4 ms·
> Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere To an ext
by flukus 6y ago
> Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere
To an extent I think it was, nothing inherently American but openness and a certain amount of cowboyness has been a key differentiator in what tech thrives and what dies and authoritarian cultures/governments/organizations don't tend to favor openness. Look at the web verse what it could have been though something like minitel or AOL, look at linux vs commercial operating systems, unix itself and windows fostered a cowboy culture where everyone could write there own programs, bring there own hardware and generally and do what they want.
For the most part I think American tech is abandoning those values anyway, walled gardens are becoming more common and getting more restrictive, open standards are yielding to proprietary services, users are being restricted in how they operate their own machines. That's something China can compete with and win, you wouldn't get IRC out of china but you would get slack, you wouldn't get Linux but you would get apple.
- Barrin92 6y ago>Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere I'd question if that's even the case inside the US. America was industrialised on the back of the American System and Silicon Valley was built on top of defense contracts. Napoleon brought the first civil code to France and Germany's national education system is a result of Prussian militarism. In many countries that tell a story of some sort of Western transparency and laissez-faire culture it was arguably authoritarian structures that initiated reform not unlike those you find in Singapore or China today. There's this popular narrative today championed by people like Acemoglu of "extractive" and "inclusive" institutions with the latter leading to progress and the former being bad, but even in Western nations a significant amoung of progress was built by the former and inherited by the latter.
- zozbot234 6y agoLinux came from Finland, not the U.S. And there's quite a lot of underground "cowboy culture" in Chinese tech, though people will disagree as to whether that promotes good quality.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> Linux came from Finland, not the U.S. Not really. Linux is a clone of Unix, developed by Bell Labs in the USA, and Linus' salary over decades has come from US companies (Transmeta) and foundations (The Linux Foundation.)
- Supermancho 6y ago>> Linux came from Finland, not the U.S. > Not really. Yes really. Linux is technically Unix-like, wherein the code is original. The closest analogue is BSD which is based off the Unix source code. This history notwithstanding, the re-implementation of Unix came from Finland, not the US. Software is almost universally designed and built from the lessons of other software. This doesn't discount the achievements.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoUserland was mostly American though. If not Linux, then we'd would have used very American FreeBSD, almost 100% same thing.