
Did the Suits win the Internet? - scarhill
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/did-the-suits-win-the-internet/
======
macintux
Tangential at best, but in 1998 or so I was working at a large company with a
small, nimble Internet team. We had a website before most companies had heard
of the Internet, we had Usenet feeds, a class A network...

One day the team was invited to lunch, where we were informed that our efforts
were appreciated but it was time for the adults to take over. Marketing was
stepping in to manage everything properly.

Our consolation prize? A motivational screen saver. I long thought that, if
they had at least been clueful enough to give us Doom or something on those
CDs, maybe the team wouldn’t have felt quite so humiliated.

~~~
rayuela
Oh god so much cringe. If you don't mind me asking, what company was this?

~~~
macintux
I’d rather not.

------
moe4
The Geeks vs Suit narrative feels totally bogus to me these days. Both are
equally trapped in a consumer culture that they can't escape.

The senseless consumption machine assimilates everyone.

Until iPhone 86 and Star Wars 123 can't get made cause there are no resources
left, Geeks and Suit will continue to serve the machine.

~~~
3131s
Absolutely. I could live off the average Hacker News user's annual salary for
like 15 years. Even if I still lived in the US I would work one or two years,
spend 10k / year on living expenses (I have done it before) and take the
remainder of my salary to a country with low cost of living and live exactly
as I do now -- no car or moto, no big house or fancy apartment, no phone, etc.
Is all that stuff really worth years and years of total freedom? I wouldn't
change anything about how I live now even if I were a millionaire.

~~~
saimiam
Do you blog about your experiences anywhere? I'd like to read more. (Totally
serious request in case it comes off as otherwise.)

~~~
3131s
I have thought about it before but haven't ever. I am happy to give you a few
more details though.

I am able to spend so little because I live in a very central area of Phnom
Penh, Cambodia. My apartment is a spacious 80$ / month concrete box, around 5m
x 16m with tall ceilings, natural ventilation, and a balcony facing out into a
long alley. Around 100m away is one of the largest markets in the city, and so
there is tons and tons of cheap, healthy food in walking distance (e.g. a kilo
of mangoes for 0.25$ when in season). The really notable aspect of living here
is the sheer population density -- I've estimated that in a 100m radius around
me, in dense rows of five story apartments [1], there are probably over 5000
people living together relatively harmoniously. Being somewhat of a shut-in,
this is really great for me as every day I see and chat with many neighbors,
local vendors, and other familiar faces. I also live within walking distance
of the absolutely awesome Olympic Stadium [2] and go there most days to sprint
and lift weights with the Cambodian national track team (choosing cheap or
free hobbies is pretty key to this lifestyle I suppose). Most everything else
that I love doing involves computers, so other than a few laptops, speakers, a
guitar, a nice table and chair, a mattress on the floor, etc. I don't really
own much.

That's not to say there are not difficult moments here. Even though I
personally am not struggling financially, it's hard to totally escape the
effects of poverty when you are immersed in it. A few years back, for example,
a teenage boy killed himself in this neighborhood by jumping from a 5th story
balcony, and knowing the backstory I don't think he would have done it if he
had the money to escape from his home life. Seeing other people struggle is
tough, but of course not nearly as tough as being in that situation yourself.

[1]
[http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/...](http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/tumblr_ms9t8gMXjn1sglye1o1_1280.jpg)
(a view looking out from the balcony of my first apartment here)

[2]
[http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/...](http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/tumblr_ms84g6u8e11sglye1o4_1280.jpg)
(this is from 4 years ago, days after I arrived, now there is a new field and
track!)

~~~
saimiam
How do you deal with any sense of emotional distance from the people around
you? If you make a good living but the people around you don't, at some level,
you must find yourself unable to identify with their struggles and
happinesses.

~~~
3131s
That's a good question. When I first moved here, like a lot of Westerners I
imagined that I would not really be able to relate to many poorer Khmer people
because of how enormously different our backgrounds are. While it is true that
most older and some younger Khmer people have a story of unimaginable
hardship, I would say that a lot of Westerners here (especially those that
never actually meet Khmer people or learn the language) have this tendency to
think of local people in a way that is too focused on their plight, to the
point that it prevents them from recognizing their mutual commonality. It's
also important to note that even in my relatively poorer neighborhood, most
people are not desperately struggling like you might see in charity
advertisements and that sort of thing (but probably do lack a safety net).

So while I am extremely sympathetic to and cognizant of how hard many Khmer
people work for their living, most of what I see day to day is happy families
and people laughing and doing things that are just very normal, for lack of a
better word. It's something that I always want to remain aware of, but at the
same time it's not what I want to be focused on all the time when I am meeting
people.

I hope that makes sense. To put it another way, I can't identify with their
struggle but regarding happiness, I feel that once our basic needs are met
that we're all pretty much the same. I guess that's why I don't feel an
emotional distance between myself and the people I meet here, most of the
time. I also feel really, really compelled to use the skills that I have to
make some money in a reasonably ethical way and more or less give it away to
the many friends and acquaintances I have here.

~~~
saimiam
Did the realization that once basic needs are met, we all have a lot in common
take a while to come? Did you try to fit your Cambodian neighbors into a
narrative that you recognized before accepting them as they are?

Sorry for such personal questions. I just returned to India from the US and at
some level, I feel I'm trying to live a US lifestyle in India.

~~~
3131s
Initially I would not have admitted to anyone or even realized that I was
putting people into a 'narrative' but then I think as I noticed other
foreigners engaging in that type of thought pattern, I also noticed it to a
lesser degree in myself. What helped me get over it was learning the language
and really getting to know a few people closely. When you can laugh about the
same things, see your own insecurities and fears in someone else, hear their
stories about falling in love, and all of those other very fundamental human
emotions, for me that really broke down any artificial distance that I had
created in my mind.

I definitely don't think that because I've superficially lived in the same
location for 4 years that somehow my experience is now anything like that of
my neighbors, but I do believe now more than ever that despite our totally
disparate backgrounds, there is still so much commonality between people all
over the world. And of course like anywhere people come in all types, ranging
from charming, funny, rude, shy, nerdy, mentally ill, etc. and everything in
between.

Where in India can I ask? I visited India almost ten years ago now, and I have
good memories of Rajasthan, Delhi (except for the crazy pollution!), Mumbai,
and especially some smaller cities in Dehradun. The level of poverty in India
seemed much more dire than in Cambodia, though I don't know if that's borne
out statistically or not -- just my impression. Still, I would love to go back
and now I suppose the flight would not be nearly so long.

~~~
saimiam
I live close (relatively) to Calcutta in the state of Jharkhand. It's far from
the glamor of a tourist city in rajasthan.

Poverty is still an issue and it may well be worse than Cambodia. The
(dis)advantage India has is that economic growth happens organically here. In
the 3 weeks I've been back, women entrepreneurs have given me pamphlets for
their at-home beauty treatment visits to hand over to my mother. If this were
more organized, some VC somewhere would have converted this into a chain of
stylists making home visits.

Anyway, thanks for the conversation. My personal goal is to see people/myself
as they are.

------
rendall
I have so many questions. If anyone can help me out, I'd appreciate it.

Has "the architecture of the web" really changed away from "peer to peer"
towards - what - centralized or top-down? In what respect?

Is the existence of Netflix and Facebook a threat to 1990s style Geekdom?
Don't these modes of approach exist side-by-side?

"the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment"

Setting "mass entertainment" aside for a moment, it seems to me there are
larger industries catering to other needs than the 90s ever dreamed:
scientific inquiry, literacy, accessibility, communication, environmental
protection, disaster awareness and relief, poverty alleviation, among others
have all risen because of the internet. Those, and mass entertainment too,
have all been driven by the interests and focus of Geeks, as I see it.

Am I wrong? Did I misunderstand something?

~~~
Godel_unicode
Totally agree. It's always super amusing to me when people argue that we need
to get rid of e.g. Facebook because it's stifling creativity. The problem
isn't Facebook, it's the fact that average people want to be (or feel they
need to be, which sums to the same thing) on the biggest platform.

Facebook's existence isn't preventing other social networks from taking off,
human nature is. Go start your own social network, I guarantee the Facebook
police will not kick in your door and shut you down.

~~~
gjjrfcbugxbhf
Nope they'll knock on your door with a fat check.

Seriously though the changes being proposed and enacted in the regulatory
environment around social networks mean that there is a danger the real police
will kick down your door if you run a moderately successful social network.

------
markbnj
> At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was
> peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business.

But you do need large amounts of capital to move packets all around the globe
like magic, so naturally the suits won the Internet.

~~~
HillRat
This is true -- I feel like the author has forgotten just how _expensive_ it
was to acquire hardware and software back in those days. You could easily blow
half a million to a million on gear and licenses for a solution that today we
would implement for pennies on the compute hour with open-source software.
Even a low-end dev server would set you back north of $25K, to say nothing of
other costs, such as provisioning T3s for the office when dialup was still the
norm. (And traffic costs for sites of even modest size were a real concern.)

While it was cheap to get into the game at an individual level (a PC, Notepad,
and a couple of O'Reilly books sufficed), the costs to stand up a
professional, scalable operation with the necessary tools and talent took
meaningful CAP/OPEX investment. (Which is why we also were able to institute
the less-laudable norm of blowing massive stacks of cash on meaningless toys
and parties -- they were a relatively minor line item next to everything
else.)

So, yeah, the suits were running stuff from the beginning -- they may have
been government, military, academia, or corporate, but _someone_ had to front
that cash. While I certainly buy into the belief that platform monopolies and
morally-murky business models are of grave concern, I love the fact that a kid
can stand up a SaaS business in a weekend on a DO droplet and never have to
beg for a seed investment.

------
purpleidea
Sadly yes.

Now it's up to us hackers to use decentralized algorithms and encryption to
take it back. Thankfully, these are fairly understood nowadays.

And when we write this code, ensure it's got a healthy amount of copyleft
built-in because multi-national software companies that live off of
proprietary are afraid that this will eat their lunch the way Linux and GNU
did.

~~~
PhaseMage
TCP/IP centralizes. Why am I stuck with one ISP? Scalable Mesh is the
solution. I just GPL'd my project I'm working to build:
[https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch](https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch)

~~~
Godel_unicode
No. TCP/IP can work just fine over multiple ISPs, Google "asymmetric routing".
Also, look into cloud load balancers like cloudflare, then realize you can use
A records to load balance over more than one of those with multiple different
backends. The problem is physical diversity of connection at any one location,
not some perceived weakness in TCP/IP.

~~~
PhaseMage
I assert that TCP/IP is actually the cause of "[lack of] physical diversity of
connection in any one location".

A second (or third) ISP isn't going to suddenly show up at my house because it
doesn't make economic sense. In the same way that two railroad lines don't get
built between the same two cities.

A real scalable mesh protocol could change the economic calculation.

~~~
spc476
That are two things that really killed the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet
---NAT and firewalls. Both work to make a true peer-to-peer connection
difficult.

------
fabianhjr
For those worried about ownership of the internet and its platforms, do check
out [https://ioo.coop/](https://ioo.coop/)

> If users owned their own social media, they could set terms of service in
> which they keep control over personal data.

I would like to mention it is not about the individual but
collective/cooperative ownership of internet platforms. For example,
[https://social.coop](https://social.coop)

------
ianai
First rule of corporate America is the corpies always win in the long run.
(Also we’re all dead in the long run)

~~~
threeseed
Second rule of corporate America is that new corporations come along all the
time to displace them.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix etc. They never existed a few decades ago
and are far more influential than companies like Comcast, NBC, Fox etc.

So yes capitalism continues to be the dominant model. But it's not always the
same companies in control.

------
gt_
As it goes, the literal "suits" are gone, replaced with hoodies, and it's onto
another cultural abstraction of revolt. I am quite hopeful in the long term
but the prize is beyond the eyes.

Symbolic revolution is the glaring fear of post-capitalist theory, and the
past couple decades glorifying Silicon Valley's sneakers-at-the-office antics
falls right in line.

------
patkai
The distinction between suits and nerds/geeks is blurrier than ever. Think
about Zuck, you can probably take a photo of him in a t-shirt, a hoody and a
suit on the same day. However, I think there is a pretty big difference
between people who feel it's worth learning things for the sake of
understanding and those who only work on sellable things. OTOH, there is a
little suit in all of us, possibly suppressed. And who knows, maybe there is a
little hoody in the suits as well!

------
threeseed
What a lazy and childish article.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk
etc etc. These people and so many others have had significant impacts on the
internet we see today and now they are just "suits" ? And why do we need to
group people like this ? Many technical people have been responsible for
negative elements of the internet which the "suits" fought against. And vice
versa.

------
williamle8300
Yes. The W3C committee just railroaded the DRM spec last week..

------
ryanqian
Make a good life, geeks, You deserve it.

------
ryanmarsh
The suits always win. Get back to work.

------
pmoriarty
I'd love to read this, but the site can't work without javascript, which I
have disabled in my browsers, and the source contains nothing but some opaque,
obfuscated JS blob.

Does anyone have a link to a plain text version of this article?

~~~
RandomInteger4
Why have you disabled javascript?

~~~
pmoriarty
Mostly to try to avoid javascript vulnerabilities, to limit exposure to ads
and tracking, and to have a nice consistent web experience without all the
design annoyances of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?).

When I've talked about this before, some people have asked "what javascript
vulnerabilities?" I've answered that question here: [1] More details about how
I browse the web here: [2]

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888)

[2] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519)

~~~
jaclaz
>Mostly to try to avoid javascript vulnerabilities, to limit exposure to ads
and tracking, and to have a nice consistent web experience without all the
design annoyances of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?).

It is reassuring to know that I am not the only one attempting to avoid as
much as possible the "paradigm shift" of Web 2.0/3.0, thanks for the note.

