From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Before Linux and Wikipedia, we assumed that if you gave everyone a sharpie, that we would graffiti and deface the world.
Instead, we learned that humans will stop and sit and write the most thorough history ever seen for the sake of free knowledge and create the tools for us to do so.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job.
But the gravy train is ending...
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.
- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.
- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
I think that's right, but I also think the OP had a point as well: in some ways, the negative effects of technology, in addition to being pushed by fat corporations, are also an emergent effect of the technology itself that goes beyond intention. Examples:
* Google probably didn't have a master plan to push SEO slop, but it came about anyway because it's in human nature to game the system.
* If someone creates one product to become more efficient, it's likely that another person will also do so, even if the net result is negative due to the prisoner's dilemma. (Bug finding vs Bug exploitation).
Etc. You can think of many examples, but how much in tech creates arms race scenarios that we MUST play out to stay afloat? How many people use LLMs just to keep up with their peers who use them?
That creates an emergent phenomena of creating problems not necessarily planned, even though a lot of the impetus to create the arms-race scenarios WERE intented by the rich.
I used to think this, I would repeat that old quote "It's not a conspiracy, the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control"
Then comes stuff like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#:~:text=th...
and
https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...
and
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-plots...
and
https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/meta-fortune-fraudulent-ads...
and
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+inauguration+zuckerburg+musk+trum...
and
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dem-orders-congressional-probe-eps...
and I'm left thinking well, if none of that covers the definition of evil cabal, then what does? How far can we move these goal posts?
In a basketball game who wins may vary but you know balls will go through hoops because that's what the rule set of the game incentivizes.
Investors want returns so number must go up. Eventually companies and their executives exhaust the basic honest core business so they have to start scraping for more revenue growth. Eventually this leads to the familiar process of enshittification where the company flips the script and sells the customers as the product and nickel and dimes people. This eventually ruins the product but number must still go up, so who else can pay? Criminals, scammers, government propagandists, political influence operations, intelligence agencies, militaries, etc.
We get what I just described for the same reason basketball makes balls go through hoops.
Why does number have to go up? Because you want to retire. Your pension funds and banks and such hire financial experts to invest. Those experts invest in things that make number go up because that's their job.
That's why this is hard. You are a player. We are all both hurt by the system and benefit by the system. It feeds us and protects us and enslaves us. Everything is paradoxes and feedback loops. When you get a job you want things like benefits and union wages, but when you go shopping you pick the cheapest product which means you want to break unions.
Conspiracism is a cop out from trying to understand this. It's easier to just pick a single scapegoat (often a make believe one) and blame them.
I'm not saying all the people in all the links you posted are great people, just that they're not the architect of this. There is no architect. The game was designed by the mad blind idiot gods of complexity and evolution.
I've had the thesis for a long time that humans are not actually intelligent. We are merely clever. A clever organism can deploy local intelligence to maximize its outcome in a game. A truly intelligent organism would understand the game and become the architect. We might not have the cognitive capacity for this. Maybe ASI can, or can help us.
Maybe that's why the aliens aren't talking to us. Anyone capable of star travel is the latter. They take a look and think "interesting fauna down there but nothing intelligent yet. They only try to win games."
For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics, regardless of conspiracies (people getting paid produce more & better quality stuff than people making a hobby of it). But if you look at the execution of that dynamic there are always going to be small highly motivated groups of people trying to achieve specific goals on the sly.
It is unusual for any individual cabal to be powerful enough to control a situation.
There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.
(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)
As soon as something becomes potentially profitable, the MBAs enter the room, and the fun goes away. The more profitable it gets, the more toxic it gets, too.
I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking, especially as you are also factually wrong: arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs. In fact, two of them were started by Harvard college dropouts and one of them by Stanford PhDs. The big tech companies I can think of that were started by MBAs (eBay, grubhub, intuit, Bloomberg) are arguably much less harmful, though two of them became quasi-monopolies.
The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).
Oh there absolutely are cabals at work. The infamous "Paypal mafia" [1] where multiple members eventually infiltrated the US government comes to my mind, and Ivy League universities in general are even more infamous for very close knit alumni networks.
The parent commenter didn't say anything about founders, that was your addition.
A reasonable interpretation of the parent comment is that these companies were in fact fun places to work until the MBAs arrived. Personally I don't take offense using MBA as a shorthand for "individuals more focused on profitability than purpose" even though I recognize that doesn't describe everyone with that degree, although admittedly, part of that is because I don't have a better term for it. It's a bit like my own handle; I don't in fact think every corporation is inherently evil, but when I say "anticorporate" there is a common understanding that I'm opposed to many of the shitty behavior of modern corporations, and not that I'm nitpicking that LLCs or sole proprietorships are somehow better forms of legal entity.
Unfortunately, FOSS maintainers pretty much everywhere have been drowning for years. First it was "security researchers" meat-proxying dependabot or people looking to gamify their Github stats by filing spam merge requests for typos in readmes, and now it's "security researchers" running one of the usual AI agent suspects and flooding projects with reports of varying kinds of quality.
For me, the passion is pretty much gone. It's slop everywhere.
> The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.
Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.
Decentralization does not imply charity. You see the same around openstreetmap. There are a lot of organizations that benefit from their data that actively contribute to it or make donations to keep development funded. Same with Wikipedia.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
Imho people (and even animals!) instinctively understand that most actions are not zero-sum. That other people's gain (whether individual or community) often exceeds the 'loss' of the person who puts in the effort. Doubly so if the latter enjoys doing it.
Classical economics ignores that. It assumes that parties nearly-always act rational (untrue), generally don't like 'work' so require compensation (YMMV), participants in a market are well-informed (untrue), transactions are zero-sum (rarely), money is THE only relevant 'currency' (it's just one of many), people are selfish (debatable, imho this is learned rather than intrinsic behaviour), markets are free (untrue), or that 'free' markets are the only way to efficiently allocate resources (again: debatable). That's a lot of questionable assumptions to base crucial socio-economic (and policing / military) systems on.
More likely it's mostly historic reasons. During some period, some approach worked better for some groups of people (probably helped by a lot of violence). And this carried forward to the present day in complex, poorly-understood ways. Never mind propaganda (include social networks' algorithms there), disinformation, or that status quo can be incredibly hard to disrupt.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to turn what exists upside down! But it's good to question underlying assumptions considered 'common knowledge'. Re-organise things, have a look at alternatives. And things change. What was valid yesteryear may not hold water today.
It's a minority of toxic behaviours that has ruined it. Most corporations cargo cult what successful corporations do.
I don't get your point about governments, though. I could see an argument about US lobbies pushing the US government to enforce anti-circumvention all over the world, maybe?
Unfortunately, we the people also failed to keep the worst elements of society contained until pressure all but exploded.
The various censorship advocates would have had a far harder game, had Pornhub been more responsive to victims of involuntarily filmed material, Facebook/Meta been more responsive to Russian propaganda, Islamist terrorism, lynch mobs and god knows how much other shit ran rampant on their platform, had Reddit been more responsible in containing hate speech...
And it's no wonder that the EU eventually was fed up. Our attitude generally is, okay, we notice there is a problem, and we offer sometimes years to large actors to clean up shop or else, and only when there still is no action, then we bring down the hammer.
Frankly, I can't even count how many explicit warnings our authorities gave to Big Tech.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.
No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.
Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.
Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.
My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.
But I doubt there are enough to fill the need for them.
I contribute to open source. I made my peace long ago with someone using what I wrote to make money. (In fact, it pleases me if they make money off of it!)
If you contribute to open source, but get mad that someone is using it without paying you, then you did not contribute in good faith. It's like those religious cults who will press a "free" book on you, and then demand a "donation".
You don't necessarily mind people profiting off of your contributions because you have been profiting from other peoples' contributions at your job. Take away the jobs and suddenly there isn't enough grant money to go around to keep the lights on.
That's not exactly how it was. I recommend reading "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years
Genuinely curious.
> user: cowlevel
> created: 31 days ago
> ^^
> karma: 1515
Considering you have posted > 75 comments to HN in the last 24 hours, I would agree you are a karmabot!
Sadly the community aspect which was the idea of the post is threatened, as internet becomes a phantom world filled with bots, agents and clueless humans.