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Sure it has. For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates). For every starry-eyed engineer or developer who just wants to help people, there

Sure it has. For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates). For every starry-eyed engineer or developer who just wants to help people, there are business people who will pervert it into an empire and jettison them as soon as practical. For every TED, there’s a Davos; for every DEFCON, there’s a glut of vendor-specific conferences. We should champion the good people who did the good things and managed to resist the temptations of the poisoned apple, but we shouldn’t hold an entire city on a pedestal because of nostalgia alone. Nobody, and no entity, is that deserving.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates) Nobody said there were no bastards. Just that they didn’t have dominion. We let this happen, in part by being lazy and cynical.
- stego-tech 1y ago
  I would argue that cynicism is born of attempting to assert accountability and finding repeated harm from said attempts, rather than some intrinsic pre-existing apathy or laziness. I think most people will snitch on bad behavior as children. However, our systems often allow other children to discipline the snitch, rather than correct the negative behavior the snitch raised. We see it in adult systems as well: whistleblowers often end up with substantially shorter and poorer lives for attempting to assert accountability or consequences on those who committed them, while the perpetrators often enjoy lives of immense wealth and reward regardless of the whistleblower's actions. If you want people to stop being "lazy" and "cynical", then you have to support them when systems turn against them. In my experience, none of ya'll actually want to also walk out of work when layoffs happen following a profitable quarter for no other reason than to juice the share price, none of ya'll also want to walk off the job because your employer is taking contracts from authoritarian regimes, none of ya'll also want to put yourselves in the line of fire and risk harm over your purported values. Don't blame us cynics when we have the battle scars showing our commitment to a better tomorrow. What have you done to prevent cynicism?

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates) Nobody said there were no bastards. Just that they didn’t have dominion. We let this happen, in part by being lazy and cynical.

stego-tech 1y ago
I would argue that cynicism is born of attempting to assert accountability and finding repeated harm from said attempts, rather than some intrinsic pre-existing apathy or laziness. I think most people will snitch on bad behavior as children. However, our systems often allow other children to discipline the snitch, rather than correct the negative behavior the snitch raised. We see it in adult systems as well: whistleblowers often end up with substantially shorter and poorer lives for attempting to assert accountability or consequences on those who committed them, while the perpetrators often enjoy lives of immense wealth and reward regardless of the whistleblower's actions. If you want people to stop being "lazy" and "cynical", then you have to support them when systems turn against them. In my experience, none of ya'll actually want to also walk out of work when layoffs happen following a profitable quarter for no other reason than to juice the share price, none of ya'll also want to walk off the job because your employer is taking contracts from authoritarian regimes, none of ya'll also want to put yourselves in the line of fire and risk harm over your purported values. Don't blame us cynics when we have the battle scars showing our commitment to a better tomorrow. What have you done to prevent cynicism?