Code Free or Die(): Why Hackers Are So Often Libertarians (2008)
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It's worth looking at the context of the time, where there was also a sense that these were previously poles around ideas of masculinity and femininity, where if you were one and embraced the values of the other, it was unsex-y, where concrete-thinking women and fluidly-political men were misfit social exceptions. Today I don't think that's as common at all, so current libertarianism is a kind of nostalgia for a time when the things it was existing as a reaction to were still present, and they aren't as central themes today.
However, the values of truth, self-reliance, competence, work, anti-authoritarianism, commensurate responsibilities for rights, limited privileges, individual freedom, simple rules-based orders, sound money, freedom of conscience, family integrity, and live and let live, lassier-faire principles are all still very much alive. I even suspect we're about to see a major conflict over them, but it's not really hacker libertarianism, it's just human dignity. That doesn't always prevail either, but I am not aware of an example where it wasn't worth absolutely everything to try. :)
to me, the "libertarian hacker" de facto standard peaked in the mid 00s (around when TFA was written), when everyone was enthusiastic about the Internet and Ron Paul and Larry Lessig and Information Wanting To Be Free and 09F9 and BitTorrent. then social media happened and everyone got an always-on Internet connection in their pockets at all times and now the Pauls are evil Republicans just like the rest of em, free speech is dangerous and should be restricted and limited on all platforms at all costs, and identity politics (of all flavors) are more important than everyone being a pseudonymous handle on the Internet, treated equally by default. there used to be this feeling that the future of the Internet was just going to be fuckin awesome because it would pierce through all existing societal constructs like bigotry and racism, connecting people of all stripes equally in this crazy libertarianesque online network of computers, and what could come of that but societal advancement, increased creative output, and a general world-improving fair and equal exchange of ideas?
I rarely, if ever, see any of that kind of idealism anymore, both in theory and in practice, and I miss it dearly.
If you stay out of that (decidedly big) circle, you can still get a bit of that sparkle.
then social media and smartphones happened and celebrities and normies immigrated en masse, bringing their preconceived notions of meatspace social norms along with them. remember when nobody ever publicly whined about "harassment" and "death threats" aimed their way by pseudonymous Internet users, because that kind of just came with the territory and you got used to it and it didn't affect you after awhile? I sure as hell didn't use my real name as my handle back then, you'd be crazy to do so. then celebrities got on Twitter and the masses of iPhone owners followed and all of that went away—cyberspace and meatspace merged together, and meatspace brought all the baggage we had been so happy to leave behind in with it.
then Denny's hired a social media intern to post on tumblr and through the dark magic of this new, normie Internet, corporations became People, Too, because see they post to the Internet with memes and support for social causes just like you and me!, and any hope of the libertarian hacker future was forever shattered. it was fun while it lasted though.
Libertarianism manifests in many forms, and I would say the Internet Libertarian early-90's WIRED cyberpunk cowboy ideal one is less of a cohesive project than a scene. It's a vibe, a mood, that was doomed to end just as warehouse techno raves did as well. The libertarian ideal of being a cyber-cowboy on a wild untamed frontier, without intrusive power structures- whether bureaucratic government, fuddy-duddy corporations, or the uncool normie hoi polloi- taps into the same American dream of the Wild West or of a land of Jeffersonian yeomen. And is just as sustainable.
I understand your loss and anguish. But the same historical forces that created the technologies that captured the dreams of Internet Libertarianism are not all that different from the same forces that created social media and brought everyone else online into Eternal September. This is how society, perhaps all forms of growth, operate.
The decline of pirate politics was underway by the time of the renewed culture wars in the 2010s, and I don't think the rise of social justice or identity politics was the cause of it. Those latter topics just were more popular because, well, they resonated with more people. (Feels like the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was the last time such issues had semi-mainstream appeal.) And more people were online, on social media, because tech went fully mainstream. (I suppose in your view you could claim that tech was a victim of its own success.)
Lessig is still around. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. His whole thing was campaign finance reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig_2016_president...
And, well, I'm pretty sure Rand is much more of a stock Republican than his father was. Justin Amash would be the libertarian standard-bearer these days.
> what could come of that but societal advancement, increased creative output, and a general world-improving fair and equal exchange of ideas?
On the flip side, we had the entire cyberpunk genre predicting that it'd be bought, sold, and owned by megacorps, and that's somewhat come to pass as well. Citizens United certainly guaranteed their right to free speech.
Proposals for changing this resulted in lots of internal drama, culminating with a notorious debate over how a women-only mailing list was in opposition to the party's principles. Similar things happened with the Swedish party. There's hardly anything in English of this; you'll have to use your Google(-translate)-fu for more info: https://www.google.de/search?q=+piratinnen+piratenpartei+fem...
However, I don't think this was the (sole) cause of the parties' decline. The German party had increasing vote shares until 2013, around when internal conflict over members' stances on issues other than copyright, made evident by the parties' commitment to transparency, started being widely publicized, proving (to the public, at least) that its approach to direct democracy could not scale.
HN has surprisingly little discussion of the pirate parties' decline - really only one, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231584
Aside: I have discovered the German version of ESR, who fulminates over his theory that the attacks on pirate politics and open source from gender studies perspectives are in collusion with American economic interests: https://www.danisch.de/blog/2015/11/04/feminismus-als-waffe-...
https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/13338750882658672...
https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/13897172944864911...
https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/14704686528057262...
https://twitter.com/populismupdates/status/14444880772257832...
According to that account the Icelandic and Slovenian Pirate Parties are pretty good too
In socialism the key difference is that those corporations are now government entities backed by the power of the gocernrather than only the power of the market.
The labor it takes to gather that knowledge and the knowledge itself are not yours under a socialist system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...
TL;DR, Awhile back, Sweden decided to tax financial trades. It was a "tiny" tax of just 1%. This tax reduced revenues of various other taxes and completely destroyed their markets which haven't recovered, even to this day. Hundreds of millions evaporated in the span of years and potentially billions over the decades... not to mention the loss of jobs and opportunities for the country as a whole...
That said, I'm glad HN is mostly apolitical... at least relative to other sites I visit, lol.
I think it's still a pretty common political formulation to have around here, but with all of the messes and crises of the past couple of decades, I see on HN people might be more receptive to something to rein in large corporations, whether it be government or even organized worker power.
Was the Swedish financial trade tax a Tobin tax?
Mmmm... I'd say it could have been, yes. IIRC the main purpose was to raise revenue though (https://www.bis.org/publ/confp01s.pdf), while a Tobin is mainly aimed at curbing speculation. They have very similar effects though.
>I'd say you'd probably fit into the archetypal libertarianish techie mould
For sure. I see no sense in denying it.
>I see on HN people might be more receptive to something to rein in large corporations
I can also agree with this. I try not to absorb myself in political philosophy but more or less, that's why I can't say I would ever be 100% one thing or the other (yea, tired trope but see no reason it isn't valid) . Ask anyone that knows me, I _hate_ TikTok and a lot of actions taken by big corporations as of late.
There are so many charlatans and corporate barons who rise to some brief level of recognition with the libertarian label that I felt forced to stop using the term to describe myself about 10 years ago. Ideology is driven by Internet defined politburo which is why it's difficult to spot libertarian themes in public online discourse. As fascist undertones are evergreen, libertarian principles remain difficult to defend and vulnerable to ad-hominem attack. But I digress.
I ask because Dang often links to a collection of threads where people make this type claim[1]. If we’re to believe him, the bias you’re perceiving may not actually exist, and may actually be a reflection of your own personal biases.
Not sure whether you relate to that, but I definitely could. Since learning of this, I actually view Hacker News as roughly politically neutral.
Note that the comments Dang linked to are making claims that HN is this or HN is that. I only claim that I saw things. It's a difference, but possibly a small difference, I guess.
Because of this, I reserve downvotes not for disagreement, but when I think someone is making an argument in bad faith, particularly if it's bullshit. In particular, some posts on HN make bold, unsubstantiated claims and tend to put the onus on the community to debunk those claims. I downvote those posts when I sense the "bullshit asymmetry principle"[0], in action because it's a tax on folks that post thoughtful comments for the benefit or amusement of the bullshitter. The link has more context, but the idea can be summarized simply:
> ...the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” holds that "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than what’s needed to produce it.”
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Education_and_reasoni...
Tech-savvy NPR liberals: deeply capitalist, socially liberal, who consider expressions of emotion profoundly offensive. This is particularly true of anger, with empathy being a close second. Humor is almost-but-not-quite taboo.
When politics is discussed, solutions outside of boycotts or elections are eschewed. Partisans are not acknowledged to exist, nor are bad-faith actors: if someone says something, you must pretend to believe they are acting in good faith, and that debate is always worth pursuing.
Racism and bigotry simply do not exist.
Market forces will solve climate crises. The use of force will not be considered or allowed to be discussed.
*black guy who occasionally makes it a topic here
The very premise of the article, taken in today's context, suggests that one should not be a libertarian. Systems thinking, aversion to restriction, and a balking at authority should, if you're using them right and bothering to think, lead one to want less free markets.
FAANG, unrestricted, is far more dangerous and toxic to innovation than any government. Same goes for banks. Same goes for the entire legal profession. If I'm at all familiar with the libertarian ethic, the idea is that you let these things expand organically without fetters. This is Bad with a capital B.
I would faster align a good hacker ethic today with the far left. Like, far, far left. Not democrats, not liberals, definitely not libertarians. Anarchists, in the "headless governance" meaning of the term. Distributed decision making without representatives.
Libertarians, neoconservatives, and all the rest of that "free market, small government" drivel are just handing the keys to the neighborhood burglar. The systems perspective, or rather, my systems perspective on this is that it's to late and the only option is to wait for a total credit collapse. But those free markets got us to the place where k Street has the funds to write their own laws.
The problem is the label, not the philosophy. If you go far enough left, you get to keep your guns; if you go far enough right, you get to keep your abortions. It's intellectually dishonest to refer to either of those positions as "left" or "right," but at the same time, we have to admit that a lot of people who call themselves "libertarians" aren't actually.
That's a pretty high bar. I mean, Google/Facebook/etc have done some skeezy stuff, but there have been a lot of REALLY bad governments.
> Anarchists, in the "headless governance" meaning of the term. Distributed decision making without representatives.
As someone who's pretty libertarian, I don't particularly mind those folks, and would say the biggest difference between them and I is their optimism. I'm pretty sure the resulting power vacuum would result in an opportunity for totalitarian fuckwits to take over.*
* It should be noted, in the defense of anarchists, that they're pretty sure that my cynicism and paranoia has already resulted in totalitarian fuckwits taking over. The possibility that we're both right should also be considered.
which is the same as libertarianism, since the ultimate libertarianism is a system without a government at all
You can't use coercive power of the government to reduce the power of corporations, since now you are just creating an entity that is more powerful that has power over other entities. This is what happened in China where the corporations are just another branch of the government and have to do what the government tells them. I live in China and it's not a leftist paradise. It's a right wing shithole where rights of LGBT people are based on the whims of whoever is in power.
The issue is that some systems are invasive. If we don't make any collective decision to restrict some behaviors (like lobbying) all the (legal) freedom in the world is meaningless, because the options available have been reduced anyway. If we, say, allow intel to install hardware-based binary signature checking, it doesn't matter how legal it is to run X piece of software, cause where the hell are you gonna run it?
The primary argument I hear against this thinking is "so the market will correct because you can just buy elsewhere". Free markets have been the norm for a while now, and it's not gotten better, it's gotten worse. Go out and buy a phone that 1) does all you want it to do and 2) lasts more than 4 years. Have fun with that.
There's more than one way to exert control over other people's business, and governance isn't even the biggest offender. Yes, we should keep the government from overreach and it is indeed overreach. But we should also reinstate glass-steagall and drive over K street with a fleet of bulldozers.
Assume that there is, in a utopian libertarian society, a corporation that has grown big and successful by providing goods and services people buy voluntarily. Anarchists think that corporation is the problem. If you got rich by founding the corporation, you are also the problem. And if many people listen to me because I speak against the corporation, I am also the problem.
Libertarianism is about giving individuals maximal freedom to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't violate other people's liberties. Anarchism is about opposing excessive influence people have over other people, regardless of how they gained that influence.
If you use the government to split up the big corporation, you're not an anarchist.
Doesn't seem to be any danger of that...
Times have changed. Social justice is now a core part of hacker ideals. So is a critical-theoretic relentless interrogation of one's own assumptions and biases, as Allison Parrish nicely elucidated: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...