The Man Who Conquered, Then Warped Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Conquered, Then Warped Silicon Valley

washingtonpost.com

42 pointsenkiv222 comments

I remember all this fondly since I became a young adult during the early years of the Internet when I setup up my first Unix system with a public TCP/IP address in 1990 and read Usenet back before endless September. I read the first year or two of WIRED magazine cover to cover.

It seems there is now a four-way breakdown among American techies:

  * Mistrust BigGov but trust BigTech
  * Trust BigGov, mistrust BigTech
  * Trust both BigGov and BigTech
  * Mistrust both BigGov and BigTech

And it all depends on your base political philosophy or leanings.

This article is a pretty formulaic example of what happens when someone from the 2nd perspective discovers John Perry Barlow's writings.

I'm a child of the 80s and I always went for option #4.

Well option #1 and #2 are untenable and result from uninformed naivete or deliberate head-in-sandism. You could rationally go for option #3 but you'd be rooting for the dark side. Cheers.

I personally consider myself part of the alternative right, but my views are overall fairly mainstream. I fall into #3 not because I'm part of some "dark side" but because I think both big government and big tech largely do what they claim to, and the negative side effects are exaggerated.

I am very wary of "X always ends up as Y" arguments. If you don't like big companies abusing power, then close the loopholes or break them up (though I much prefer the former). If you don't like big government abusing citizens, then change the laws to limit government.

I like big government because they really do tend to work towards the public good. Look at healthcare or welfare in Australia for an example. I like big tech because they really do increase economic efficiency, and drive technology forwards.

I think as poorly of the conspiratorial thinking of #4's as they do of the "dark side".

My suspicion is that this symptomatic of the mainstreaming of tech. AFAICT from random techie documents from before the web, the 4th perspective was broadly held. (Or perhaps I just have read primarily from hacker sources, which by definition lean towards #4).

Yes. Reddit 9 years ago was different. Usenet 15-25 years ago was quite different than any significant forum today. Sometimes it feels like I grew up in a country that doesn't exist any more.

I wasn't aware there was really anyone in #2. I also don't think "Trust X" is an atomic unit that you can permute over (i.e. there are significant further divisions). I'm rather liberal by the standards of the average American when it comes to the role of gov't in the economy (mostly because I have an actual education in economics), and yet for things like government surveillance, I'm as opposed as they come. Those two things are conflated in "Trust BigGov".

I'm aware you were simplifying a little, but I think that's more than an insignificant divide.

To my mind, the reason that #2 has any merit is that governments claim (at least in liberal democracies) to be beholden to you while corporations are not. The government is accountable to you in ways that companies are not.

In theory at least. I end up much closer to #4 since I'm not convinced that the government-people feedback loop works correctly, but I can imagine circumstances in which I might be #2.

I think these qualifiers could make more sense if we substitute 'trust' for 'believe in'.

Are there any offline archives of pre-AOL Usenet? These topics must have been discussed at that time, would be interesting to compare relative segments, then and now. Archives of The WELL would also be relevant.

Google bought the company that had the archive and for a while it was searchable as part of Google Groups. Now it is gone. I hope archive.org can put it online if it isn't lost forever.

It's still up. They just broke search-by-date, which makes it fairly useless for finding particular posts.

"Generally the province of fascists, artists or fascist artists, manifestos are a dying form. It takes gall to have published one anytime after, say, 1938."

I dunno, here's a list of UK election manifestos, and they do still seem to be writing them, if only to serve as a checklist of things to ignore when in power.

http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man.htm

The article is from an American newspaper, and from the American perspective manifestos are not something we really see anymore. The word has become too weighed down by its association with nuts on the political fringe, like the Unabomber. (People still write political statements, of course; they just call them other things.)

"from the American perspective manifestos are not something we really see anymore"

I decided to have a look at google ngrams for the word manifesto in the American English corpus:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year...

The clear peaks for 1918 and 1932 are pretty impressive, but after the 1968 everest, the concept nosedives till you get to the oppressively featureless plain starting, amusingly, at 1984.

Now there is platform instead. Which has none of the pesky connotations of promise that manifesto tended to carry.

edit -

British English, on the other hand, still loves the idea, though it has taken a knock in the last ten years.

Our correlating peaks were 1915, 1940 and 1967, but the idea recovered here after 1973 and enjoyed strength during the 80s and 90s, instead of falling off a cliff. - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manifesto&year...

You bring up a good point about the connotions associated with 'manifestos', but writings like political platforms & planks are largely ignored in the media. It seems like our mass media is largely dominated by reality-tv flavored coverage of political discourse.

> ... American perspective ...

You wish. How many Americans would even get the (clear) reference to the Futurists?

If you've graduated from an American high school, you should have been required to read the Futurist manifesto and several of the Dadaist manifestos.

(I know that a lot of high school graduates never completed their curricula, or immediately forgot everything they learned, but you can hardly blame the school for that.)

Not to forget, the Unabomber's Manifesto (published way after 1938).

I'm so tired of hearing that "Today’s ambitions include Randian projects like secession, seasteading or private “innovation zones” where government regulations wouldn’t apply.", as if Peter Thiel is the only person in Silicon Valley making political statements.

"who routinely refer to their corporations as city-states and call for secession"

And of course, the links point to the single instance of both of those supposedly "routine" occurrences. The only thing more pathetic than the idiot who wrote this article are the HNers who found this article noteworthy enough to upvote. The only fact of worth in the entire article is mentioning that Barlow's work exists (as a historical curiosity, I find it rather interesting).

David Golumbia essay (2013) on this topic, http://www.academia.edu/4429212/Cyberlibertarianism_The_Extr...

"While cyberlibertarianism appears to be and in many ways is a theory of technology, I will discuss it today as a politics and as an epistemic theory, and above all an ideology, which is to say a belief system that serves purposes other than those goals at which it says it explicitly aims.

... It is not hard to understand how this strange mixture of pro-corporate and anti-corporate sentiment can coexist so readily. What most of those who write about hackers seem to miss, perhaps purposely, is the chronological dimension to the phenomenon, something like Mirowski’s Russian Doll working over time.

... As these individuals get older and realize the seriousness of the economic imperatives we all face, and as they come to understand that their technical skills and quasi-political bravado have served as terrific sales tools for future careers as technology developers and businesspeople, some of these same individuals (as we all do) change their perspective and hop on board a train that before they had been lobbing grenades at."

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