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The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

108 points by kmfrk 14y ago

petercooper 14y ago
Aside from the actual content, I'm intrigued how working on this sort of content can pay. The author claims to have spent three months (not necessarily full-time, I assume) reading everything O'Reilly has personally written in public and this gigantic article must have taken a good week or two to write and edit alone. That's several thousand dollars of effort there and I can't imagine it ever getting paid back by this article, no matter how good it is (or not).
- MaysonL 14y ago
  See his website: http://www.evgenymorozov.com http://www.evgenymorozov.com
savagejen 14y ago
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." -Eleanor Roosevelt
beachstartup 14y ago
i got through about 15 pages without finding a thesis or a point being made.
- lubujackson 14y ago
  I guess the whole point is that O'Reilly is rebranding propaganda as "meme-engineering" even though they are technically the same.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    I read the article and think the point is deeper than that. I would summarize it like this: Tim O'Reilly's business has changed from selling things (books, conferences) to selling ideologies ("Web 2.0", "government as a framework"). This is a relationship that goes both ways: the books and conferences provide crucial support for the ideologies he sells (the existence of a "Web 2.0" conference can be cited as proof that "Web 2.0" is a real thing), and the ideologies create demand for books and conferences as they spread. The primary problem the author (Evgeny Morozov) has with this isn't that O'Reilly profits from it, but rather that the ideologies O'Reilly sells tend to provide corporate-friendly alternatives that are used to marginalize rising ideologies that could threaten existing power structures. Examples discussed: - "Open source" as an ideology focused on the rights of the software developer, as opposed to the ideology it was explicitly designed to compete with, Richard Stallman's "free software" movement, which focused instead on the rights of the software user - "Web 2.0" companies wanted to package up information about their users and sell it to the highest bidder; the ideology supported this by positioning it as a natural evolution of the Web rather than a major power shift - "Government as a service" would involve taking major systems currently run by government and privatizing them, but covers this with a layer of techno-dust to avoid having to talk about the negative implications of privatization Hence the comparison of O'Reilly to famed Republican spin architect Frank Luntz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz). Luntz has made a career selling policies to people they will hurt by packaging them up with attractive-sounding words. Morozov argues that O'Reilly is in the same business.
    - ptaffs 14y ago
      Awesome summary. Thanks.
    - tankbot 14y ago
      Thank you! I couldn't make it through the whole thing. Too little nourishment per paragraph to complete the daunting trek!
    - ttuominen 14y ago
      I also read it, and I think you summarize it well. I'd like to add that the author's main aim seems to be in revealing a strong technocratic tendency underlying O'Reilly's thought. The technocracy is shown for example in the naive assumption that political decisions can be calculated algorithmically with enough data and intelligent algorithms. According to the author, O'Reilly hides the political claim that small government is good behind technological newspeak about governments providing only the essential APIs for the private sector to build on. In coining new terms for old ideas he is ignoring the vast literature of political and philosophical thought discussing these matters and gaining the support of hackers for a political agenda. And, most importantly, dismissing tough ethical and political decisions by claiming that government is some kind of an optimization problem. I'm not sure if he convinced me regarding O'Reilly specifically (haven't read O'Reilly enough), and I agree with others about the repetition and bad style ("crazy talk"?). But some actual thoughts were hidden in there.
- iamwil 14y ago
  I wasn't able to wade through it all either, but I thought it was clear the point was that O'Reilly bends thought and attitudes in Silicon Valley through PR and marketing of memes and buzzwords. To the OP, this has had negative consequences, and he goes through them point by point.
potatolicious 14y ago
Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now. If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was actually a point besides "Tim O'Reilly is evil incarnate", which he established in the first two paragraphs. And then re-established in the third. And the fourth... Don't get me wrong, I whine bitterly about the over-glorified promise of the Silicon Valley techno-drome, where raw technology is supposed to solve all of humanity's woes. I fail to see how this article addresses this, at all.
- pnathan 14y ago
  Several points were being made, as I can tell from a single reading. Note that I don't claim to do anything more than summarize, and that, probably badly. Read the original to rebut/clarify my take... - The open source movement separated from libre source in the pursuit of profits; Mr. O'Reilly was heavily involved in that. - Mr. O'Reilly has changed & massaged certain words and meanings in a masterful art of propaganda. - Mr. O'Reilly's influence & the approach he favors has demoted the individual's ability to effectively govern themselves.
  - mr_spothawk 14y ago
    Additionally: the author does not support O'Reilly's (or any "Randian" for that matter) politics. That the author (a great writer) would use Rand (an awful writer) as the strawman here indicates he's never read her work (it sucks, fyi) and is only reacting to what he thinks it is. Say what you want about Rand's political views, it's clear that the author doesn't understand them... implying that he doesn't understand O'Reilly's either. The first half of the article was an interesting historic lesson for me. The last half of the article, less so.
- svachalek 14y ago
  LOL. After skimming a few pages, I was hoping to just skip it and find the discussion about what this article is actually accusing O'Reilly of. I can see why the author may feel threatened by anyone who actually has communication skills.
pjungwir 14y ago
Is this an April Fools joke? After scrolling for pages I still hadn't read anything substantive, and I was only 1/6th of the way down.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  I'm afraid I went down the rabbit hole here... "In 1981 the young O'Reilly even wrote a reputable biography of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, in which he waxes lyrical about Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers." And the book is available here http://oreilly.com/tim/herbert/index.html http://oreilly.com/tim/herbert/index.html Stallman's four freedoms look very clear don't they?
- rbanffy 14y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out this article is the result of repeated iterations of a prose generator.
bascule 14y ago
Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is happening: while global mean surface temperature is rising, climate change may cause cooling in other areas. If people were to accept the phrase "climate change", perhaps it would help end comments like "scientists say the earth is getting hotter... why have our winters been extra cold?"
- smacktoward 14y ago
  Luntz was the one who picked up on the emergence of the new term and urged Republican policymakers to use it in place of "global warming," because to people unschooled in the details of the subject "climate change" sounds less dramatic and therefore calls less for immediate action. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.cli... for background on this. Luntz took a term that scientists developed and turned it against them, very effectively. This is part of why science communicators keep losing policy battles to Luntz and others like him -- you're right that "climate change" is a more scientifically accurate term, but it's also a less scary term, and therefore if you think that something needs to be done about the problem anytime soon you would be better served to avoid it than to embrace it. EDIT: If you want more examples of how science communicators fail and guidance on how to do better, Randy Olson's book Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243396051&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/15...) is a good place to start.
mistermcgruff 14y ago
I was kinda interested when I started reading this thing, but the article assumes you're already a Tim O'Reilly scholar -- the article is devoid of examples of his behavior. Whenever an article makes claims about a figure, I like to have an exhibit A, B, and C for every point argued.
dade_ 14y ago
It is for articles like these, that TL,DR was created. EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes" is clever and good.
- jchrisa 14y ago
  I didn't think it was so bad. I don't have time to go into detail, but briefly: If you read it as a critique of tech culture generally (and not Tim personally) it's interesting. The critique about polluting language is the crux of it. This is a critique worth diving into more. But the author didn't do a good job of it. It reads like the author got a whiff of some Philosophy, and then rather than expand the ideas and connect them to the larger culture, he just found a convenient figurehead and wrote some link-bait. He could have easily targeted Richard Dawkins (inventer of the term meme) or any number of others. The reason I think the article wasn't as bad as some is because I'm just so hungry for philosophical thought in the tech world. Maybe this will make some hackers think critically. If you like philosophy and want to delve into the discussion about the value of language and it's intersection with software, there's a mailing list here you should check out: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/philosophy-in-a-time-of-software https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/philosophy-in-a-time...
  - wyclif 14y ago
    re: his philosophy. It reminded me of Bacon: "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
- darushimo 14y ago
  Ugh...episteme's a word that dates back to Plato, although the author seems to use it like Foucault does in 'The Order of Things.' That is--it's exceptionally NOT "coming up" with the word, assuming you mean to imply he's inventing the word for this article. I like your first sentence though ;)
unoti 14y ago
This article, and its presence on the front page of HN, helped make it abundantly clear to me that I should probably be working right now instead of wasting my time on Hacker News.
xradionut 14y ago
Having been a developer through the last couple of decades, I've appreciated some of the books that ORA has published. But I'm wary of Tim pimping the the latest wave that sells books and conferences. The current wave is "Big Data" and my spam folder has countless missives promoting this conference or that gathering. Sigh...
spinchange 14y ago
I think Steven Johnson said it best about Mr. Morozov: “He’s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business.”
zeruch 14y ago
It's not his best work by any stretch (its overly dense and repetitive) and some factoids are off the mark, but I do like that he has pointed out that the kind of back-patting altruism everyone likes to pretend is the best reward for their efforts is exposed as the barely upright rationalization for what is otherwise what I call "benign greed". I'm not exempt from it either; I like money, and I like doing interesting things to earn it. If I can make the world a better place for the effort, all the better, but it isn't the raison d'etre, and I won't posture otherwise...a large number of folks in the value do though (possibly to the point of self-denial).
pg 14y ago
Stylish and smooth-talking are the last words I'd use to describe Tim. Whereas they do fairly accurately describe the tone of this article.
- teawithcarl 14y ago
  I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent. Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth. Always worth reading. This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" and "free software". I had no idea Tim O'Reilly actively barred Stallman from his early conferences, which crucially helped create the competing open source community. Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education). HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    I sort of understand the value people see in Morozov as a counterweight to tech's occasional fatuousness, but this wasn't a good article. As someone who is morally (if not intellectually) coming from a similar place as him, I found myself getting progressively more and more unhappy with the article the farther I got; it became a caricature of a point that deserves to be made more carefully.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      I thought it was ok, and I don't actually usually like Morozov much. But I think it was confusing in being nominally about O'Reilly. The bulk of the article is only tangentially about O'Reilly, and is more along the lines of a reprise of Richard Stallman's essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", but for a non-tech audience who probably wouldn't read Stallman (he does at least cite/credit that Stallman piece, though he paraphrases it in more words than the actual original piece). O'Reilly seems to get grafted on because he organized some conferences and promoted the term among businesspeople, and is taken to be emblematic of a certain kind of Valley culture.
deleted 14y ago
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jholman 14y ago
Whew, I read 4500 words, then paused to see how many more I had to go, and quit at that point. (As you will see from this comment, I'm pretty patient with length, but Morozov defeated me.) Here's my review of the first 4500 words: 1) There's a lot of really fucking useless ad hominem. Offensively useless, offensively voluminous. Do you actually have something substantial to say about the man, or is it just linkbait? Oh, I see. Anyway, after the first ten paragraphs, I just assumed that the author couldn't be trusted in his analysis of O'Reilly, the person. Oh, and there's some hilarious ranting in the first paragraph or four about the offensively bland jargon of silicon valley PR machines. But it has nothing to do with the rest of the article (even less than the ad hominem on O'Reilly). 2) Morozov makes a case that O'Reilly is more interested in Randian entrepreneurship than in user freedom. I'm not clear how fair it is to tar O'Reilly with the Randian brush (obviously many HNers will say "tar?!? laud! gild!", and we can quietly disagree about that), and again, I no longer trust any assertion Morozov makes about O'Reilly. But certainly some people exist who are pro-open-source but anti-free-software (especially anti-stallmanite), and many of them are laudable and reasonable people. 3) Further on free software vs open source, there's a useful discussion about how Stallman is interested in ends, but open source (and perhaps O'Reilly) is about means. Particularly interesting is how, in an era of desktop software, licenses were an important means to Stallman's ends, not an end in and of themselves. If you confuse the means for the ends, then in an era of cloud computing, you might say "oh these licenses no longer matter so the ends are accomplished", but of course that's emphatically not the Free Software position. And maybe we should give serious consideration to the free software position. (I think we should give serious consideration to the free software position!) 4) As Morozov points out, "open" is a slippery word, and he has some citations of O'Reilly using it in hilariously slippery and demagogical ways. I think this is a good point, and I hate that kind of slippery reasoning-by-analogy. Morozov says "Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as 'open'". Well, that's true, Morozov, but I can think of a word that's slipperier and sexier: "free". (It's still super-slippery and super-sex if you somehow restrict yourself to the "libre" sense.) Free software advocates are forever trying to explain that my freedom to restrict what you do with software I wrote isn't freedom, and while I support that cause overall, I'm not entirely enamoured of the doublespeak inherent in the branding. And at this point, I ran out of patience with TFA. Maybe I'll come back to it later, read another 3000 words, and add another comment. Avalanche of verbosity notwithstanding, I think there's an important thing here for hackers, buried in 15k words of bad writing. I think Stallman's movement is important as a matter of ethics. And I think the ethics-free engineering-and-business-focused open-source movement is important. And I think that hackers/coders/developers/compscientists who are also citizens should think seriously about both of these movements. And I think anyone who says "FLOSS" is either perpetrating doublespeak, or a victim of it, because "Free/Libre Software" and "Open Source Software" are different things, which only-sometimes have common cause.
CleanedStar 14y ago
The comments on this article is that it is: "without...a thesis or a point", "hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking" This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air. I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the readers here. In the seventh paragraph it says "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101". Do you understand what he means by saying that? Do you know who Bernard-Henri Levy is? Do you know why the Baffler crowd holds him in contempt? Can you give a detailed explanation of the disagreements between the New Philosophers and the post-structuralists? Most Baffler readers can answer these questions, and it is assumed that someone reading the article could fully answer what "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101" means. If you don't understand that, you won't understand the article, and can not dismiss it other than to say you don't understand it. As far as verbosity - Noam Chomsky often says if you repeat popular propaganda bromides, you can just stop there. If you say something counter to the cultural hegemony, it will need a long explanation, footnotes, multiple references and so forth. This is one reason articles like this seem long, if he is making a point about O'Reilly, he will have to point to multiple instances of things O'Reilly said, to nail down the case he is making.
- thedudemabry 14y ago
  I'm not sure that the throwaway metaphor in the seventh paragraph is in any way related to a reader's dismissal of each argument in the article. Each piece of evidence presented in the article is poorly analyzed, even when it could provide a solid foundation for an argument. As far as verbosity goes, a longer collection of ad-hominem attacks does not equal a stronger or more persuasive argument.
- mturmon 14y ago
  Thanks for this counterpoint to the glib dismissals around here. The message of the article is hard to hear if you already have ideological commitments to the transformative potential of entrepreneurial activity and to the power of Web 2.0. It's a long, difficult article. So, pick something you didn't like, and dismiss it all wholesale? Too easy.
danso 14y ago
Evgeny Morozov is just a poor man's Malcolm Gladwell, and one focused solely on being contrarian to anything future-thinking, which makes him a darling for old media. Here's a recent interview with him from Gawker: http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-silicon-valleys-fiercest-critic http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-s... Here's he talks about something he thinks he read on Hacker News: http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779 http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779 > I don't think we should ban them. But boy most of tech blogs would SO MUCH benefit from being ridiculed. Do you read the stuff they publish? I recall seeing a headline - on Hacker News, I think - on how "Uber will disrupt racism." I mean, what on earth is this? The Onion is less funny. While I have no doubt that there are some HNers who are "Yes, startups can fix ANYTHING", I had a feeling that most HNers were not so credulous. So I did a search for "Uber" and "racism": https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=uber+racism https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=uber+racis... Turns out the headline he mocked was from Reason magazine ("How market forces undermine racism: Uber Cab Edition"). But it figures that someone like Morozov who reflexively shits on anything Google or any tech giant tries to do would not be bothered to conduct a simple Internet search before making a mocking assertion
- nsomething 14y ago
  That's funny, I said the exact opposite to my friends comparing this piece to Gladwell.
- kragen 14y ago
  Are you saying that Morozov should have been talking about ridiculing Libertarians instead of ridiculing tech blogs when he brought up that assertion? Perhaps that seems like a major error to you? I don't think it would to him.
  - mr_spothawk 14y ago
    Morozov didn't disappoint, the last 8,000 words were devoted to ridiculing Libertarians.
dechols 14y ago
The author invents new words regularly in this article. Stephen King's "On Writing" talks about this, and I'm paraphrasing: "Writers who invent words are bad writers."
- obviouslygreen 14y ago
  Which is hilarious if you've read much King (he was my favorite author for a very long time), unless he actually claims to be a bad writer himself, in which case writing a book called On Writing is a questionable endeavor.
- kragen 14y ago
  You would think that if he did it "regularly" you could have come up with at least one example.
RougeFemme 14y ago
Yes, it's long. No, I didn't finish it - yet. I fully intend to. I thought it would be a relatively quick read and then it turned out to be more of an intellectual exercise than I anticipated. Still, it kept me interested enough to make me want to go back and read more. Even though I took it all with a grain of salt, I started viewing O'Reilley from a different perspective - maybe not so much different as more complex. And his view of Silicon Valley was certainly a breath of fresh air compared to what normally makes it through the media filters.
cjoh 14y ago
I find it absolutely amazing that a guy who coined the term "mindless clicktivism" spent more than 14,000 words on an attack on Tim O'Reilly. Aren't there more important things to worry about? Disclosure: I'm an O'Reilly author.
pnathan 14y ago
Metacomment: I don't think that it's a bad thing to consider and reconsider the ideas being pushed and pumped by various parties. Even when the party being critiqued is pushing the agenda you favor. The article could stand to be a higher-entropy source though. It proved distressingly low-entropy after a while.
art_arbitrage 14y ago
The article raises some interesting ideas but I think it misses some really big things. I've always seen O'Reilly as more of a passionate commenter/pundit as opposed to a influential operator. This isn't to say that he has no influence, but I think he's mostly just synthysizing the Valley zeitgeist. In other words, he seems like an odd target for what I see as a cultural critique. Maybe I'm not smart enough to actually disagree with Morozov, but I find it difficult to see the problem here. Even if Morozov is right, is O'Reilly really the most guilty party and why exactly are the things he is doing bad? For such a long article, there seems to be a lot of unstated assumptions. FWIW I live in SF so maybe I can't see forest for the trees.
marshray 14y ago
Stuff like this is just weird: What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else. I wonder if this makes more sense if you've never used or written free and/or open source software.
kragen 14y ago
Tim's short rebuttal from over on Google+ is worth repeating (https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/Q8EqCQJstBE https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/Q8EqCQJstBE): > He could just have easily picked out a narrative that highlighted all the criticisms I've made of Silicon Valley "solutionism" (his current bete noir). If he'd really done his research, he would have found Steve Talbott's book The Future Does Not Compute, which I published all the way back in 1995 in a first attempt to get people thinking about the ambiguous gifts that technology brings us. He could have also discovered my distaste for Libertarian fairy dust, my warnings about loss of freedom in the cloud era (which I started making back in 1999, before they became fashionable), or my arguments for the moral basis of both corporate and government decision making. By the way, how pathetic is it that only 18 hours after this item was posted to HN, it's already off the front page of the site, and the conversation here is nearly dead? That's virtually guaranteeing that most of the comments will be made by people who haven't read the article.
room271 14y ago
I'm disappointed in Hacker News. The top comments seem to be about people lacking the patience to read the article and then criticising the article for being too long! Please either spend real time reading the article and thinking about it and then comment, or don't comment at all.
jboynyc 14y ago
So far no commenter has mentioned that this piece appeared in The Baffler, where Aaron Swartz was a contributing editor. The announcement of Swartz joining The Baffler was previously linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298445 While Morozov's essay to some may appear to be coming out of left field, it's actually appearing in a venue that takes ethical concerns in relation to technological innovation quite seriously as evidenced by whom it associates with.

108 points by kmfrk 14y ago

Aside from the actual content, I'm intrigued how working on this sort of content can pay. The author claims to have spent three months (not necessarily full-time, I assume) reading everything O'Reilly has personally written in public and this gigantic article must have taken a good week or two to write and edit alone. That's several thousand dollars of effort there and I can't imagine it ever getting paid back by this article, no matter how good it is (or not).

MaysonL 14y ago
See his website: http://www.evgenymorozov.com http://www.evgenymorozov.com

savagejen 14y ago

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." -Eleanor Roosevelt

beachstartup 14y ago

i got through about 15 pages without finding a thesis or a point being made.

lubujackson 14y ago
I guess the whole point is that O'Reilly is rebranding propaganda as "meme-engineering" even though they are technically the same.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  I read the article and think the point is deeper than that. I would summarize it like this: Tim O'Reilly's business has changed from selling things (books, conferences) to selling ideologies ("Web 2.0", "government as a framework"). This is a relationship that goes both ways: the books and conferences provide crucial support for the ideologies he sells (the existence of a "Web 2.0" conference can be cited as proof that "Web 2.0" is a real thing), and the ideologies create demand for books and conferences as they spread. The primary problem the author (Evgeny Morozov) has with this isn't that O'Reilly profits from it, but rather that the ideologies O'Reilly sells tend to provide corporate-friendly alternatives that are used to marginalize rising ideologies that could threaten existing power structures. Examples discussed: - "Open source" as an ideology focused on the rights of the software developer, as opposed to the ideology it was explicitly designed to compete with, Richard Stallman's "free software" movement, which focused instead on the rights of the software user - "Web 2.0" companies wanted to package up information about their users and sell it to the highest bidder; the ideology supported this by positioning it as a natural evolution of the Web rather than a major power shift - "Government as a service" would involve taking major systems currently run by government and privatizing them, but covers this with a layer of techno-dust to avoid having to talk about the negative implications of privatization Hence the comparison of O'Reilly to famed Republican spin architect Frank Luntz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz). Luntz has made a career selling policies to people they will hurt by packaging them up with attractive-sounding words. Morozov argues that O'Reilly is in the same business.
  - ptaffs 14y ago
    Awesome summary. Thanks.
  - tankbot 14y ago
    Thank you! I couldn't make it through the whole thing. Too little nourishment per paragraph to complete the daunting trek!
  - ttuominen 14y ago
    I also read it, and I think you summarize it well. I'd like to add that the author's main aim seems to be in revealing a strong technocratic tendency underlying O'Reilly's thought. The technocracy is shown for example in the naive assumption that political decisions can be calculated algorithmically with enough data and intelligent algorithms. According to the author, O'Reilly hides the political claim that small government is good behind technological newspeak about governments providing only the essential APIs for the private sector to build on. In coining new terms for old ideas he is ignoring the vast literature of political and philosophical thought discussing these matters and gaining the support of hackers for a political agenda. And, most importantly, dismissing tough ethical and political decisions by claiming that government is some kind of an optimization problem. I'm not sure if he convinced me regarding O'Reilly specifically (haven't read O'Reilly enough), and I agree with others about the repetition and bad style ("crazy talk"?). But some actual thoughts were hidden in there.
iamwil 14y ago
I wasn't able to wade through it all either, but I thought it was clear the point was that O'Reilly bends thought and attitudes in Silicon Valley through PR and marketing of memes and buzzwords. To the OP, this has had negative consequences, and he goes through them point by point.

potatolicious 14y ago

Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now. If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was actually a point besides "Tim O'Reilly is evil incarnate", which he established in the first two paragraphs. And then re-established in the third. And the fourth... Don't get me wrong, I whine bitterly about the over-glorified promise of the Silicon Valley techno-drome, where raw technology is supposed to solve all of humanity's woes. I fail to see how this article addresses this, at all.

pnathan 14y ago
Several points were being made, as I can tell from a single reading. Note that I don't claim to do anything more than summarize, and that, probably badly. Read the original to rebut/clarify my take... - The open source movement separated from libre source in the pursuit of profits; Mr. O'Reilly was heavily involved in that. - Mr. O'Reilly has changed & massaged certain words and meanings in a masterful art of propaganda. - Mr. O'Reilly's influence & the approach he favors has demoted the individual's ability to effectively govern themselves.
- mr_spothawk 14y ago
  Additionally: the author does not support O'Reilly's (or any "Randian" for that matter) politics. That the author (a great writer) would use Rand (an awful writer) as the strawman here indicates he's never read her work (it sucks, fyi) and is only reacting to what he thinks it is. Say what you want about Rand's political views, it's clear that the author doesn't understand them... implying that he doesn't understand O'Reilly's either. The first half of the article was an interesting historic lesson for me. The last half of the article, less so.
svachalek 14y ago
LOL. After skimming a few pages, I was hoping to just skip it and find the discussion about what this article is actually accusing O'Reilly of. I can see why the author may feel threatened by anyone who actually has communication skills.

pjungwir 14y ago

Is this an April Fools joke? After scrolling for pages I still hadn't read anything substantive, and I was only 1/6th of the way down.

keithpeter 14y ago
I'm afraid I went down the rabbit hole here... "In 1981 the young O'Reilly even wrote a reputable biography of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, in which he waxes lyrical about Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers." And the book is available here http://oreilly.com/tim/herbert/index.html http://oreilly.com/tim/herbert/index.html Stallman's four freedoms look very clear don't they?
rbanffy 14y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out this article is the result of repeated iterations of a prose generator.

bascule 14y ago

Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is happening: while global mean surface temperature is rising, climate change may cause cooling in other areas. If people were to accept the phrase "climate change", perhaps it would help end comments like "scientists say the earth is getting hotter... why have our winters been extra cold?"

smacktoward 14y ago
Luntz was the one who picked up on the emergence of the new term and urged Republican policymakers to use it in place of "global warming," because to people unschooled in the details of the subject "climate change" sounds less dramatic and therefore calls less for immediate action. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.cli... for background on this. Luntz took a term that scientists developed and turned it against them, very effectively. This is part of why science communicators keep losing policy battles to Luntz and others like him -- you're right that "climate change" is a more scientifically accurate term, but it's also a less scary term, and therefore if you think that something needs to be done about the problem anytime soon you would be better served to avoid it than to embrace it. EDIT: If you want more examples of how science communicators fail and guidance on how to do better, Randy Olson's book Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243396051&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/15...) is a good place to start.

mistermcgruff 14y ago

I was kinda interested when I started reading this thing, but the article assumes you're already a Tim O'Reilly scholar -- the article is devoid of examples of his behavior. Whenever an article makes claims about a figure, I like to have an exhibit A, B, and C for every point argued.

dade_ 14y ago

It is for articles like these, that TL,DR was created. EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes" is clever and good.

jchrisa 14y ago
I didn't think it was so bad. I don't have time to go into detail, but briefly: If you read it as a critique of tech culture generally (and not Tim personally) it's interesting. The critique about polluting language is the crux of it. This is a critique worth diving into more. But the author didn't do a good job of it. It reads like the author got a whiff of some Philosophy, and then rather than expand the ideas and connect them to the larger culture, he just found a convenient figurehead and wrote some link-bait. He could have easily targeted Richard Dawkins (inventer of the term meme) or any number of others. The reason I think the article wasn't as bad as some is because I'm just so hungry for philosophical thought in the tech world. Maybe this will make some hackers think critically. If you like philosophy and want to delve into the discussion about the value of language and it's intersection with software, there's a mailing list here you should check out: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/philosophy-in-a-time-of-software https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/philosophy-in-a-time...
- wyclif 14y ago
  re: his philosophy. It reminded me of Bacon: "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
darushimo 14y ago
Ugh...episteme's a word that dates back to Plato, although the author seems to use it like Foucault does in 'The Order of Things.' That is--it's exceptionally NOT "coming up" with the word, assuming you mean to imply he's inventing the word for this article. I like your first sentence though ;)

unoti 14y ago

This article, and its presence on the front page of HN, helped make it abundantly clear to me that I should probably be working right now instead of wasting my time on Hacker News.

xradionut 14y ago

Having been a developer through the last couple of decades, I've appreciated some of the books that ORA has published. But I'm wary of Tim pimping the the latest wave that sells books and conferences. The current wave is "Big Data" and my spam folder has countless missives promoting this conference or that gathering. Sigh...

spinchange 14y ago

I think Steven Johnson said it best about Mr. Morozov: “He’s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business.”

zeruch 14y ago

It's not his best work by any stretch (its overly dense and repetitive) and some factoids are off the mark, but I do like that he has pointed out that the kind of back-patting altruism everyone likes to pretend is the best reward for their efforts is exposed as the barely upright rationalization for what is otherwise what I call "benign greed". I'm not exempt from it either; I like money, and I like doing interesting things to earn it. If I can make the world a better place for the effort, all the better, but it isn't the raison d'etre, and I won't posture otherwise...a large number of folks in the value do though (possibly to the point of self-denial).

pg 14y ago

Stylish and smooth-talking are the last words I'd use to describe Tim. Whereas they do fairly accurately describe the tone of this article.

teawithcarl 14y ago
I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent. Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth. Always worth reading. This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" and "free software". I had no idea Tim O'Reilly actively barred Stallman from his early conferences, which crucially helped create the competing open source community. Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education). HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
- tptacek 14y ago
  I sort of understand the value people see in Morozov as a counterweight to tech's occasional fatuousness, but this wasn't a good article. As someone who is morally (if not intellectually) coming from a similar place as him, I found myself getting progressively more and more unhappy with the article the farther I got; it became a caricature of a point that deserves to be made more carefully.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I thought it was ok, and I don't actually usually like Morozov much. But I think it was confusing in being nominally about O'Reilly. The bulk of the article is only tangentially about O'Reilly, and is more along the lines of a reprise of Richard Stallman's essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", but for a non-tech audience who probably wouldn't read Stallman (he does at least cite/credit that Stallman piece, though he paraphrases it in more words than the actual original piece). O'Reilly seems to get grafted on because he organized some conferences and promoted the term among businesspeople, and is taken to be emblematic of a certain kind of Valley culture.

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jholman 14y ago

Whew, I read 4500 words, then paused to see how many more I had to go, and quit at that point. (As you will see from this comment, I'm pretty patient with length, but Morozov defeated me.) Here's my review of the first 4500 words: 1) There's a lot of really fucking useless ad hominem. Offensively useless, offensively voluminous. Do you actually have something substantial to say about the man, or is it just linkbait? Oh, I see. Anyway, after the first ten paragraphs, I just assumed that the author couldn't be trusted in his analysis of O'Reilly, the person. Oh, and there's some hilarious ranting in the first paragraph or four about the offensively bland jargon of silicon valley PR machines. But it has nothing to do with the rest of the article (even less than the ad hominem on O'Reilly). 2) Morozov makes a case that O'Reilly is more interested in Randian entrepreneurship than in user freedom. I'm not clear how fair it is to tar O'Reilly with the Randian brush (obviously many HNers will say "tar?!? laud! gild!", and we can quietly disagree about that), and again, I no longer trust any assertion Morozov makes about O'Reilly. But certainly some people exist who are pro-open-source but anti-free-software (especially anti-stallmanite), and many of them are laudable and reasonable people. 3) Further on free software vs open source, there's a useful discussion about how Stallman is interested in ends, but open source (and perhaps O'Reilly) is about means. Particularly interesting is how, in an era of desktop software, licenses were an important means to Stallman's ends, not an end in and of themselves. If you confuse the means for the ends, then in an era of cloud computing, you might say "oh these licenses no longer matter so the ends are accomplished", but of course that's emphatically not the Free Software position. And maybe we should give serious consideration to the free software position. (I think we should give serious consideration to the free software position!) 4) As Morozov points out, "open" is a slippery word, and he has some citations of O'Reilly using it in hilariously slippery and demagogical ways. I think this is a good point, and I hate that kind of slippery reasoning-by-analogy. Morozov says "Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as 'open'". Well, that's true, Morozov, but I can think of a word that's slipperier and sexier: "free". (It's still super-slippery and super-sex if you somehow restrict yourself to the "libre" sense.) Free software advocates are forever trying to explain that my freedom to restrict what you do with software I wrote isn't freedom, and while I support that cause overall, I'm not entirely enamoured of the doublespeak inherent in the branding. And at this point, I ran out of patience with TFA. Maybe I'll come back to it later, read another 3000 words, and add another comment. Avalanche of verbosity notwithstanding, I think there's an important thing here for hackers, buried in 15k words of bad writing. I think Stallman's movement is important as a matter of ethics. And I think the ethics-free engineering-and-business-focused open-source movement is important. And I think that hackers/coders/developers/compscientists who are also citizens should think seriously about both of these movements. And I think anyone who says "FLOSS" is either perpetrating doublespeak, or a victim of it, because "Free/Libre Software" and "Open Source Software" are different things, which only-sometimes have common cause.

CleanedStar 14y ago

The comments on this article is that it is: "without...a thesis or a point", "hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking" This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air. I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the readers here. In the seventh paragraph it says "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101". Do you understand what he means by saying that? Do you know who Bernard-Henri Levy is? Do you know why the Baffler crowd holds him in contempt? Can you give a detailed explanation of the disagreements between the New Philosophers and the post-structuralists? Most Baffler readers can answer these questions, and it is assumed that someone reading the article could fully answer what "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101" means. If you don't understand that, you won't understand the article, and can not dismiss it other than to say you don't understand it. As far as verbosity - Noam Chomsky often says if you repeat popular propaganda bromides, you can just stop there. If you say something counter to the cultural hegemony, it will need a long explanation, footnotes, multiple references and so forth. This is one reason articles like this seem long, if he is making a point about O'Reilly, he will have to point to multiple instances of things O'Reilly said, to nail down the case he is making.

thedudemabry 14y ago
I'm not sure that the throwaway metaphor in the seventh paragraph is in any way related to a reader's dismissal of each argument in the article. Each piece of evidence presented in the article is poorly analyzed, even when it could provide a solid foundation for an argument. As far as verbosity goes, a longer collection of ad-hominem attacks does not equal a stronger or more persuasive argument.
mturmon 14y ago
Thanks for this counterpoint to the glib dismissals around here. The message of the article is hard to hear if you already have ideological commitments to the transformative potential of entrepreneurial activity and to the power of Web 2.0. It's a long, difficult article. So, pick something you didn't like, and dismiss it all wholesale? Too easy.

danso 14y ago

Evgeny Morozov is just a poor man's Malcolm Gladwell, and one focused solely on being contrarian to anything future-thinking, which makes him a darling for old media. Here's a recent interview with him from Gawker: http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-silicon-valleys-fiercest-critic http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-s... Here's he talks about something he thinks he read on Hacker News: http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779 http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779 > I don't think we should ban them. But boy most of tech blogs would SO MUCH benefit from being ridiculed. Do you read the stuff they publish? I recall seeing a headline - on Hacker News, I think - on how "Uber will disrupt racism." I mean, what on earth is this? The Onion is less funny. While I have no doubt that there are some HNers who are "Yes, startups can fix ANYTHING", I had a feeling that most HNers were not so credulous. So I did a search for "Uber" and "racism": https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=uber+racism https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=uber+racis... Turns out the headline he mocked was from Reason magazine ("How market forces undermine racism: Uber Cab Edition"). But it figures that someone like Morozov who reflexively shits on anything Google or any tech giant tries to do would not be bothered to conduct a simple Internet search before making a mocking assertion

nsomething 14y ago
That's funny, I said the exact opposite to my friends comparing this piece to Gladwell.
kragen 14y ago
Are you saying that Morozov should have been talking about ridiculing Libertarians instead of ridiculing tech blogs when he brought up that assertion? Perhaps that seems like a major error to you? I don't think it would to him.
- mr_spothawk 14y ago
  Morozov didn't disappoint, the last 8,000 words were devoted to ridiculing Libertarians.

dechols 14y ago

The author invents new words regularly in this article. Stephen King's "On Writing" talks about this, and I'm paraphrasing: "Writers who invent words are bad writers."

obviouslygreen 14y ago
Which is hilarious if you've read much King (he was my favorite author for a very long time), unless he actually claims to be a bad writer himself, in which case writing a book called On Writing is a questionable endeavor.
kragen 14y ago
You would think that if he did it "regularly" you could have come up with at least one example.

RougeFemme 14y ago

Yes, it's long. No, I didn't finish it - yet. I fully intend to. I thought it would be a relatively quick read and then it turned out to be more of an intellectual exercise than I anticipated. Still, it kept me interested enough to make me want to go back and read more. Even though I took it all with a grain of salt, I started viewing O'Reilley from a different perspective - maybe not so much different as more complex. And his view of Silicon Valley was certainly a breath of fresh air compared to what normally makes it through the media filters.

cjoh 14y ago

I find it absolutely amazing that a guy who coined the term "mindless clicktivism" spent more than 14,000 words on an attack on Tim O'Reilly. Aren't there more important things to worry about? Disclosure: I'm an O'Reilly author.

pnathan 14y ago

Metacomment: I don't think that it's a bad thing to consider and reconsider the ideas being pushed and pumped by various parties. Even when the party being critiqued is pushing the agenda you favor. The article could stand to be a higher-entropy source though. It proved distressingly low-entropy after a while.

art_arbitrage 14y ago

The article raises some interesting ideas but I think it misses some really big things. I've always seen O'Reilly as more of a passionate commenter/pundit as opposed to a influential operator. This isn't to say that he has no influence, but I think he's mostly just synthysizing the Valley zeitgeist. In other words, he seems like an odd target for what I see as a cultural critique. Maybe I'm not smart enough to actually disagree with Morozov, but I find it difficult to see the problem here. Even if Morozov is right, is O'Reilly really the most guilty party and why exactly are the things he is doing bad? For such a long article, there seems to be a lot of unstated assumptions. FWIW I live in SF so maybe I can't see forest for the trees.

marshray 14y ago

Stuff like this is just weird: What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else. I wonder if this makes more sense if you've never used or written free and/or open source software.

kragen 14y ago

Tim's short rebuttal from over on Google+ is worth repeating (https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/Q8EqCQJstBE https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/Q8EqCQJstBE): > He could just have easily picked out a narrative that highlighted all the criticisms I've made of Silicon Valley "solutionism" (his current bete noir). If he'd really done his research, he would have found Steve Talbott's book The Future Does Not Compute, which I published all the way back in 1995 in a first attempt to get people thinking about the ambiguous gifts that technology brings us. He could have also discovered my distaste for Libertarian fairy dust, my warnings about loss of freedom in the cloud era (which I started making back in 1999, before they became fashionable), or my arguments for the moral basis of both corporate and government decision making. By the way, how pathetic is it that only 18 hours after this item was posted to HN, it's already off the front page of the site, and the conversation here is nearly dead? That's virtually guaranteeing that most of the comments will be made by people who haven't read the article.

room271 14y ago

I'm disappointed in Hacker News. The top comments seem to be about people lacking the patience to read the article and then criticising the article for being too long! Please either spend real time reading the article and thinking about it and then comment, or don't comment at all.

jboynyc 14y ago

So far no commenter has mentioned that this piece appeared in The Baffler, where Aaron Swartz was a contributing editor. The announcement of Swartz joining The Baffler was previously linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298445 While Morozov's essay to some may appear to be coming out of left field, it's actually appearing in a venue that takes ethical concerns in relation to technological innovation quite seriously as evidenced by whom it associates with.