercial websites was very controversial. Advertising was entirely unacceptable. Didn't last long, though.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I think your last paragraph is basically correct. In college, I met a number of sincere libertarians that were skeptical of authority and very interested in a wide range of people having a pretty broad set of freedoms. When I started work in SF in 1997, I saw similar attitudes in a lot of people. In that time, it seems to me the definition of "libertarian" has shifted to be much more about the freedom of people with a lot of money to do what they want without constraint. And a great deal of SF culture has since been priced out of the market; a lot of the weirdos, hippies, artists, and other people marching to the beat of their own drummer have had to march elsewhere. The same seems to be true online. Eternal September is more than 25 years old. The early flowering of small communities, individual bloggers, and digital anarchosyndicalists seems to me to have been mostly supplanted by profit-seeking services run by a small number of very rich people. It's probably inevitable. All that money was basically lying there. I can't be shocked that a bunch of people rushed in to scoop it up and damn the consequences, just like San Francisco's first gold rush. [1] But I do miss the more innocent times. [1] E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining#California_Gold_Rush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining#California_Go...
- mirimir 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. OK, I gotta share these: http://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html http://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html http://bofh.bjash.com/ http://bofh.bjash.com/
generalpass 7y ago
How can a company be libertarian? This doesn't make sense to me. A company is just an organization acting in some system. The system could be libertarian, or individuals could be prefer libertarianism, but not a company. The companies could promote libertarianism, but given Mark Zuckerberg's public requests to have facebook regulated, I don't think facebook is an example of a large company that supports libertarianism, let alone anarcho-capitalism. How many people do you think in Silicon Valley believe that individuals should have more power than any government? Or who believe that government is illegitimate? I don't feel I find very many of them. I felt the previous generation of engineers and admin were more anti-authoritarian than they were libertarian.
- atq2119 7y ago
  Companies are basically emergent artificial intelligences. So yeah, they can be libertarian.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    No. They are organizations representing shareholders.
    - atq2119 7y ago
      How is that a logical contradiction? All intelligence has goals and constraints. A (publicly held) company's goals and constraints are partially informed by their shareholders. That doesn't change the fact that they're emergent artificial intelligences.
      - generalpass 7y ago
        A lawyer representing someone can have whatever person positions the lawyer desires, but in the course of representing a client, the lawyer can only be an extension of what the client wants to be represented for. The same is true of anyone representing a shareholder. The company's goals and constraints are 100% informed by the shareholders.
ekianjo 7y ago
> Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right". What do you mean? Libertarianism exists precisely because it has principles that are sometimes endorsed by different sides of the political spectrum.
- mirimir 7y ago
  I agree that there seems to be overlap. But arguably it's just that politics isn't one dimensional.
- atq2119 7y ago
  The term "libertarianism" has shifted in meaning over time, which makes grand-parent's qualification important and even necessary. Originally, in the sense that people like Noam Chomsky still use it, it's simply a philosophy of deep skepticism towards authority and central power. More recently, what I like to call "internet libertarianism" has shifted much more in an Ayn Randian direction; those libertarians are still skeptical of state power, but they forgot to be skeptical of economic power. To them, whatever is done by people with a lot of money is Inherently Good, and screw the consequences to others. It's a philosophy of "(economic) might makes right" -- and that is definitely not something anybody on the left would endorse.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    The term libertarian was redefined in the U.S. by activists wishing to continue the path toward individual liberty, but who could not use the term "liberal" because the definition of that term had been redefined in the U.S. to describe people desiring to move away from individual liberty.
    - atq2119 7y ago
      While there are movements in the US that want to take significant liberties away from individuals (e.g., restricting the rights of non-whites), generally the vast majority of people are in favor of individual liberty. The disagreement is rooted in the question of whether economic power is relevant for an individual's liberty or not. There are those who are fine with curtailing the liberty of those who don't have economic power (or the flip side: who claim that extreme wealth does not increase a person's freedom)[0], and there are those who see inequal access to economic power as a problem that needs to be fixed in order to improve overall individual liberty. [0] If you hold that view but have ever considered the term "fuck you money" to be a valid meme, then I've got bad news about the logical consistency of your worldview.
watwut 7y ago
> Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right". But also, many of the past engineers were not libertarians at all. There was subculture of libertarians that through themselves to be representing engineers as a whole, but they were just one vocal bubble.

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.
mirimir 7y ago
> what they do is just rob other humans out of money, privacy, dignity, or all three at the same time. That's what I meant by saying anarcho-capitalist. > 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. At first, yes. It was anti-authoritarian and idealistic. Very much a "power to the people" thing. The prospect of commercial websites was very controversial. Advertising was entirely unacceptable. Didn't last long, though.
wpietri 7y ago
I think your last paragraph is basically correct. In college, I met a number of sincere libertarians that were skeptical of authority and very interested in a wide range of people having a pretty broad set of freedoms. When I started work in SF in 1997, I saw similar attitudes in a lot of people. In that time, it seems to me the definition of "libertarian" has shifted to be much more about the freedom of people with a lot of money to do what they want without constraint. And a great deal of SF culture has since been priced out of the market; a lot of the weirdos, hippies, artists, and other people marching to the beat of their own drummer have had to march elsewhere. The same seems to be true online. Eternal September is more than 25 years old. The early flowering of small communities, individual bloggers, and digital anarchosyndicalists seems to me to have been mostly supplanted by profit-seeking services run by a small number of very rich people. It's probably inevitable. All that money was basically lying there. I can't be shocked that a bunch of people rushed in to scoop it up and damn the consequences, just like San Francisco's first gold rush. [1] But I do miss the more innocent times. [1] E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining#California_Gold_Rush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining#California_Go...
mirimir 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. OK, I gotta share these: http://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html http://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html http://bofh.bjash.com/ http://bofh.bjash.com/

generalpass 7y ago

How can a company be libertarian? This doesn't make sense to me. A company is just an organization acting in some system. The system could be libertarian, or individuals could be prefer libertarianism, but not a company. The companies could promote libertarianism, but given Mark Zuckerberg's public requests to have facebook regulated, I don't think facebook is an example of a large company that supports libertarianism, let alone anarcho-capitalism. How many people do you think in Silicon Valley believe that individuals should have more power than any government? Or who believe that government is illegitimate? I don't feel I find very many of them. I felt the previous generation of engineers and admin were more anti-authoritarian than they were libertarian.

atq2119 7y ago
Companies are basically emergent artificial intelligences. So yeah, they can be libertarian.
- generalpass 7y ago
  No. They are organizations representing shareholders.
  - atq2119 7y ago
    How is that a logical contradiction? All intelligence has goals and constraints. A (publicly held) company's goals and constraints are partially informed by their shareholders. That doesn't change the fact that they're emergent artificial intelligences.
    - generalpass 7y ago
      A lawyer representing someone can have whatever person positions the lawyer desires, but in the course of representing a client, the lawyer can only be an extension of what the client wants to be represented for. The same is true of anyone representing a shareholder. The company's goals and constraints are 100% informed by the shareholders.

ekianjo 7y ago

> Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right". What do you mean? Libertarianism exists precisely because it has principles that are sometimes endorsed by different sides of the political spectrum.

mirimir 7y ago
I agree that there seems to be overlap. But arguably it's just that politics isn't one dimensional.
atq2119 7y ago
The term "libertarianism" has shifted in meaning over time, which makes grand-parent's qualification important and even necessary. Originally, in the sense that people like Noam Chomsky still use it, it's simply a philosophy of deep skepticism towards authority and central power. More recently, what I like to call "internet libertarianism" has shifted much more in an Ayn Randian direction; those libertarians are still skeptical of state power, but they forgot to be skeptical of economic power. To them, whatever is done by people with a lot of money is Inherently Good, and screw the consequences to others. It's a philosophy of "(economic) might makes right" -- and that is definitely not something anybody on the left would endorse.
- generalpass 7y ago
  The term libertarian was redefined in the U.S. by activists wishing to continue the path toward individual liberty, but who could not use the term "liberal" because the definition of that term had been redefined in the U.S. to describe people desiring to move away from individual liberty.
  - atq2119 7y ago
    While there are movements in the US that want to take significant liberties away from individuals (e.g., restricting the rights of non-whites), generally the vast majority of people are in favor of individual liberty. The disagreement is rooted in the question of whether economic power is relevant for an individual's liberty or not. There are those who are fine with curtailing the liberty of those who don't have economic power (or the flip side: who claim that extreme wealth does not increase a person's freedom)[0], and there are those who see inequal access to economic power as a problem that needs to be fixed in order to improve overall individual liberty. [0] If you hold that view but have ever considered the term "fuck you money" to be a valid meme, then I've got bad news about the logical consistency of your worldview.

watwut 7y ago

> Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right". But also, many of the past engineers were not libertarians at all. There was subculture of libertarians that through themselves to be representing engineers as a whole, but they were just one vocal bubble.