
The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk - kmfrk
http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler
======
potatolicious
Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is
interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same
ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time,
making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure
that ground is just mud now.

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.

~~~
bcantrill
I tried to read it, but my brain kept powering itself off as a self-defense
mechanism. Then I tried to skim it, and it started getting worse, e.g.:
"Another apt example of O’Reilly’s meme-engineering is his attempt to
establish a strong intellectual link between the development of Unix [...] and
the development of open source and the Internet." At this point I became blind
with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself...

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."

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271>

~~~
zeteo
>I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself...
Ironic that it should deface Unix

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?

~~~
kragen
Morozov is wrong; you just don't know the history.

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.

------
pg
Stylish and smooth-talking are the last words I'd use to describe Tim. Whereas
they do fairly accurately describe the tone of this article.

~~~
teawithcarl
I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger)
Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's
important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent.

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.

~~~
tptacek
I sort of understand the value people see in Morozov as a counterweight to
tech's occasional fatuousness, but this wasn't a good article. As someone who
is morally (if not intellectually) coming from a similar place as him, I found
myself getting progressively more and more unhappy with the article the
farther I got; it became a caricature of a point that deserves to be made more
carefully.

~~~
_delirium
I thought it was ok, and I don't actually usually like Morozov much. But I
think it was confusing in being nominally about O'Reilly. The bulk of the
article is only tangentially about O'Reilly, and is more along the lines of a
reprise of Richard Stallman's essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free
Software", but for a non-tech audience who probably wouldn't read Stallman (he
does at least cite/credit that Stallman piece, though he paraphrases it in
more words than the actual original piece). O'Reilly seems to get grafted on
because he organized some conferences and promoted the term among
businesspeople, and is taken to be emblematic of a certain kind of Valley
culture.

------
danso
Evgeny Morozov is just a poor man's Malcolm Gladwell, and one focused solely
on being contrarian to anything future-thinking, which makes him a darling for
old media.

Here's a recent interview with him from Gawker:
[http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-
morozov-s...](http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-
silicon-valleys-fiercest-critic)

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...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=uber+racism)

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

~~~
kragen
Are you saying that Morozov should have been talking about ridiculing
Libertarians instead of ridiculing tech blogs when he brought up that
assertion? Perhaps that seems like a major error to you? I don't think it
would to him.

~~~
mr_spothawk
Morozov didn't disappoint, the last 8,000 words were devoted to ridiculing
Libertarians.

------
kragen
Tim's short rebuttal from over on Google+ is worth repeating
(<https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/Q8EqCQJstBE>):

> 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_.

------
bascule
Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate
science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is
happening: while global _mean_ surface temperature is rising, climate change
may cause cooling in other areas.

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?"

~~~
smacktoward
Luntz was the one who picked up on the emergence of the new term and urged
Republican policymakers to use it in place of "global warming," because to
people unschooled in the details of the subject "climate change" sounds less
dramatic and therefore calls less for immediate action. See
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.cli...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange)
for background on this. Luntz took a term that scientists developed and turned
it against them, very effectively.

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...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-
Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243396051&sr=8-1)) is
a good place to start.

------
RougeFemme
Yes, it's long. No, I didn't finish it - yet. I fully intend to. I thought it
would be a relatively quick read and then it turned out to be more of an
intellectual exercise than I anticipated. Still, it kept me interested enough
to make me want to go back and read more. Even though I took it all with a
grain of salt, I started viewing O'Reilley from a different perspective -
maybe not so much different as more complex. And his view of Silicon Valley
was certainly a breath of fresh air compared to what normally makes it through
the media filters.

------
dade_
It is for articles like these, that TL,DR was created.

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.

~~~
jchrisa
I didn't think it was so bad. I don't have time to go into detail, but
briefly:

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...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/philosophy-in-a-time-of-
software)

~~~
wyclif
re: his philosophy. It reminded me of Bacon:

"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy
bringeth men's minds about to religion."

------
pjungwir
Is this an April Fools joke? After scrolling for pages I still hadn't read
anything substantive, and I was only 1/6th of the way down.

~~~
keithpeter
I'm afraid I went down the rabbit hole here...

 _"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?

------
unoti
This article, and its presence on the front page of HN, helped make it
abundantly clear to me that I should probably be working right now instead of
wasting my time on Hacker News.

------
mistermcgruff
I was kinda interested when I started reading this thing, but the article
assumes you're already a Tim O'Reilly scholar -- the article is devoid of
examples of his behavior. Whenever an article makes claims about a figure, I
like to have an exhibit A, B, and C for every point argued.

------
xradionut
Having been a developer through the last couple of decades, I've appreciated
some of the books that ORA has published. But I'm wary of Tim pimping the the
latest wave that sells books and conferences. The current wave is "Big Data"
and my spam folder has countless missives promoting this conference or that
gathering. Sigh...

------
spinchange
I think Steven Johnson said it best about Mr. Morozov: “He’s like a vampire
slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to
stay in business.”

------
jholman
Whew, I read 4500 words, then paused to see how many more I had to go, and
quit at that point. (As you will see from this comment, I'm pretty patient
with length, but Morozov defeated me.)

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.

~~~
icebraining
_anyone who says "FLOSS" is either perpetrating doublespeak, or a victim of
it, because "Free/Libre Software" and "Open Source Software" are different
things_

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.

------
petercooper
Aside from the actual content, I'm intrigued how working on this sort of
content can pay. The author claims to have spent three months (not necessarily
full-time, I assume) reading everything O'Reilly has personally written in
public and this gigantic article must have taken a good week or two to write
and edit alone. That's several thousand dollars of effort there and I can't
imagine it ever getting paid back by this article, no matter how good it is
(or not).

~~~
MaysonL
See his website: <http://www.evgenymorozov.com>

------
marshray
Stuff like this is just weird:

 _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.

------
dechols
The author invents new words regularly in this article.

Stephen King's "On Writing" talks about this, and I'm paraphrasing:

"Writers who invent words are bad writers."

~~~
obviouslygreen
Which is hilarious if you've read much King (he was my favorite author for a
very long time), unless he actually claims to be a bad writer himself, in
which case writing a book called _On Writing_ is a questionable endeavor.

------
art_arbitrage
The article raises some interesting ideas but I think it misses some really
big things. I've always seen O'Reilly as more of a passionate commenter/pundit
as opposed to a influential operator. This isn't to say that he has no
influence, but I think he's mostly just synthysizing the Valley zeitgeist. In
other words, he seems like an odd target for what I see as a cultural
critique. Maybe I'm not smart enough to actually disagree with Morozov, but I
find it difficult to see the problem here. Even if Morozov is right, is
O'Reilly really the most guilty party and why exactly are the things he is
doing bad? For such a long article, there seems to be a lot of unstated
assumptions. FWIW I live in SF so maybe I can't see forest for the trees.

------
room271
I'm disappointed in Hacker News. The top comments seem to be about people
lacking the patience to read the article and then criticising the article for
being too long!

Please either spend real time reading the article and thinking about it and
then comment, or don't comment at all.

------
zeruch
It's not his best work by any stretch (its overly dense and repetitive) and
some factoids are off the mark, but I do like that he has pointed out that the
kind of back-patting altruism everyone likes to pretend is the best reward for
their efforts is exposed as the barely upright rationalization for what is
otherwise what I call "benign greed". I'm not exempt from it either; I like
money, and I like doing interesting things to earn it. If I can make the world
a better place for the effort, all the better, but it isn't the raison d'etre,
and I won't posture otherwise...a large number of folks in the value do though
(possibly to the point of self-denial).

------
cjoh
I find it absolutely amazing that a guy who coined the term "mindless
clicktivism" spent more than 14,000 words on an attack on Tim O'Reilly. Aren't
there more important things to worry about?

Disclosure: I'm an O'Reilly author.

------
jboynyc
So far no commenter has mentioned that this piece appeared in _The Baffler_ ,
where Aaron Swartz was a contributing editor.

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.

------
pnathan
Metacomment: I don't think that it's a bad thing to consider and reconsider
the ideas being pushed and pumped by various parties. Even when the party
being critiqued is pushing the agenda you favor.

The article could stand to be a higher-entropy source though. It proved
distressingly low-entropy after a while.

------
CleanedStar
The comments on this article is that it is: "without...a thesis or a point",
"hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking"

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.

~~~
mturmon
Thanks for this counterpoint to the glib dismissals around here. The message
of the article is hard to hear if you already have ideological commitments to
the transformative potential of entrepreneurial activity and to the power of
Web 2.0.

It's a long, difficult article. So, pick something you didn't like, and
dismiss it all wholesale? Too easy.

~~~
mr_spothawk
I read the article, and disagreed with half the message. The first
(Specificity is important) was very good, well defended, and made me think
about how I use language in my life. The second (O'Reilly is a shill for Rand)
was soapboxing about a topic the writer didn't appear to understand.

------
beachstartup
i got through about 15 pages without finding a thesis or a point being made.

~~~
lubujackson
I guess the whole point is that O'Reilly is rebranding propaganda as "meme-
engineering" even though they are technically the same.

~~~
smacktoward
I read the article and think the point is deeper than that. I would summarize
it like this:

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.

~~~
ttuominen
I also read it, and I think you summarize it well. I'd like to add that the
author's main aim seems to be in revealing a strong technocratic tendency
underlying O'Reilly's thought. The technocracy is shown for example in the
naive assumption that political decisions can be calculated algorithmically
with enough data and intelligent algorithms. According to the author, O'Reilly
hides the political claim that small government is good behind technological
newspeak about governments providing only the essential APIs for the private
sector to build on. In coining new terms for old ideas he is ignoring the vast
literature of political and philosophical thought discussing these matters and
gaining the support of hackers for a political agenda. And, most importantly,
dismissing tough ethical and political decisions by claiming that government
is some kind of an optimization problem.

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.

