The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was actually a point besides "Tim O'Reilly is evil incarnate", which he established in the first two paragraphs. And then re-established in the third. And the fourth...
Don't get me wrong, I whine bitterly about the over-glorified promise of the Silicon Valley techno-drome, where raw technology is supposed to solve all of humanity's woes. I fail to see how this article addresses this, at all.
I'm left with the vague feeling that I could probably use the same approach to tear down Gandhi or any other more or less untouchable folk hero by using long tracts of insinuation interspersed with a few phrases in scare quotes.
Like others here, I make it a general rule to read everything, and even consulting other sources, before commenting. Like others here also, I had not the time nor the inclination to go through the entirety of a 16,000 word behemoth of writing when the first 8,000 words were rote reptitions of a single point already copiously made within 1,000 words. Being no stranger to long-form writing, and seeing no visible structure to the work that would suggest it's going anywhere besides more reptition of the same point, I gave up - like others here did.
A basic modicum of civility is desirable, and this includes blatant labeling and name-calling.
If you read half of that behemoth of an article, good for you - you can't be accused of not giving it a fair chance (although I found that second half to be more interesting and insightful myself).
I just find it aggravating and perhaps indicative of a negative attitude amongst HN readers that contrarian comments almost always end up at the top of the thread. That is all. Sorry if I hurt your feelings.
And now you dress that comment up as reasoned and adding value. Wow.
Ironic that it should deface Unix, because I think that dmr's immortal words[1] are particularly apt here: this piece is "a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy."
Agree with him or not, all he's saying is that the code sharing involved in creating Unix was no more than regular academic sharing of ideas, and that retroactively claiming it for "open source" is spin. The article takes no issue with Unix, maybe you should read in more detail before becoming enraged?
So it is not so much retroactively claiming it as open source as it is acknowledge open source's heritage.
Keith Bostic has gone on record as saying that he was inspired by Richard Stallman to try to make a fully free version of BSD. The GNU tools were a crucial tool on every Unix by the mid-1980s, and indeed played a major role in making Unix useful. While you can argue about whether it was a good idea to try to rebrand Stallman's "free software" movement as "open source", it doesn't make sense to argue that Unix was somehow unconnected to the free software movement.
Furthermore, there was already a movement afoot to build software under free-software licenses in commercial companies many years before the Open Source Initiative was founded: Sun, DEC, HP, and so on, were members of the X Consortium, which continued the development of X-Windows as free software many years after its original (academic) maintainers had stopped; Cygnus effectively took over maintenance of GCC and the rest of the GNU toolchain from the GNU project by about 1990; Sun published NFS, Yellow Pages, Sun RPC, and so on under free-software licenses starting in the mid-1980s, and later funded development on Emacs; Lucid forked Emacs to form the basis of its IDE, giving us XEmacs and its high-quality open-source C compiler, lcc. None of this was "regular academic sharing of ideas" — while these were companies with academic roots, they were judged by standards of business, not academia — and it all happened on Unix.
And many of the people who built that open-source software that made Unix what it was were also founding members of the Open Source Initiative.
At the same time, there was perhaps an order of magnitude more programmers using IBM PCs under MS-DOS. The only significant open-source software I can think of from this era on that platform is the various open-source FORTH systems. There was lots of user-group and BBS-scene software, but it was usually distributed without source, or occasionally with source, but under "no commercial use" licenses — you could maybe even put the IBM PC BIOS source code into this category. There were occasional exceptions — the WaZOO source code from Opus, say, or PC-HACK, ported from Unix — but not many.
So I think that it's perfectly fair to describe the "code sharing involved in Unix" as a unique nascent movement, separate from the "regular academic sharing of ideas", which at some point decided to (mostly) call itself the "open source" movement.
- The open source movement separated from libre source in the pursuit of profits; Mr. O'Reilly was heavily involved in that.
- Mr. O'Reilly has changed & massaged certain words and meanings in a masterful art of propaganda.
- Mr. O'Reilly's influence & the approach he favors has demoted the individual's ability to effectively govern themselves.
That the author (a great writer) would use Rand (an awful writer) as the strawman here indicates he's never read her work (it sucks, fyi) and is only reacting to what he thinks it is.
Say what you want about Rand's political views, it's clear that the author doesn't understand them... implying that he doesn't understand O'Reilly's either.
The first half of the article was an interesting historic lesson for me. The last half of the article, less so.
Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth. Always worth reading.
This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" and "free software".
I had no idea Tim O'Reilly actively barred Stallman from his early conferences, which crucially helped create the competing open source community.
Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
I don't think I've read Morozov before, so after reading your comments, I dove back in for a second take.
I agree that it is an impressively concise and clear history of free vs open source - that alone made the article worthwhile, I think.
Regarding HN readers dumping on him:
> Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression—the religious fervor that many users feel about the Internet has helped catalyze a lot of activist campaigns—but, by and large, the concept also blunted our analytical ability to balance rights against each other.
This is spot-on, and is especially poignant when applied to sites such as Reddit, where users championing "Internet Freedom" occasionally eschew morality in order to create an ethical martyr for their cause - see the case of the 'jailbait' subreddit. I have no doubt that those users and similarly minded users who browse HN would find the above insulting.
He makes other insights throughout the article that would apply to similarly ardent groups of users that are around the HN-sphere.
A writer who can't seem to get to the point because he needs more paragraphs to showcase additional literary allusions is not going to hold me hostage indefinitely. If the first two thousand words of an essay are not a sufficiently representative sample on which to base conclusions about the essay, then the writer is not a good writer. He may of course reveal the cure for cancer in the final paragraph, but given the opportunity cost of missing out on more important things I could be reading, I'm willing to take the risk.
I discovered long ago that "intellectual" did not mean "intelligent"; it was about style of presentation, not importance of ideas. You be the judge of whether that is a symptom of intellectual decline.
Or he is just in love with the allusions. A good essay should not require independent research to figure out an allusion-it should be evident in the essay itself.
The article just doesn't have any sort of flow. It feels like Morozov had a pile of things he wanted to talk about, references he wanted to include, and points he wanted to attempt to make, but wasn't able to(or didn't bother to) make a coherent narrative out of the entire thing. The end result is that it feels disjointed and is very hard to read.
The 13th paragraph starts talking about O'Reilly's origin. But why is it there? The closest reference to his origin is in the 5th paragraph. The next 8 paragraphs are spent jumping all over the last 15 or so years.
Another example is the reference to Neil Postman. The two paragraphs dedicated to him is absolutely worthless, as Postman is used to refer to Alfred Korzybski, who Morozov then related to O'Reilley. There isn't any reason for Postman to be in there other than to have the reference. There is no link to O'Reilly, aside from a throwaway sentence referring to Postman's work 31 paragraphs(and 2 sections) after the last Postman reference.
No essay can really be understood in a vaccuum. There's always some manner of background information which has to be absorbed in order to understand its gist, even if that background information is just a rudimentary grasp of the language used to write it. The purpose of Morozov's allusions is not to just allude, but rather to give explicit links to concepts he's drawing on. In the Postman case, Morozov wishes to use the distinction Postman drew up, but without spending too long reiterating it (and thus cluttering up an already cluttered essay) he describes it briefly, notes the source, and then figures that if you want to understand the distinction more thoroughly, you can look up the original.
I can't argue that it's a bit overwrought and thick—at the very least, I concur it needed some manner of chapter headings or other structure—but Morozov is most certainly not alluding for the sake of alluding.
Here's a recent interview with him from Gawker: http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-s...
Here's he talks about something he thinks he read on Hacker News:
http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779 > I don't think we should ban them. But boy most of tech blogs would SO MUCH benefit from being ridiculed. Do you read the stuff they publish? I recall seeing a headline - on Hacker News, I think - on how "Uber will disrupt racism." I mean, what on earth is this? The Onion is less funny.
While I have no doubt that there are some HNers who are "Yes, startups can fix ANYTHING", I had a feeling that most HNers were not so credulous. So I did a search for "Uber" and "racism":
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=uber+racis...
Turns out the headline he mocked was from Reason magazine ("How market forces undermine racism: Uber Cab Edition").
But it figures that someone like Morozov who reflexively shits on anything Google or any tech giant tries to do would not be bothered to conduct a simple Internet search before making a mocking assertion
> He could just have easily picked out a narrative that highlighted all the criticisms I've made of Silicon Valley "solutionism" (his current bete noir). If he'd really done his research, he would have found Steve Talbott's book The Future Does Not Compute, which I published all the way back in 1995 in a first attempt to get people thinking about the ambiguous gifts that technology brings us. He could have also discovered my distaste for Libertarian fairy dust, my warnings about loss of freedom in the cloud era (which I started making back in 1999, before they became fashionable), or my arguments for the moral basis of both corporate and government decision making.
By the way, how pathetic is it that only 18 hours after this item was posted to HN, it's already off the front page of the site, and the conversation here is nearly dead? That's virtually guaranteeing that most of the comments will be made by people who haven't read the article.
If people were to accept the phrase "climate change", perhaps it would help end comments like "scientists say the earth is getting hotter... why have our winters been extra cold?"
This is part of why science communicators keep losing policy battles to Luntz and others like him -- you're right that "climate change" is a more scientifically accurate term, but it's also a less scary term, and therefore if you think that something needs to be done about the problem anytime soon you would be better served to avoid it than to embrace it.
EDIT: If you want more examples of how science communicators fail and guidance on how to do better, Randy Olson's book Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/15...) is a good place to start.
EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes" is clever and good.
If you read it as a critique of tech culture generally (and not Tim personally) it's interesting. The critique about polluting language is the crux of it. This is a critique worth diving into more. But the author didn't do a good job of it.
It reads like the author got a whiff of some Philosophy, and then rather than expand the ideas and connect them to the larger culture, he just found a convenient figurehead and wrote some link-bait. He could have easily targeted Richard Dawkins (inventer of the term meme) or any number of others.
The reason I think the article wasn't as bad as some is because I'm just so hungry for philosophical thought in the tech world. Maybe this will make some hackers think critically.
If you like philosophy and want to delve into the discussion about the value of language and it's intersection with software, there's a mailing list here you should check out: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/philosophy-in-a-time...
"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
That is--it's exceptionally NOT "coming up" with the word, assuming you mean to imply he's inventing the word for this article.
I like your first sentence though ;)
"In 1981 the young O'Reilly even wrote a reputable biography of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, in which he waxes lyrical about Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers."
And the book is available here
http://oreilly.com/tim/herbert/index.html
Stallman's four freedoms look very clear don't they?
Here's my review of the first 4500 words:
1) There's a lot of really fucking useless ad hominem. Offensively useless, offensively voluminous. Do you actually have something substantial to say about the man, or is it just linkbait? Oh, I see. Anyway, after the first ten paragraphs, I just assumed that the author couldn't be trusted in his analysis of O'Reilly, the person.
Oh, and there's some hilarious ranting in the first paragraph or four about the offensively bland jargon of silicon valley PR machines. But it has nothing to do with the rest of the article (even less than the ad hominem on O'Reilly).
2) Morozov makes a case that O'Reilly is more interested in Randian entrepreneurship than in user freedom. I'm not clear how fair it is to tar O'Reilly with the Randian brush (obviously many HNers will say "tar?!? laud! gild!", and we can quietly disagree about that), and again, I no longer trust any assertion Morozov makes about O'Reilly. But certainly some people exist who are pro-open-source but anti-free-software (especially anti-stallmanite), and many of them are laudable and reasonable people.
3) Further on free software vs open source, there's a useful discussion about how Stallman is interested in ends, but open source (and perhaps O'Reilly) is about means. Particularly interesting is how, in an era of desktop software, licenses were an important means to Stallman's ends, not an end in and of themselves. If you confuse the means for the ends, then in an era of cloud computing, you might say "oh these licenses no longer matter so the ends are accomplished", but of course that's emphatically not the Free Software position. And maybe we should give serious consideration to the free software position. (I think we should give serious consideration to the free software position!)
4) As Morozov points out, "open" is a slippery word, and he has some citations of O'Reilly using it in hilariously slippery and demagogical ways. I think this is a good point, and I hate that kind of slippery reasoning-by-analogy. Morozov says "Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as 'open'". Well, that's true, Morozov, but I can think of a word that's slipperier and sexier: "free". (It's still super-slippery and super-sex if you somehow restrict yourself to the "libre" sense.) Free software advocates are forever trying to explain that my freedom to restrict what you do with software I wrote isn't freedom, and while I support that cause overall, I'm not entirely enamoured of the doublespeak inherent in the branding.
And at this point, I ran out of patience with TFA. Maybe I'll come back to it later, read another 3000 words, and add another comment.
Avalanche of verbosity notwithstanding, I think there's an important thing here for hackers, buried in 15k words of bad writing. I think Stallman's movement is important as a matter of ethics. And I think the ethics-free engineering-and-business-focused open-source movement is important. And I think that hackers/coders/developers/compscientists who are also citizens should think seriously about both of these movements.
And I think anyone who says "FLOSS" is either perpetrating doublespeak, or a victim of it, because "Free/Libre Software" and "Open Source Software" are different things, which only-sometimes have common cause.
They are different things - though mostly in terms of goals and priorities, since the actual definitions are very similar - but I disagree that doublespeak is required to use that term.
"FLOSS", at least the way I've used and understood it, is not intended to equate them but simply to refer to both at once. In my view, FLOSS is the union of the two sets.
There is potentially a common thread in Morozov's discussions that would rally against this sort of statement. Arguably the article is just such an assault.
The notion that technology can be unbound from ethics is a very libertarian one.
At risk of incorrectly paraphrasing Morozov, I would think he is taking issue with a hijacking of language with neutered terminology. Worse, the neutered and euphemistic phrasing, while more palatable, is forwarding another ideology.
What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
I wonder if this makes more sense if you've never used or written free and/or open source software.
Stephen King's "On Writing" talks about this, and I'm paraphrasing:
"Writers who invent words are bad writers."
Please either spend real time reading the article and thinking about it and then comment, or don't comment at all.
Disclosure: I'm an O'Reilly author.
The announcement of Swartz joining The Baffler was previously linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298445
While Morozov's essay to some may appear to be coming out of left field, it's actually appearing in a venue that takes ethical concerns in relation to technological innovation quite seriously as evidenced by whom it associates with.
The article could stand to be a higher-entropy source though. It proved distressingly low-entropy after a while.
This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air.
I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the readers here. In the seventh paragraph it says "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101". Do you understand what he means by saying that? Do you know who Bernard-Henri Levy is? Do you know why the Baffler crowd holds him in contempt? Can you give a detailed explanation of the disagreements between the New Philosophers and the post-structuralists? Most Baffler readers can answer these questions, and it is assumed that someone reading the article could fully answer what "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101" means. If you don't understand that, you won't understand the article, and can not dismiss it other than to say you don't understand it.
As far as verbosity - Noam Chomsky often says if you repeat popular propaganda bromides, you can just stop there. If you say something counter to the cultural hegemony, it will need a long explanation, footnotes, multiple references and so forth. This is one reason articles like this seem long, if he is making a point about O'Reilly, he will have to point to multiple instances of things O'Reilly said, to nail down the case he is making.
As far as verbosity goes, a longer collection of ad-hominem attacks does not equal a stronger or more persuasive argument.
It's a long, difficult article. So, pick something you didn't like, and dismiss it all wholesale? Too easy.
Tim O'Reilly's business has changed from selling things (books, conferences) to selling ideologies ("Web 2.0", "government as a framework"). This is a relationship that goes both ways: the books and conferences provide crucial support for the ideologies he sells (the existence of a "Web 2.0" conference can be cited as proof that "Web 2.0" is a real thing), and the ideologies create demand for books and conferences as they spread.
The primary problem the author (Evgeny Morozov) has with this isn't that O'Reilly profits from it, but rather that the ideologies O'Reilly sells tend to provide corporate-friendly alternatives that are used to marginalize rising ideologies that could threaten existing power structures. Examples discussed:
- "Open source" as an ideology focused on the rights of the software developer, as opposed to the ideology it was explicitly designed to compete with, Richard Stallman's "free software" movement, which focused instead on the rights of the software user
- "Web 2.0" companies wanted to package up information about their users and sell it to the highest bidder; the ideology supported this by positioning it as a natural evolution of the Web rather than a major power shift
- "Government as a service" would involve taking major systems currently run by government and privatizing them, but covers this with a layer of techno-dust to avoid having to talk about the negative implications of privatization
Hence the comparison of O'Reilly to famed Republican spin architect Frank Luntz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz). Luntz has made a career selling policies to people they will hurt by packaging them up with attractive-sounding words. Morozov argues that O'Reilly is in the same business.
I'm not sure if he convinced me regarding O'Reilly specifically (haven't read O'Reilly enough), and I agree with others about the repetition and bad style ("crazy talk"?). But some actual thoughts were hidden in there.
To the OP, this has had negative consequences, and he goes through them point by point.