Hacker News Reader

Comment by googlryas | Hacker News Reader

Are younger hackers trending libertarian as well? Maybe there was something about society back then which caused hackers to lean libertarian, but it seems like there is nothing intrinsic that correlates hackers with libertarians, at least from my (extremely limited) observations.

View on HN

Back in the '80s and '90s there were both from the bottom-up with anarchistic, civic liberties-focused phone phreaks, greyhat hackers, cowboy coders and the like, as well as from the top-down from free market tech entrepreneur types.

I would guess not.

to me, the "libertarian hacker" de facto standard peaked in the mid 00s (around when TFA was written), when everyone was enthusiastic about the Internet and Ron Paul and Larry Lessig and Information Wanting To Be Free and 09F9 and BitTorrent. then social media happened and everyone got an always-on Internet connection in their pockets at all times and now the Pauls are evil Republicans just like the rest of em, free speech is dangerous and should be restricted and limited on all platforms at all costs, and identity politics (of all flavors) are more important than everyone being a pseudonymous handle on the Internet, treated equally by default. there used to be this feeling that the future of the Internet was just going to be fuckin awesome because it would pierce through all existing societal constructs like bigotry and racism, connecting people of all stripes equally in this crazy libertarianesque online network of computers, and what could come of that but societal advancement, increased creative output, and a general world-improving fair and equal exchange of ideas?

I rarely, if ever, see any of that kind of idealism anymore, both in theory and in practice, and I miss it dearly.

Once the human became the focus of the computer and internet usage, I think that's when it lost that amazing feeling. When the real identity became central to the majority's experience of the web.

If you stay out of that (decidedly big) circle, you can still get a bit of that sparkle.

this is a huge part of it. I was a dork in high school and the Internet let me connect to communities of people all over the world and make relationships I wouldn't have had otherwise, and all of it was just cool as shit. nobody cared who you were in real life or what your social status or physical appearance there was, people were just handles creating and playing and talking about stuff together. it was great. I joined a group of kids making a far-too-ambitious Game Maker game and became close friends with one guy, and we IMed almost nightly on MSN for like a year before he even mentioned that his skin tone was different than mine. none of that shit mattered at all, and it felt like the future.

then social media and smartphones happened and celebrities and normies immigrated en masse, bringing their preconceived notions of meatspace social norms along with them. remember when nobody ever publicly whined about "harassment" and "death threats" aimed their way by pseudonymous Internet users, because that kind of just came with the territory and you got used to it and it didn't affect you after awhile? I sure as hell didn't use my real name as my handle back then, you'd be crazy to do so. then celebrities got on Twitter and the masses of iPhone owners followed and all of that went away—cyberspace and meatspace merged together, and meatspace brought all the baggage we had been so happy to leave behind in with it.

then Denny's hired a social media intern to post on tumblr and through the dark magic of this new, normie Internet, corporations became People, Too, because see they post to the Internet with memes and support for social causes just like you and me!, and any hope of the libertarian hacker future was forever shattered. it was fun while it lasted though.

Corporations becoming People would be the natural outcome of a libertarian society as well. That’s what happens when they have unchecked influence and power. It just took ours a little longer to get to that state.

sure, but my point is, that happened right around the same time that everyone got used to having a a 3G-connected screen in their pockets at all time as a societal default. if you wanted to get on the Internet, you had to use a desktop computer in your house, school, or place of work, or take your laptop to a coffee shop or McDonald's or whatever. when smartphones because a societal standard and social media proliferated, that's the vector corporations used to become People, Too, and also when the Golden Age of the Internet Libertarian died as well. the Internet Libertarian future of the Internet is Mastodon et al. and federation and such, but it's not going to catch on because normies don't want anything it has to offer over the mainstream social media networks. the inevitable thing that killed the Internet Libertarian future and gave way for everything to be an ad-filled walled-garden corporate nightmare world was mass walled-garden smartphone ecosystem adoption by the general public instead of a more Internet Libertarian open, federated software landscape. we figured this out too little too late and were in the process of dying out, no longer the Default Internet User, and then #Occupy happened, the concept of modern identity politics were deployed as a countermeasure, various political subfactions formed in the online space, and now few people who were Internet Libertarians at the time of the article's writing would still consider themselves to be such today, and with good reason—the Internet of today is not the same Internet that they were absolutely sure would lead to the culmination of their techno-libertarian ideals at a global scale, through proliferation of Internet connectivity. whoops. things didn't end up working out that way because nobody foresaw how utterly chemically addictive the average person would find stroking a piece of glass to consume a literally endless supply of visual stimuli—whoops.

What you have described would happen as the natural end result of a libertarian state. Because before smartphones we have seen how postwar industrialized America foster all sorts of addictions in consumers. From self-medication, which started in the '50s (watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers and count how many times characters casually pop pills or imbibe in the background), to fast food, to television, and then on to social media and everything else that the internet enabled that is what unregulated industry does where there is no opposing force- whether governmental or otherwise- to check its power.

Libertarianism manifests in many forms, and I would say the Internet Libertarian early-90's WIRED cyberpunk cowboy ideal one is less of a cohesive project than a scene. It's a vibe, a mood, that was doomed to end just as warehouse techno raves did as well. The libertarian ideal of being a cyber-cowboy on a wild untamed frontier, without intrusive power structures- whether bureaucratic government, fuddy-duddy corporations, or the uncool normie hoi polloi- taps into the same American dream of the Wild West or of a land of Jeffersonian yeomen. And is just as sustainable.

I understand your loss and anguish. But the same historical forces that created the technologies that captured the dreams of Internet Libertarianism are not all that different from the same forces that created social media and brought everyone else online into Eternal September. This is how society, perhaps all forms of growth, operate.

I think you're conflating Ron Paul's brand of (populist) libertarianism, with its embrace of everything from abolishing most of the federal departments to returning to the gold standard, with the cyber-specific futurist hacker variety. The EFF and the Mozilla Foundation and other FOSS orgs are still there, but certainly there's been a lot of setbacks. Pirate Parties never caught on in the U.S., unlike in Europe where they're more of a presence for whatever reason.

The decline of pirate politics was underway by the time of the renewed culture wars in the 2010s, and I don't think the rise of social justice or identity politics was the cause of it. Those latter topics just were more popular because, well, they resonated with more people. (Feels like the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was the last time such issues had semi-mainstream appeal.) And more people were online, on social media, because tech went fully mainstream. (I suppose in your view you could claim that tech was a victim of its own success.)

Lessig is still around. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. His whole thing was campaign finance reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig_2016_president...

And, well, I'm pretty sure Rand is much more of a stock Republican than his father was. Justin Amash would be the libertarian standard-bearer these days.

> what could come of that but societal advancement, increased creative output, and a general world-improving fair and equal exchange of ideas?

On the flip side, we had the entire cyberpunk genre predicting that it'd be bought, sold, and owned by megacorps, and that's somewhat come to pass as well. Citizens United certainly guaranteed their right to free speech.

Re: pirate parties, there actually was such controversy surrounding the more prominent instances just as they acquired public attention in their respective countries. For example, AFAIU, the current gender-politics situation arrived in Germany slightly earlier than it did the US. And so in 2009-2010, there was much media scrutiny of the low female membership of the German pirate party.

Proposals for changing this resulted in lots of internal drama, culminating with a notorious debate over how a women-only mailing list was in opposition to the party's principles. Similar things happened with the Swedish party. There's hardly anything in English of this; you'll have to use your Google(-translate)-fu for more info: https://www.google.de/search?q=+piratinnen+piratenpartei+fem...

However, I don't think this was the (sole) cause of the parties' decline. The German party had increasing vote shares until 2013, around when internal conflict over members' stances on issues other than copyright, made evident by the parties' commitment to transparency, started being widely publicized, proving (to the public, at least) that its approach to direct democracy could not scale.

HN has surprisingly little discussion of the pirate parties' decline - really only one, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231584

Aside: I have discovered the German version of ESR, who fulminates over his theory that the attacks on pirate politics and open source from gender studies perspectives are in collusion with American economic interests: https://www.danisch.de/blog/2015/11/04/feminismus-als-waffe-...

Fair enough, but perhaps those were just Pirate Parties that weren’t as good as the Czech one:

https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/13338750882658672...

https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/13897172944864911...

https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/14704686528057262...

https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/14444880772257832...

According to that account the Icelandic and Slovenian Pirate Parties are pretty good too

Author of the essay here. I did a double take at seeing it posted here because I thought it was completely forgotten, nearly including by myself. I think the actual date of this essay is 2007 or maybe 2006, because I remember writing it from my university computer lab and I was class of '07. Anyway, there's certainly a lot of water under the bridge since then and the political composition of hackerdom today looks nothing like it did 15 years ago. With the growth of the FAANGs there are far more hackers today than there were then, and the younger ones are a lot more likely to be leftists than libertarians. Still, though, when I travel in libertarian circles it's pretty clear to me that hackers are overrepresented there, so I think the reverse remains true as well, even though it's not as dramatic or obvious as it was in the '00s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com