
The Man Who Conquered, Then Warped Silicon Valley - enkiv2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-one-mans-utopian-vision-for-the-internet-conquered-and-then-badly-warped-silicon-valley/2015/03/20/7dbe39f8-cdab-11e4-a2a7-9517a3a70506_story.html
======
stalcottsmith
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.

~~~
wutbrodo
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.

~~~
thesteamboat
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.

------
lotsofmangos
_" 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](http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man.htm)

~~~
smacktoward
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.)

~~~
eternalban
> ... American perspective ...

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

~~~
enkiv2
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.)

------
21echoes
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.

~~~
wutbrodo
"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).

------
walterbell
David Golumbia essay (2013) on this topic,
[http://www.academia.edu/4429212/Cyberlibertarianism_The_Extr...](http://www.academia.edu/4429212/Cyberlibertarianism_The_Extremist_Foundations_of_Digital_Freedom)

 _" 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."_

 _

