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.
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.
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.
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...
OK, I gotta share these:
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.
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.
What do you mean? Libertarianism exists precisely because it has principles that are sometimes endorsed by different sides of the political spectrum.
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 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.
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.
But arguably it's just that politics isn't one dimensional.
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.
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.
The same is true of anyone representing a shareholder.
The company's goals and constraints are 100% informed by the shareholders.
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)
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.
Or places a lot more conservative than Silicon Valley.
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 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!
Also, I can make only so much impact on my own. Advocating for taxes gets many people to give.
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
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.
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.)
but I want more taxes... I feel greedy and unethical making as much as I do.
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.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_the_United_State...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?w...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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