
“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999) - Hooke
http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html
======
maire
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.

------
roenxi
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.

------
indigochill
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."

------
ppod
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?!

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

------
1996
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.

~~~
Ensorceled
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.

~~~
pmoriarty
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
mr_toad
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.

~~~
z3phyr
Hangouts as in afk?

------
jimbo1qaz
The URL points to a footnote and should be changed to
[http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html](http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html)

~~~
tlb
Fixed, thanks.

------
0x8BADF00D
This essay is a cautionary tale, more than a writing about the political
influences of early computer culture.

------
dfee
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.

~~~
Nasrudith
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.

------
CDSlice
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?

~~~
colejohnson66
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.

~~~
generalpass
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.

------
deogeo
Always relevant when discussing libertarianism:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-
liberta...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-
faq/)

~~~
nickik
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.

