6 ms·

The Man Who Conquered, Then Warped Silicon Valley

42 points by enkiv2 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago
"Generally the province of fascists, artists or fascist artists, manifestos are a dying form. It takes gall to have published one anytime after, say, 1938." I dunno, here's a list of UK election manifestos, and they do still seem to be writing them, if only to serve as a checklist of things to ignore when in power. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man.htm http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man.htm
- mlmonkey 12y ago
  Not to forget, the Unabomber's Manifesto (published way after 1938).
- smacktoward 12y ago
  The article is from an American newspaper, and from the American perspective manifestos are not something we really see anymore. The word has become too weighed down by its association with nuts on the political fringe, like the Unabomber. (People still write political statements, of course; they just call them other things.)
  - eternalban 12y ago
    > ... American perspective ... You wish. How many Americans would even get the (clear) reference to the Futurists?
    - enkiv2 12y ago
      If you've graduated from an American high school, you should have been required to read the Futurist manifesto and several of the Dadaist manifestos. (I know that a lot of high school graduates never completed their curricula, or immediately forgot everything they learned, but you can hardly blame the school for that.)
  - digikata 12y ago
    You bring up a good point about the connotions associated with 'manifestos', but writings like political platforms & planks are largely ignored in the media. It seems like our mass media is largely dominated by reality-tv flavored coverage of political discourse.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    "from the American perspective manifestos are not something we really see anymore" I decided to have a look at google ngrams for the word manifesto in the American English corpus: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmanifesto%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year... The clear peaks for 1918 and 1932 are pretty impressive, but after the 1968 everest, the concept nosedives till you get to the oppressively featureless plain starting, amusingly, at 1984. Now there is platform instead. Which has none of the pesky connotations of promise that manifesto tended to carry. edit - British English, on the other hand, still loves the idea, though it has taken a knock in the last ten years. Our correlating peaks were 1915, 1940 and 1967, but the idea recovered here after 1973 and enjoyed strength during the 80s and 90s, instead of falling off a cliff. - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmanifesto%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year...
stalcottsmith 12y ago
I remember all this fondly since I became a young adult during the early years of the Internet when I setup up my first Unix system with a public TCP/IP address in 1990 and read Usenet back before endless September. I read the first year or two of WIRED magazine cover to cover. It seems there is now a four-way breakdown among American techies: * Mistrust BigGov but trust BigTech * Trust BigGov, mistrust BigTech * Trust both BigGov and BigTech * Mistrust both BigGov and BigTech And it all depends on your base political philosophy or leanings. This article is a pretty formulaic example of what happens when someone from the 2nd perspective discovers John Perry Barlow's writings.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Are there any offline archives of pre-AOL Usenet? These topics must have been discussed at that time, would be interesting to compare relative segments, then and now. Archives of The WELL would also be relevant.
  - stalcottsmith 12y ago
    Google bought the company that had the archive and for a while it was searchable as part of Google Groups. Now it is gone. I hope archive.org can put it online if it isn't lost forever.
    - enkiv2 12y ago
      It's still up. They just broke search-by-date, which makes it fairly useless for finding particular posts.
- wyclif 12y ago
  I'm a child of the 80s and I always went for option #4.
  - stalcottsmith 12y ago
    Well option #1 and #2 are untenable and result from uninformed naivete or deliberate head-in-sandism. You could rationally go for option #3 but you'd be rooting for the dark side. Cheers.
walterbell 12y ago
David Golumbia essay (2013) on this topic, http://www.academia.edu/4429212/Cyberlibertarianism_The_Extremist_Foundations_of_Digital_Freedom http://www.academia.edu/4429212/Cyberlibertarianism_The_Extr... "While cyberlibertarianism appears to be and in many ways is a theory of technology, I will discuss it today as a politics and as an epistemic theory, and above all an ideology, which is to say a belief system that serves purposes other than those goals at which it says it explicitly aims. ... It is not hard to understand how this strange mixture of pro-corporate and anti-corporate sentiment can coexist so readily. What most of those who write about hackers seem to miss, perhaps purposely, is the chronological dimension to the phenomenon, something like Mirowski’s Russian Doll working over time. ... As these individuals get older and realize the seriousness of the economic imperatives we all face, and as they come to understand that their technical skills and quasi-political bravado have served as terrific sales tools for future careers as technology developers and businesspeople, some of these same individuals (as we all do) change their perspective and hop on board a train that before they had been lobbing grenades at."
21echoes 12y ago
I'm so tired of hearing that "Today’s ambitions include Randian projects like secession, seasteading or private “innovation zones” where government regulations wouldn’t apply.", as if Peter Thiel is the only person in Silicon Valley making political statements.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  "who routinely refer to their corporations as city-states and call for secession" And of course, the links point to the single instance of both of those supposedly "routine" occurrences. The only thing more pathetic than the idiot who wrote this article are the HNers who found this article noteworthy enough to upvote. The only fact of worth in the entire article is mentioning that Barlow's work exists (as a historical curiosity, I find it rather interesting).

42 points by enkiv2 12y ago

"Generally the province of fascists, artists or fascist artists, manifestos are a dying form. It takes gall to have published one anytime after, say, 1938." I dunno, here's a list of UK election manifestos, and they do still seem to be writing them, if only to serve as a checklist of things to ignore when in power. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man.htm http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man.htm

mlmonkey 12y ago
Not to forget, the Unabomber's Manifesto (published way after 1938).
smacktoward 12y ago
The article is from an American newspaper, and from the American perspective manifestos are not something we really see anymore. The word has become too weighed down by its association with nuts on the political fringe, like the Unabomber. (People still write political statements, of course; they just call them other things.)
- eternalban 12y ago
  > ... American perspective ... You wish. How many Americans would even get the (clear) reference to the Futurists?
  - enkiv2 12y ago
    If you've graduated from an American high school, you should have been required to read the Futurist manifesto and several of the Dadaist manifestos. (I know that a lot of high school graduates never completed their curricula, or immediately forgot everything they learned, but you can hardly blame the school for that.)
- digikata 12y ago
  You bring up a good point about the connotions associated with 'manifestos', but writings like political platforms & planks are largely ignored in the media. It seems like our mass media is largely dominated by reality-tv flavored coverage of political discourse.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  "from the American perspective manifestos are not something we really see anymore" I decided to have a look at google ngrams for the word manifesto in the American English corpus: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmanifesto%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year... The clear peaks for 1918 and 1932 are pretty impressive, but after the 1968 everest, the concept nosedives till you get to the oppressively featureless plain starting, amusingly, at 1984. Now there is platform instead. Which has none of the pesky connotations of promise that manifesto tended to carry. edit - British English, on the other hand, still loves the idea, though it has taken a knock in the last ten years. Our correlating peaks were 1915, 1940 and 1967, but the idea recovered here after 1973 and enjoyed strength during the 80s and 90s, instead of falling off a cliff. - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmanifesto%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year...

stalcottsmith 12y ago

I remember all this fondly since I became a young adult during the early years of the Internet when I setup up my first Unix system with a public TCP/IP address in 1990 and read Usenet back before endless September. I read the first year or two of WIRED magazine cover to cover. It seems there is now a four-way breakdown among American techies: * Mistrust BigGov but trust BigTech * Trust BigGov, mistrust BigTech * Trust both BigGov and BigTech * Mistrust both BigGov and BigTech And it all depends on your base political philosophy or leanings. This article is a pretty formulaic example of what happens when someone from the 2nd perspective discovers John Perry Barlow's writings.

walterbell 12y ago
Are there any offline archives of pre-AOL Usenet? These topics must have been discussed at that time, would be interesting to compare relative segments, then and now. Archives of The WELL would also be relevant.
- stalcottsmith 12y ago
  Google bought the company that had the archive and for a while it was searchable as part of Google Groups. Now it is gone. I hope archive.org can put it online if it isn't lost forever.
  - enkiv2 12y ago
    It's still up. They just broke search-by-date, which makes it fairly useless for finding particular posts.
wyclif 12y ago
I'm a child of the 80s and I always went for option #4.
- stalcottsmith 12y ago
  Well option #1 and #2 are untenable and result from uninformed naivete or deliberate head-in-sandism. You could rationally go for option #3 but you'd be rooting for the dark side. Cheers.

walterbell 12y ago

David Golumbia essay (2013) on this topic, http://www.academia.edu/4429212/Cyberlibertarianism_The_Extremist_Foundations_of_Digital_Freedom http://www.academia.edu/4429212/Cyberlibertarianism_The_Extr... "While cyberlibertarianism appears to be and in many ways is a theory of technology, I will discuss it today as a politics and as an epistemic theory, and above all an ideology, which is to say a belief system that serves purposes other than those goals at which it says it explicitly aims. ... It is not hard to understand how this strange mixture of pro-corporate and anti-corporate sentiment can coexist so readily. What most of those who write about hackers seem to miss, perhaps purposely, is the chronological dimension to the phenomenon, something like Mirowski’s Russian Doll working over time. ... As these individuals get older and realize the seriousness of the economic imperatives we all face, and as they come to understand that their technical skills and quasi-political bravado have served as terrific sales tools for future careers as technology developers and businesspeople, some of these same individuals (as we all do) change their perspective and hop on board a train that before they had been lobbing grenades at."

21echoes 12y ago

I'm so tired of hearing that "Today’s ambitions include Randian projects like secession, seasteading or private “innovation zones” where government regulations wouldn’t apply.", as if Peter Thiel is the only person in Silicon Valley making political statements.

wutbrodo 12y ago
"who routinely refer to their corporations as city-states and call for secession" And of course, the links point to the single instance of both of those supposedly "routine" occurrences. The only thing more pathetic than the idiot who wrote this article are the HNers who found this article noteworthy enough to upvote. The only fact of worth in the entire article is mentioning that Barlow's work exists (as a historical curiosity, I find it rather interesting).