Slashdot Mirror
Round 3 Of TAP Forum By ESR, Lessig, Et Al.
Iambic Pentametor writes "Back in April, Slashdot had a story
covering the first two rounds of a forum at The American Prospect between Eric S. Raymond, Lawrence Lessig,
Nathan Newman, Jeff A. Taylor, and Jonathan Band.
The third round is here.
ESR's latest is pretty inspiring and despite some squabbling, each of the combatants make some good points."
No, because chances are very good that what ESR says is what most hackers think. People like ESR and RMS don't get their ability to be heard from their own power, we attribute it to them.
If you are going to be annoyed, go be annoyed at elected officials telling you what you think. Or get mad at the media for telling you what laws you break and what a horrible person you are as a hacker. Go be annoyed with society or something. But don't try to construct ESR as `the man'. Last I checked, ESR was viewed as typical hacker with ideas that lined up pretty well with a good many open source and free software people out there.
When that changes, I'm sure the majority will finger some other willing soul to be a mouthpiece for the movement. Maybe even you.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
I think perhaps ESR and the others are not as far apart as they might imagine. In the third round, ESR states that "we [hackers] are very, very good at co-opting the system". What he doesn't seem to realize is that there are two entities in his statement, the co-opter and the system being co-opted.
From my reading, I believe that what Lessig in particular is saying is that the system exists in the form of policy, and that system has already been co-opted by the Microsofts, MPAAs and other large corporate interests to pass things like UCITA and DMCA. Lessig seems to be suggesting that if we don't co-opt the policy process the way we've done in other areas, somebody else will, much to the open source movement's detriment.
ESR seems to be arguing that we don't need no stinking system, because hackers are the real creators of the digital revolution. What he is ignoring is the fact that without a system, there is nothing to co-opt. For instance, if there had been no ARPA in 1969 with money to spend on a massive networking experiment and politicians nervous about mobile military communication, then it wouldn't have mattered how many hackers like JCR Liklider and Robert Taylor there were.
PS. I also grow weary of ESR as my "tribe's" representative. We are too diverse a group of people for any one (or two) people to really represent our views. Otherwise slashdot wouldn't be as interesteing as it is.
One of the more disturbing subtexts of ESR's use of the word 'tribe' is that, in an actual tribe (think "primitive peoples"), there can be no dissent in the modern sense. All members are of the same blood, have identical culture, and have similar life experiences so there is actually not much in the way of deeply opposed points-of-view. And the Tribal Elders run the show, and tolerate no serious opposition.
Given these attributes, it makes perfect sense for ESR to refer to all hackers as his Tribe: In his view, those with any fundamental disagreements are, by definition, not of His Tribe. And therefore not really hackers. Witness phrases such as "...my report of what the open-source culture knows and believes and wants." If you disagree, you Don't Really Matter.
As a self-described anthropologist/linguist ESR cannot be totally ignorant of the implications of this usage of the word.... and one does sometimes get the impression from his essays that this sort of tribal setup would, indeed, be his ideal social structure for Open Source.
Depressingly enough, we may already be there.
:Michael
And his poetry is shit
And his "Funny Fan Mail" isn't funny.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I submit that this is a problem with media that has no true intrest or ties to the community it is reporting on/about. Even other groups have this problem, and I'm sure we won't be the first to deal with it.
Yeah, I stopped believing that the mainstream press was correct, accurate, complete or up-to-date years ago. Every time they report events that I have first-hand knowledge of, they are dead wrong on at least a few important aspects of it. By Occam's Razor, I assume that the same is true when they report on things I wasn't already familiar with.
Part, and only part, of the problem arises from the model of the press as an entity that practices unbiased journalism. Those two words hold the key to the problem. There is nothing wrong with the hope that we can get a view of every side of a controversial issue. But it is common for press reports to reduce it to two competing sides. As for journalism, there are too many reporters out there who know how to write stories for newspapers and magazines and too little about what they are reporting on.
I prefer press with a background knowledge and a viewpoint. I don't have to agree with that viewpoint, so long as I know what it is.
Mojo, go ahead and quote me. It isn't like my comments ever got anyone else anything.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
(AC 'cuz who knows how much today's moderators like ESR)
My only suggestion: please look again at copyright. What part of it could not be emulated with NDA contracts plus receiving-stolen-data laws? Because copyrights and patents both assert that I don't own my property where it has a certain form, or where I changed it with a certain process into that form. This even if I got it into that form without breaking any NDAs or accepting data derived from a broken NDA.
ES Raymond seems to say that non hackers shouldn't have any say in the Open Source movement, and that THEY (hackers) and not avg. Joe should decide whether to put Microsoft on it's knees.
Lessig comes right out and states flat out that he never coded a thing in his life, yet seems to have a firmer grasp on the situation than others... It's quite unfortunate in todays world that the law is so convoluted that it requires readers assistance... But thank god some of the best are on the Open Source side.
If you combine the argument of Lessig, and Brand, the strongest argument exists. Tighter Government control for the handing out of patents, the use of those patents (and copyrights) (Lessig) and Government sponsorship of Innovation, as opposed to stagnation. (Brand)
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
While you may never corral those last few hackers, the ones who write FreeNet and change it in the face of all attacks and figure out how to disguise it yet again so it evades the law this week... so what? Freedom for the .01% is not freedom at all.
I agree with Lessig; it's dangerous to assume hackers uber alle. Barring a large scale move out into space, the policians still have a lot of power here. There's no natural law of the universe that the they can't destroy all the routers of the world, confiscate computers, and kill the ringleaders of any resistance movement. You think they need us? Those who would fight freedom this hard would have no problem moving the world back to feudalism, as long as they are in power.
Do not underestimate your enemies. They like it when you do that.