Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkeroack | Hacker News Reader

Hacker culture used to trend towards libertarian ideals: free speech absolutism, cyberpunk freedom, etc. Now we have a huge mass of people at Google forming a rage mob to punish someone for expressing an unpopular idea. Should people lose their livelihoods and be blacklisted from the industry because you disagree with them? (see also Brendan Eich)

View on HN

The software industry still trends toward libertarianism. A tiny slice of it in a specific area does not in some marginal ways on a small subset of social issues.

As a leftist, I find the notion that SV, northern California, or the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. have a left bias to be hilarious.

Anyone from outside of California would see SV as heavily left leaning. You have people protesting Google buses, Berkeley riots over conservative speakers, anti growth liberals preventing new construction, while simultaneously decrying the lack of affordable housing and gentrification, and plastic bags are the devil.

Most people don't want to work with jerks, and in a libertarian ideal would be free to choose whether to do so.

Most companies choose to get rid of jerks for a ton of sensible reasons. In a libertarian ideal they'd be free to choose who to hire/fire.

Large groups calling for someone to lose their job is totally in line with libertarian ideals. Nobody is calling for government regulation, this is just the (employment) market at work.

That's all well and good, but one of the core instincts of libertarianism is a deep distrust of angry mobs.

I don't think the SV crowd gets how reasonable the author looks to everyone else and how unreasonable the angry rants on Twitter look.

"everyone else" ... I don't know man, I haven't been ranting about this on twitter, and I find the author's document to be completely unreasonable, and many of the arguments against it to be entirely reasonable.

Maybe this just says more about our individual social groups ... or one of us is wrong about how prevalent one viewpoint is vs the other. Could be me :)

Misunderstanding libertarianism to mean "whatever the market does is just" is a common straw man. Just because libertarianism says that large groups calling for someone to lose their job is legal doesn't mean that all libertarians must necessarily believe that such a thing is moral or even right in every single case.

Who is the majority at Google though? You might be surprised that it is silent and the other kind of jerks would have to leave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com