“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999) | Hacker News Reader

“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999)

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I initially found this article disconcerting since in 1999 I would have described Computer Culture as closer to socialist than to libertarian. At that point in time Silicon Valley was still strongly influenced by HP culture which included giving back to the community and employee ownership of the company (stock options). Both of these are socialist concepts.

I got my insight into the authors thinking when he described EFF as a libertarian organization. Then a lightbulb went on in my head. I personally would not describe EFF as libertarian but I can see why someone would interpret it that way. EFF is based on a distrust of oligarchies and a distrust of governments ability to make technical decisions. Ah. Silicon Valley back then still viewed itself as the underdog and not as the alpha dog. Remember that for decades tech was dominated by IBM and suddenly it was dominated by Microsoft. The horrible antitrust case of Microsoft vs Netscape was in 1998. No wonder the tech culture distrusted government!

In 1999 the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility was still going strong. They also had a similar goal of EFF of limiting technical invasion of privacy. I look at everything they tried to stop - and it all went through.

I can't say that I trust government any more today than back then. The tech giants have changed and they still have an undue influence on government. Distrust of oligarchs is shared between both the far left and the far right.

This essay says little, although it is indicative of the uncertainty in the 90s as people tried to figure out exactly what was going on. 'Computer Culture' doesn't exactly have a lineage. By nature of the challenges that are faced in computing there is a high concentration of systems-thinkers who enjoy thinking about entire systems in their totality. This group of people are going to at least see the draw of libertarianism - as a philosophy it advocates a robust and highly fault tolerant system. Athoritarianism is a bad system because at some point a critical part becomes corrupt and then it delivers worse outcomes for pretty much everyone.

One area the essay tries to pick up on this but doesn't quite manage is the detour past IP law. There are people in the computer world who recognise that IP law has created a system that is clearly terrible. Trademarks are fine, copyright and patents have substantially hindered the development of good software. It isn't encouraging new ideas, it is delaying fast-follow-up of ideas that were always going to be discovered very quickly when someone turned their mind to a problem. Systems thinkers would naturally unite against a system so bad at delivering its stated outcome. The Open Source movement is indicative of what happens when people with system thinker ideals are left in charge (ie, people like Stallman and Torvalds).

People who have dedicated their lives to understanding data organisation aren't necessarily the ones who should be running the world; but the libertarian undertones aren't primarily about escaping from the world, they are a natural discovery on the path of someone looking at politics from a whole-system perspective and trying to optimise.

As it describes Xanadu, it sounds like this is an actual use case for a blockchain implementation?

> The logarithmically increasing demands on computing resource that such a perfect system would demand (each alteration recorded, each reading generating compensation for each author, a complete record or all such transactions accessible to all throughout the system) may have been its technological Waterloo; in conventional economic language, the system would probably drown in its own "transaction costs."

I'm not sure what to make of this article, but on a related note: the economics of software just seems to get weirder and weirder.

I guess most US developers are fairly politically liberal, although probably a good chunk are libtertarian. I'm sure the SV vote averages out Democrat though. From the outside though, tech companies are viewed as dangerous, neo-liberal, privacy-threatening, all the worst forms of capitalism. And yet the entire foundation (and a good part fo the main structure) of every data based product is based on open-source libraries in python, R, C, and Javascript that was written often for no pay, or as an academic or side-project. And they aren't even patented! They often aren't even really properly credited!

What does an economic theory of this even look like? Show me the incentive and reward and value-creation structure of a pandas developer?!

The view of tech companies as dangerous, and privacy-threatening,(while there are certainly issues) is presented in an inflated matter by the hyperbole loving main stream press, who feels their role as gatekeepers of ideas and news is threatened.

I get the opposite impression. It's pretty clear at this point that if it's closed source, cloud based, or riddled with telemetry (open or closed source); your privacy is out the window; and media isn't presenting any concern but the minimum, re-spewing the same PR copy companies use to justify their acts to the semi-aware.

Those two are oddly correct - old media is largely too illiterate to report on those issues so instead they just incessantly repeat bullshit about "destroying democracy" and "selling your data".

Software itself is not the primary product though. I argue that Open Source has paved the way for advertisement and services companies (traditionally non tech companies) to call themselves tech companies and gain an advantage in their respective spheres of buisness. Software has eaten the world, and now nobody is hungry. They do not care about core software or it's beauty. They don't care about hacking in true sense.

In that way, they are probably exploitive.

To me it seems that Open Source software works better with neoliberalism than traditional business does.

> Show me the incentive and reward and value-creation structure of a pandas developer?!

What incents a teenager in the profound belief that their first program was their best:

   10 PRINT "This class sucks!!!!!!"
   20 GOTO 10

This was a good article, by the way -- a 1999 look back 10-15 years at hippies like Stuart Brand getting into code. But from the article, it seems like Ted Nelson is the kind of guy who'd try to copyright the theory of relativity -:)

Not only that, but Xanadu never happened and Richard Stallman won - at least, in the sense that OSS and GNU/Linux are both widespread and accessible to billions

Academics or side-projects not getting the reward they are worth is common in every industry. The hundreds of academics that have worked on fusion in the past are not going to get much out of a commercially run plant.

Most Americans are still positive in their views of tech companies (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/29/americans-h...). The downtrend is clearly caused by the recent media coverage.

It makes sense if you consider that the hardest point of any economic transaction is convincing people that you have something of value to them, and the best way to increase the amount of money you take home (particularly when selling a scarce good like your labor) is to get more people interested in what you're selling and take the best offer.

Most open-source developers are motivated by exposure. The independent ones can often parlay their open-source contributions into a better job or higher salary; "I wrote Pandas" looks great on a resume. The corporate ones are usually doing it either for recruiting (by demonstrating that they support open-source software, and being able to attract & vet potential developers by their open-source contributions), or for publicity, or to commoditize their complements and increase the demand for their product.

Once the software is out there, it's free for everyone to use, so if it's useful, it gets used. Hard to compete with free.

A lot of other strange things about the software industry come from this realization that sales is the primary problem faced by every service business, and software is an effective way of making more sales. Google, Facebook, and Twitter's primary business model is in getting your service in front of people and increasing your sales; that is how they make hundreds of billions. The reason for the "price desert" between consumer software that costs ~$100/year and enterprise software that costs ~$100K/year is because the latter is sold through consultative sales that requires paying a professional salesperson. The reason why enterprise software companies will often offer a free version of their product (eg. Github, Dropbox, AWS, Heroku, YCombinator) is because it's free lead generation for the paid product, and usually offering the free version costs less for higher quality leads than traffic acquisition through paid sources like Google. The reason why VCs will bid up the shares of any business that has actual people using their product, regardless of how trivial it seems, is that they've solved the hardest part of building a business and can usually find new ways to increase the importance of their product and charge more for it afterwards.

The corollary is that sales is appearance management. So a sales driven economy is superficial and at least one step removed from tangible value and product quality.

It's all about politics and persuasion - i.e. rhetoric, narrative, and social relationships of various kinds. Tangible value creation - in the sense of making products that reliably get the job done with low friction and consistent customer delight - plays a secondary role at best.

Which is why social media is qualitatively different to mainstream media. Access to valuable relationships, and information about personal relationship patterns (cultural, professional, social, not especially romantic) and preferences, is the product - because they can be used to amplify the effectiveness of persuasion.

>Most open-source developers are motivated by exposure. The independent ones can often parlay their open-source contributions into a better job or higher salary; "I wrote Pandas" looks great on a resume

That's a pretty bold statement offered without much evidence. I'm not a major open source developer, but I've never been motivated by 'exposure' in my work. My motivation is almost always to build something useful that I want to use.

I'm not going to claim that everyone has the same motivation I do, but useful theories do not make overbroad assumptions.

Maybe when this was written, but now?

Most of the comments I read on HN advocate for some sort of government intervention - whether it is breaking up Facebook or Google or the evil of the day, or giving everyone a Universal Basic Income, or having more stringent laws against whatever someone dislikes.

Regardless of the merits of each proposition and each school of thoughts, I'd say computer culture is no longer libertarian.

A lot of computer culture is now 20 years older. Libertarian philosophy has less appeal when you start having kids, especially daughters, need blood pressure meds and have obligations like starting to think about caring for aging parents.

HN is a lot more diverse now, with people from all over the globe, including places a lot less conservative than Silicon Valley.

There are a lot more people from outside the computer industry here too these days. They offer a fresh perspective.

There's also been a lot more negative press about technology companies in recent decades, and a lot of the techno-utopian optimism that was so prevalent in the early days of the internet is harder to maintain in the face of, say, the rise of the surveillance state and ever the growing inequality that technology and technologists have enabled.

The world is turning in to a technological dystopia and people are starting to wake up to it.

The next market down turn might help this. It seemed like FOSS projects benefited quite a bit during the GR. People without work had time to contribute to projects and build names for themselves.

I'm still a techno-utopian in my hand, in the sense that I believe advancements in technology are a crucial part of building a better world. However, the years I worked in the industry made me realize that a lot of companies have a tendency to oversell their technology to ridiculous extent, while at the same time not even caring about using it to create a better world, seeking only fast profit instead. So count me as one who woke up to realize that our industry isn't moving us towards an utopia, no matter what marketing texts say.

> places a lot less conservative than Silicon Valley.

Or places a lot more conservative than Silicon Valley.

Because government subsidizes kids. And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism, even if they then give you welfare to help pay for the cronyism, for example: https://prospect.org/health

Edit: This is on the borderline of not even offering an opinion, but a statement of facts; but I guess go ahead and downvote facts you do not want to hear because they disagree with your politics.

You call it government cronyism, I call it regulatory capture and legalized bribery by corporations.

When all you demand of business is that they seek to increase profits, but you demand of government that it protect everyone (including itself) from said businesses, enforce contracts, enact and enforce just laws, and provide all sorts of other services... of course you'll end up seeing business as perfect and government as flawed.

I didn't say businesses do not have flaws, nor that this cronyism was not consistent with bribery or regulatory capture.

Subsidies are not inherently bad; the public is allowed to decide if there’s something it genuinely wants to subsidize and thus have more of than would be dictated by pure market forces, even if that means paying extra. The problem with subsidies is that they are usually a) not decided on democratically and b) for things we don’t actually want more of, like fossil fuel production. But children are a perfectly reasonable thing to want to subsidize, since without them we go extinct.

> And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism

The good news is that this is a very simple hypothesis to test: look at the price of meds and healthcare in a range of developed countries, and correlate with government involvement (or not) in provision of said meds and healthcare

A lot of computer culture has been replaced with different people.

Not that libertarianism is the same as conservativism but most of everyone becomes more and more conservative as they age. Moreover, the young computer guys are now middle-aged/old computer guys and are probably making significantly more money than when they were younger.

Personally, I've gotten more and more libertarian (though maybe less isolationist in terms of foreign policy) the more and more taxes I am forced to pay. Every time I see my paycheck and the taxes I pay I die a little-bit inside. Though if I could even decide where a small fraction of my taxes went, I think I would be a lot happier with the whole situation.

I especially don’t mind the local taxes. But all taxes are part of civic duty. I mean I’d rather be the financial contributor to the government than some foreign or private interest. Both of those should be considered bribes. My money goes without ties.

This is an extremely rosey view of the government. Private interest groups aren’t bombing people after all. There are a ton of amoral ties to how your taxes are spent.

The government and corporations can not be clearly separated.

People from the one go to work for the other regularly[1], often as a reward for serving one-another's interests. They constantly scratch each other's backs, such as politicians awarding fat contracts to corporations and then being rewarded with a high paying job at the same corporation when they retire, or just outright bribery in a variety of forms. Governments also regularly hire highly placed executive from corporations to regulate industries.

History is full of examples of the military used to protect private (including corporate) interests, which are often seen by the ruling class as virtually synonymous with national interests. Protecting oil in the Middle East is one obvious example, but so is protecting banana corporations in South America, nevermind older examples such as using the military for colonialism and to further the slave trade.

Media corporations have been highly complicit in provoking and defending war. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was infamous for boasting for his paper's ability to start wars, saying, "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war." Later media magnates (like Fox News' Rupert Murdoch) and outlets have been no less influential.

Private individuals who've made their fortunes in corporations, like the Koch brothers and Peter Thiel, can also have an enormous influence on politics and the government through their donation, advocacy, and having the ear of powerful politicians.

The military-industrial complex is yet another good example where corporations and governments are deeply intertwined, to the point of corporate interests having massive influence on both domestic and national security policy. It is a truism that political representatives in many states can't vote against military spending for fear of getting kicked out of office by their constituency, who depends on this military spending for their jobs (and their profits). There's endless corruption, bribes, billions of dollars going "missing", and kickbacks in the military as well, to the benefit of private individuals and corporations. Many politicians also own a lot of stock in military contractors and companies like Halliburton which benefit from both military spending and then reconstruction spending after the wars they authorize. This is yet another massive conflict of interest.

So when you favor corporations over governments, don't be so sure they're not two heads of the same beast.

[1] - Trump himself is probably the most famous current example, since he's top corporate executive and business owner at the pinnacle of political power in the US while having massive conflicts of interest between his economic and corporate interests and those of his political office, but this happens all throughout government in every administration (though usually not quite so brazenly).

This is the problem. People are so ready to believe government is hopelessly corrupt that they assume all aspects of it must be evil and should be taken away or “cancelled.”

There are actual agencies that fight, deter/avoid, and persecute corruption within the government. But people believe the worst so they’ve accepted the worst behavior from government.

This should be a moment where people learn how actual government agencies work and what exist. Like this https://www.oge.gov/

For decades, the US government has been a shining example of republican democracy with actual oversight and minimal corruption.

You say “believe” as if people can’t see the corruption and wars with their own eyes. It’s all there out in the open, you can see it yourself.

> There are actual agencies that fight, deter/avoid, and persecute corruption within the government.

They are doing a terrible job since our government is corrupt from top to bottom.

[edit] There’s a really good comment to the parent by chrisco255 that was flagged for some reason. It says:

> I believe in the old idiom, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." The whole reason I want government to be small is because I know that the bigger and more powerful it gets, the more corrupt it will get. The more unwieldy it is to change.

> The U.S. government has tons of corruption. And we've seen that in recent years with the CIA and the FBI, with the spying, and mass data collection. You look at how the U.S. government treats Assange and Snowden and tell me they aren't corrupt. The fake Russiagate scandal was built on lies forged by our own intelligence agencies. The Iraq war was supposed to be based on WMDs. I could go on and on...but you've got to be naive to call the U.S. government corruption-free or anything close to it.

Wikipedia: “In 2018, Transparency International ranked the United States as the 22nd least corrupt country,[1] falling from 18th since 2016.[2] In 2019, Transparency International stated that the United States is "experiencing threats to its system of checks and balances", along with an "erosion of ethical norms at the highest levels of power.[3]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_the_United_State...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?w...

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Of course there are other countries that are more corrupt. That's the entire point of the argument; the government (anywhere) cannot be trusted.

I assume you are not familiar with the various actions Nestle has taken in order to ensure their hegemony over chocolate production?

Corporations benefit plenty from war and famine. Some of their actions are more overt than others. If corporations were allowed to force people to work at gunpoint, make no mistake: They absolutely would. In some parts of the world, they just do so by integrating themselves deeply into the local governments. Then those corporations can point towards the big bad government as being the reason why they employed slave labor, while walking away all the richer.

Corporations are definitely also moral hazards in many cases. But even when they profit from war, I think it's some form of government or government-like agency that's actually killing people.

I'm not saying corporations should be trusted, I'm saying that the government is far worse than any corporation in terms of corruption and coming with "ties" to how your money is spent.

FWIW, I've gone the opposite. As I'm aging I find myself caring less about myself and more about how we treat the worst off. Decades ago I described myself as a moderate, today I label myself a socialist. I make hundreds of thousands annually, but I want more taxes. Honestly, after a certain point I feel greedy and unethical making as much as I do. When I see my paycheck, I look at the taxes I paid and I think, "I was just there for someone in their time of need. Glad I could help."

I expect I'll get some votes from folks who find my mindset different from their own. But I think it's healthy to talk about this stuff calmly. Even though I strongly disagree with you, it's good to know how others feel and you expressed it without being dismissive or pejorative towards folks like me. Thanks!

Respectfully, why do you feel taxes are the best avenue for your philanthropy rather than donating personally to one or more organizations/causes? It seems like the former would result in far more waste and ultimately less getting to the cause of your choice.

The reason wealthy liberals want higher taxes is they get many times that in matching funds vs making a donation.

Even if taxes are much less efficient, having a lot more money in the pool means more of it ends up where they want to see it distributed.

Also, a lot of stuff the government does actually cost a lot of money and needs to be done but people wouldn't donate like infrastructure maintenance

The power of "matching funds" is actually an underappreciated force in making voluntary, non-tax based provision of public goods more feasible. "Matching funds" is how threshold-based crowdfunding ala Kickstarter works: if you're a pivotal funder (i.e. your contribution pushes the funding campaign over the threshold), you get "many times your contribution in matching funds"! This effectively means that everyone involved wants to be a pivotal funder; it becomes a self-sustaining outcome. (Proposals have been made to extend this principle to non-threshold-based funding, see e.g. https://www.snowdrift.coop as one example.)

Exactly. Another aspect to it is that taxes eliminate the free-rider problem.

If I, as a socially-minded millionaire, make a lot of philantropic donations, but my neighbor, the not-so-socially-minded millionaire doesn't do that and instead uses their money to fund a think tank that lobbies for the abolition of social welfare, then we have a problem.

Rather than engaging in philantropy, it is more rational for me to fund a think tank that lobbies for the expansion of the social welfare system.

If your millionaire neighbor is genuinely less "socially-minded" than you are, it's not clear whether she would actually be "free riding" on your philanthropy. "Free riding" generally means getting a benefit that you strategically avoid paying for, not just having different preferences.

Now, there might nonetheless be a case for taxing your neighbor millionaire a bit more, but it would have to be somewhat different. (For instance, you might think that having more millionaires around creates negative externalities in the form of way too much corruption, rent-seeking etc. from aspiring millionaires. This would indeed be the kind of thing that taxes could correct.)

Part of it is because the cause of my choice is not where the money should go. I want a functional safety net, good schools, strong infrastructure, and a million other things to ensure a healthy society. I'm not sufficiently educated to donate money in a way that ensures all that stuff gets funded. I accept that some inefficiencies exist but also the government is funding things I need but have no idea about.

Also, I can make only so much impact on my own. Advocating for taxes gets many people to give.

I think folks here would not disagree with your overall mindset, so much as the assumption that giving even more money to the government and forcing even more red tape on the business sector would be "good" for the worst off. It seems to be an incredibly common assumption though, and even conservatives are increasingly adopting it these days (see e.g. their attitudes to international trade) - so I'm not sure I could fault you for that. Thanks for your input!

  but I want more taxes... I feel greedy and unethical making as much as I do.

You can pay more easily via the site pay.gov, if this is sincere.

To be clear, if I give more, I can have some positive impact. If taxes get raised on wealthy folks like me there's much, much, much more impact.

Might I suggest funding a think tank that lobbies for changes towards a more egalitarian society?

A portion of my that I allocate to donations goes to places like this.

That may be true for you, but it's not universally. Having kids, including a daughter, has made me a lot more cautious of our authoritarian government and what it means for my children's future.

I had the same reaction. 90s libertarianism is largely dead and it seems like most of the tech people I know have gone either authoritarian left or authoritarian right ("alt-right," NRx, etc.).

It is sad that libertarians have become a tiny minority, even in computer culture.

I don't care too much about people having different opinions from mine. Good for them to be far left or alt right if it makes them happy.

I just wish we libertarians were not an endangered species in North America (and extinct in the rest of the world)

Move to Nevada. All I ever really heard espoused there were libertarian ideals - with few exceptions, even in the city.

Nevada's been overrun with authoritarians too (especially ones that want to escape what authoritarianism has done to California).

Nope. Harry Reid is evidence that the majority is pretty much bog standard NIMBY establishment Democrats. He destroyed nuclear energy by reneging on Yucca mountain.

WIRED used to be a very libertarian magazine for most of its existence. It only changed less than 10 years ago.

It depends what you mean by "computer culture".

There's the business culture (Silicon Valley etc). There are the engineers who work for those firms. And then there are the users.

Since Eternal September, the users are largely just regular folks. Who are more or less clueless about "computer culture". Except for the geeks, anyway.

Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right".

But the business culture is largely libertarian. And some of it, such as Facebook and Uber, is almost anarcho-capitalist.

What's largely missing is the cypherpunk commitment to freedom, privacy and anonymity.

Edit: I should have said "some engineers are still basically libertarian". Sorry.

Don't discount the engineers who work surrounded by the "business culture" and perhaps even live in SV, but don't like that culture.

Myself, I'm very much against the libertarian business culture of SV. I used to like all the cool tech companies talking about changing the world; nowadays, I recognize that for those companies, technology is only an exhibit in their PR strategy, and what they do is just rob other humans out of money, privacy, dignity, or all three at the same time. As far as the tech culture goes, I increasingly find myself agreeing with FSF on things.

I'm too young to have experienced the early culture first-hand, but from what I read, it wasn't all that business-libertarian. Yes, it was anti-authoritarian and encouraged asking for forgiveness instead of permission, but it was all in service of intellectual pursuits - hacking societies to make money wasn't considered kosher for hackers.

I think it was a sort of business-libertarian. Hacking society to make money wasn't necessarily frowned upon, but imposing real costs or harms on others to make money certainly was. Of course, it also wasn't a monoculture, and it's probably hard to pin down a concrete set of beliefs that represents the state of hacker-libertarianism in 1999.

An end-run around a taxi medallion system that results in bad service, high prices, and profits for investors who have a million dollars to buy one and rent it out to drivers? Good. Spamming competitors with fake requests to disrupt their business, and spying on users with location tracking? Not good.

> what they do is just rob other humans out of money, privacy, dignity, or all three at the same time.

That's what I meant by saying anarcho-capitalist.

> from what I read, it wasn't all that business-libertarian. Yes, it was anti-authoritarian and encouraged asking for forgiveness instead of permission, but it was all in service of intellectual pursuits - hacking societies to make money wasn't considered kosher for hackers.

At first, yes. It was anti-authoritarian and idealistic. Very much a "power to the people" thing. The prospect of commercial websites was very controversial. Advertising was entirely unacceptable.

Didn't last long, though.

I think your last paragraph is basically correct.

In college, I met a number of sincere libertarians that were skeptical of authority and very interested in a wide range of people having a pretty broad set of freedoms. When I started work in SF in 1997, I saw similar attitudes in a lot of people.

In that time, it seems to me the definition of "libertarian" has shifted to be much more about the freedom of people with a lot of money to do what they want without constraint. And a great deal of SF culture has since been priced out of the market; a lot of the weirdos, hippies, artists, and other people marching to the beat of their own drummer have had to march elsewhere.

The same seems to be true online. Eternal September is more than 25 years old. The early flowering of small communities, individual bloggers, and digital anarchosyndicalists seems to me to have been mostly supplanted by profit-seeking services run by a small number of very rich people.

It's probably inevitable. All that money was basically lying there. I can't be shocked that a bunch of people rushed in to scoop it up and damn the consequences, just like San Francisco's first gold rush. [1] But I do miss the more innocent times.

[1] E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining#California_Go...

> Don't discount the engineers who work surrounded by the "business culture" and perhaps even live in SV, but don't like that culture.

OK, I gotta share these:

http://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html

http://bofh.bjash.com/

How can a company be libertarian? This doesn't make sense to me. A company is just an organization acting in some system. The system could be libertarian, or individuals could be prefer libertarianism, but not a company.

The companies could promote libertarianism, but given Mark Zuckerberg's public requests to have facebook regulated, I don't think facebook is an example of a large company that supports libertarianism, let alone anarcho-capitalism.

How many people do you think in Silicon Valley believe that individuals should have more power than any government? Or who believe that government is illegitimate? I don't feel I find very many of them.

I felt the previous generation of engineers and admin were more anti-authoritarian than they were libertarian.

Companies are basically emergent artificial intelligences. So yeah, they can be libertarian.

No. They are organizations representing shareholders.

How is that a logical contradiction? All intelligence has goals and constraints. A (publicly held) company's goals and constraints are partially informed by their shareholders. That doesn't change the fact that they're emergent artificial intelligences.

A lawyer representing someone can have whatever person positions the lawyer desires, but in the course of representing a client, the lawyer can only be an extension of what the client wants to be represented for.

The same is true of anyone representing a shareholder.

The company's goals and constraints are 100% informed by the shareholders.

Do you recognize differences between ideal theory and practical reality?

No, I have no ability to understand the difference between the real world and Tamriel.

> Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right".

What do you mean? Libertarianism exists precisely because it has principles that are sometimes endorsed by different sides of the political spectrum.

I agree that there seems to be overlap.

But arguably it's just that politics isn't one dimensional.

The term "libertarianism" has shifted in meaning over time, which makes grand-parent's qualification important and even necessary.

Originally, in the sense that people like Noam Chomsky still use it, it's simply a philosophy of deep skepticism towards authority and central power.

More recently, what I like to call "internet libertarianism" has shifted much more in an Ayn Randian direction; those libertarians are still skeptical of state power, but they forgot to be skeptical of economic power. To them, whatever is done by people with a lot of money is Inherently Good, and screw the consequences to others. It's a philosophy of "(economic) might makes right" -- and that is definitely not something anybody on the left would endorse.

The term libertarian was redefined in the U.S. by activists wishing to continue the path toward individual liberty, but who could not use the term "liberal" because the definition of that term had been redefined in the U.S. to describe people desiring to move away from individual liberty.

While there are movements in the US that want to take significant liberties away from individuals (e.g., restricting the rights of non-whites), generally the vast majority of people are in favor of individual liberty.

The disagreement is rooted in the question of whether economic power is relevant for an individual's liberty or not. There are those who are fine with curtailing the liberty of those who don't have economic power (or the flip side: who claim that extreme wealth does not increase a person's freedom)[0], and there are those who see inequal access to economic power as a problem that needs to be fixed in order to improve overall individual liberty.

[0] If you hold that view but have ever considered the term "fuck you money" to be a valid meme, then I've got bad news about the logical consistency of your worldview.

Libertarians, particularly the ones who actively chose to appropriate that relatively previously unknown phrase in the U.S., saw the issue, as related to economics, as being a question of under what circumstances is it just to grant another person or group of persons power to decide who gets what. Opposition to the position of anyone having such power over anyone else is in the direction of individual liberty.

IOW, they argued that there cannot be a just system where everyone is truly equal when some of the people have the power to apply force (government) that, when applied by those not chosen to have such powers (citizens), is "illegal." (E.g., taxes, war, imprisonment, drafting of laws, etc.)

The restriction of rights to non-whites was a policy created and enforced by governments. Also enforced by governments were the Jim Crow and other eugenics-based laws (including forced sterilizations, which disproportionately affected racial minorities). The 13th amendment was written to only ban private ownership of slaves - governments can and do still own slaves (prisoners perform forced labor that profits the state and other entities, not the harmed parties).

Access to opportunity is most heavily curtailed by governments, who make massive laws that heavily increase the cost to open new or even maintain existing smaller businesses. In Silicon Valley, we see an extreme version of a common problem created by governments where the governments act to restrict the building of housing, resulting in housing only being available to the extremely wealthy.

> Many of the engineers are still basically libertarian, some more "left" and some more "right".

But also, many of the past engineers were not libertarians at all. There was subculture of libertarians that through themselves to be representing engineers as a whole, but they were just one vocal bubble.

Young people today don’t see the internet as a disruptive libertarian force. To them it’s just another tool of the establishment.

So if you don’t see so many wide-eyed idealists around, it’s probably because they see you as too old. They have their own hangouts, and we’re not invited.

Hangouts as in afk?

The URL points to a footnote and should be changed to http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html

Fixed, thanks.

This essay is a cautionary tale, more than a writing about the political influences of early computer culture.

It seems like an interesting topic, but I could only read so much before it read like the author was getting paid per word.

> It's easy, as many do, to dismiss the computer culture as merely an adolescent subculture whose values and principles hardly matter beyond the video game market. But, while certainly not at the center of today's power structures, the computer culture can be understood as standing in complex relations to the hegemonic bloc in the Gramscian sense.

Yeah it resembles a thought disorder with verbosity. If you told me it was generated by a Markov Chain as a prank I would believe you. Combined with shallow "namecheck" references everywhere with nary an explanation of /how/ they are connected. There is a fundamental cluelessness and shallowness to it all made more apparent by the papering over with the flesh of a few sacrifical thesauruses.

Somewhat meta but I don't think I've seen a relatively popular story here that has the majority of the comments gray before this one. Did this article strike a nerve or something?

Anything political here (I’ve noticed) leads to people flagging anything remotely rude. I try to do my part by vouching for the good, but dead, comments.

If only being polite were all that is necessary to not get down-voted!

I've just decided I'm up-voting everything. I don't care if I agree, disagree, hate it, don't even read it.

Vote-inflation, FTW.

Always relevant when discussing libertarianism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

As a libertarian, not very impressed with this write-up. It repeats a couple of common criticism that are 100s of years old without attempting to argue or understand the other side plus not applying the same criticism to his own side in the a consistent matter.

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