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Code Free or Die(): Why Hackers Are So Often Libertarians (2008)
- PsySecGroup 4y ago
- Kiro 4y agoI don't see many libertarians on Hacker News.
- xwdv 4y agoWhat do you see
- revscat 4y agoMy take on the Platonic ideal HN user: Tech-savvy NPR liberals: deeply capitalist, socially liberal, who consider expressions of emotion profoundly offensive. This is particularly true of anger, with empathy being a close second. Humor is almost-but-not-quite taboo. When politics is discussed, solutions outside of boycotts or elections are eschewed. Partisans are not acknowledged to exist, nor are bad-faith actors: if someone says something, you must pretend to believe they are acting in good faith, and that debate is always worth pursuing. Racism and bigotry simply do not exist. Market forces will solve climate crises. The use of force will not be considered or allowed to be discussed.
- jrm4 4y agoCan confirm.* *black guy who occasionally makes it a topic here
- junofan 4y agoStartup News on the other hand…
- tragictrash 4y agoI think your comment reflects more on yourself than anything else.
- noSyncCloud 4y agoAgreed with most of your points, except they're actually "tech-savvy OAN 'independents'".
- xwdv 4y agoRacism and bigotry is alive and well here in Hackernews, it's just disguised, and perhaps not directed toward the usual races you'd expect.
- rascul 4y agoI see a lot of comments advocating for more regulation, more policies, more government control, less individual freedom. Many that argue the other way are down voted.
- bigyikes 4y agoDo you disagree with those comments? I ask because Dang often links to a collection of threads where people make this type claim[1]. If we’re to believe him, the bias you’re perceiving may not actually exist, and may actually be a reflection of your own personal biases. Not sure whether you relate to that, but I definitely could. Since learning of this, I actually view Hacker News as roughly politically neutral. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922311
- rascul 4y agoIt's just what I (remember) seeing. My own views and biases may certainly have an effect on that. Note that the comments Dang linked to are making claims that HN is this or HN is that. I only claim that I saw things. It's a difference, but possibly a small difference, I guess.
- Apocryphon 4y agoTimes have changed greatly since the Great Recession. Individuals in general are more materially dispossessed than they were in the end of history '90s. Even well-paid hackers in San Francisco or Seattle can see poverty all around them. Meanwhile, corporate wealth and power have risen to the stuff of cyberpunk fantasies. Less luxury, nowadays, to be an absolutist individualist. Not to mention, libertarianism as a American political ideology has fallen by the wayside with the failure of the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
- layer8 4y agoMaybe libertarians just downvote less? I mean, nominally they should?
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bediger4000 4y agoI see a lot of HN user IDs that argue libertarian ideas, and take libertarian talking points for granted.
- sli 4y agoBeing pretty far-left (by American standards, anyway), I feel extremely out of place on this website for reasons that I think are pretty benign in the grand scheme of things. I support programmers unionizing, but the overall vibe of this website is that making a little more money individually is more important. Unions just aren't that radical, though. This site skews towards high earners, but the rest of us programming grunts in the trenches could use the solidarity.
- iopq 4y agoLibertarians have no problem with privately run organizations, like unions. Anyone has the right to associate with anyone they want. You just can't force someone to be in your union to get a job
- bet3lgeuse 4y agoThank you. I wish more of the real libertarians would stand up like this. Unions are indeed a positive force in the world to counteract private power. Freedom to assemble is a right that's nearly extinct. It's government that is responsible for union busting, not libertarians. There are so many charlatans and corporate barons who rise to some brief level of recognition with the libertarian label that I felt forced to stop using the term to describe myself about 10 years ago. Ideology is driven by Internet defined politburo which is why it's difficult to spot libertarian themes in public online discourse. As fascist undertones are evergreen, libertarian principles remain difficult to defend and vulnerable to ad-hominem attack. But I digress.
- anothernewdude 4y agoHard to be that naive about economics and how large corporations would immediately capture regulation in a "libertarian paradise" these days.
- willnonya 4y agoI dunno, people still find it pretty easy to be naive about how great and free a socialist paradise would be.
- anothernewdude 4y agoI'm in one, and it is pretty great.
- robswc 4y agoI'd probably consider most closely aligning with libertarian-ism but honestly being part of any "ism" is just a drag. I don't see why you can't favor parts of different ideologies while rejecting others. A funny example... I find socialists very good at identifying societal problems and even identifying their core causes... the only problem is I can't say I find a lot of the proposed solutions all that great. One of my favorite examples of an intention != consequence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_... TL;DR, Awhile back, Sweden decided to tax financial trades. It was a "tiny" tax of just 1%. This tax reduced revenues of various other taxes and completely destroyed their markets which haven't recovered, even to this day. Hundreds of millions evaporated in the span of years and potentially billions over the decades... not to mention the loss of jobs and opportunities for the country as a whole... That said, I'm glad HN is mostly apolitical... at least relative to other sites I visit, lol.
- Apocryphon 4y agoI'd say you'd probably fit into the archetypal libertarianish techie mould - "socially liberal, economically conservative", valuing pragmatism above all with a bias towards technological/engineered solutions, and perhaps generally apolitical and disliking of labels. Not to label you specifically, but I think that sort of soft-libertarian is a common engineering archetype, both on HN and other tech communities all the way back to the BBS era. I think it's still a pretty common political formulation to have around here, but with all of the messes and crises of the past couple of decades, I see on HN people might be more receptive to something to rein in large corporations, whether it be government or even organized worker power. Was the Swedish financial trade tax a Tobin tax?
- robswc 4y ago>Was the Swedish financial trade tax a Tobin tax? Mmmm... I'd say it could have been, yes. IIRC the main purpose was to raise revenue though (https://www.bis.org/publ/confp01s.pdf https://www.bis.org/publ/confp01s.pdf), while a Tobin is mainly aimed at curbing speculation. They have very similar effects though. >I'd say you'd probably fit into the archetypal libertarianish techie mould For sure. I see no sense in denying it. >I see on HN people might be more receptive to something to rein in large corporations I can also agree with this. I try not to absorb myself in political philosophy but more or less, that's why I can't say I would ever be 100% one thing or the other (yea, tired trope but see no reason it isn't valid) . Ask anyone that knows me, I _hate_ TikTok and a lot of actions taken by big corporations as of late.
- bsuvc 4y agoWhy does everyone have to be labeled?
- the_only_law 4y agoHow else will I know who to hate.
- intelVISA 4y agoSo you can catch errors (wrongthink) at compile time rather than runtime.
- Apocryphon 4y agoA rather reductive condemnation of clustering.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RappingBoomer 4y agothey are alienated from society
- googlryas 4y agoAre younger hackers trending libertarian as well? Maybe there was something about society back then which caused hackers to lean libertarian, but it seems like there is nothing intrinsic that correlates hackers with libertarians, at least from my (extremely limited) observations.
- Apocryphon 4y agoBack in the '80s and '90s there were both from the bottom-up with anarchistic, civic liberties-focused phone phreaks, greyhat hackers, cowboy coders and the like, as well as from the top-down from free market tech entrepreneur types.
- adamrezich 4y agoI would guess not. to me, the "libertarian hacker" de facto standard peaked in the mid 00s (around when TFA was written), when everyone was enthusiastic about the Internet and Ron Paul and Larry Lessig and Information Wanting To Be Free and 09F9 and BitTorrent. then social media happened and everyone got an always-on Internet connection in their pockets at all times and now the Pauls are evil Republicans just like the rest of em, free speech is dangerous and should be restricted and limited on all platforms at all costs, and identity politics (of all flavors) are more important than everyone being a pseudonymous handle on the Internet, treated equally by default. there used to be this feeling that the future of the Internet was just going to be fuckin awesome because it would pierce through all existing societal constructs like bigotry and racism, connecting people of all stripes equally in this crazy libertarianesque online network of computers, and what could come of that but societal advancement, increased creative output, and a general world-improving fair and equal exchange of ideas? I rarely, if ever, see any of that kind of idealism anymore, both in theory and in practice, and I miss it dearly.
- nebulousthree 4y agoOnce the human became the focus of the computer and internet usage, I think that's when it lost that amazing feeling. When the real identity became central to the majority's experience of the web. If you stay out of that (decidedly big) circle, you can still get a bit of that sparkle.
- peter-m80 4y agoHackers in general are against corporations and share knowledge. To me that reminds more to socialism than libertarism
- willnonya 4y agoThe freedom to posses and share knowledge is much more libertarian than socialist. In socialism the key difference is that those corporations are now government entities backed by the power of the gocernrather than only the power of the market. The labor it takes to gather that knowledge and the knowledge itself are not yours under a socialist system.
- pksebben 4y agoNo, no no no no no no. Perhaps this made more sense in 2008, and I was there for the 4chan and the glory days of Usenet and all that magic jazz and in my early twenties, sure, you could have unironically called me a libertarian and been almost right. but not now. The very premise of the article, taken in today's context, suggests that one should not be a libertarian. Systems thinking, aversion to restriction, and a balking at authority should, if you're using them right and bothering to think, lead one to want less free markets. FAANG, unrestricted, is far more dangerous and toxic to innovation than any government. Same goes for banks. Same goes for the entire legal profession. If I'm at all familiar with the libertarian ethic, the idea is that you let these things expand organically without fetters. This is Bad with a capital B. I would faster align a good hacker ethic today with the far left. Like, far, far left. Not democrats, not liberals, definitely not libertarians. Anarchists, in the "headless governance" meaning of the term. Distributed decision making without representatives. Libertarians, neoconservatives, and all the rest of that "free market, small government" drivel are just handing the keys to the neighborhood burglar. The systems perspective, or rather, my systems perspective on this is that it's to late and the only option is to wait for a total credit collapse. But those free markets got us to the place where k Street has the funds to write their own laws.
- iopq 4y ago> Anarchists, in the "headless governance" meaning of the term. Distributed decision making without representatives. which is the same as libertarianism, since the ultimate libertarianism is a system without a government at all
- bitwize 4y agoYeah, that was 2008. Before GamerGate happened, back when we as a society could still comfortably think marginalizing BIPOC, LGBTQ, genderqueer, otherkin, plural, and otherwise neurodiverse folk was okay. Times have changed. Social justice is now a core part of hacker ideals. So is a critical-theoretic relentless interrogation of one's own assumptions and biases, as Allison Parrish nicely elucidated: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/ http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...
- motohagiography 4y agoI remember those times, and over the years what I think I can distill it to is that when you have physical competence at something, you come to believe, understand, and respect the effects of things like work and truth. When you don't have physical competence, you respect alignment to power and its narratives because you know truth does not always prevail, but power and alignment to it invariably does. Material rewards come from alliances, not knowledge or work, etc. They're irreconcilable poles that we can generate some temporary value from with finesse and management, but I think the libertarian urge comes from a belief in truth that is demonstrably not universal. It's worth looking at the context of the time, where there was also a sense that these were previously poles around ideas of masculinity and femininity, where if you were one and embraced the values of the other, it was unsex-y, where concrete-thinking women and fluidly-political men were misfit social exceptions. Today I don't think that's as common at all, so current libertarianism is a kind of nostalgia for a time when the things it was existing as a reaction to were still present, and they aren't as central themes today. However, the values of truth, self-reliance, competence, work, anti-authoritarianism, commensurate responsibilities for rights, limited privileges, individual freedom, simple rules-based orders, sound money, freedom of conscience, family integrity, and live and let live, lassier-faire principles are all still very much alive. I even suspect we're about to see a major conflict over them, but it's not really hacker libertarianism, it's just human dignity. That doesn't always prevail either, but I am not aware of an example where it wasn't worth absolutely everything to try. :)
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]