Slashdot Mirror
Good Bad Attitude
teidou writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay titled 'Good Bad Attitude' talking about the hacker attitude toward rules and government regulation of Intellectual Property. Choice quote: "(Hackers) can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.""
Hmm, batman, my spider sense must be out of whack. I thought it was an oligarchy approaching.
Hackers are as likely to be wrong as they are to be right. In their case it isn't an accute sense, but chronic pessimism.
totalitariansim coming a mile away"
Is it just me or is this one of the more ridiculous sounding things you've heard in a while? Let's see what other deep sounding vacuous statements we can come up with:
There is no group with such an ability for singleminded devotion to the pursuit of universal betterance than the New York Cab Drivers association.
More than any other group formed since the first descent of man from the trees, Sanitation Engineers are able to ensure the future of democracy in our nation.
I bet I have more support for either of these than he's got for his hackers. Too bad there's no taxidot.org or cleandot.org so I could get an article posted too.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
Too bad that so many hackers understand well all about how to use tools (e.g., computers), but do not understand how to use the government as a tool for themselves and other ordinary people just like themselves. Instead, many hackers reject government totally. That attitude is akin to Luddism. Government is a tool that can be hacked to work for you, just as a computer can be hacked to work for you.
One problem is that young people seem to think that the wealth and the power is on THEIR side. They seem not to see that the the upper 10% of America owns most of the wealth.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Which is not to say that we shouldn't try to make it better, because we should. Just that it's going to be many many orders of magnitude harder to get anything useful accomplished.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
You completely neglected to mention the FACT that the wealthy use government to deter competition and maintain their control.
Limited government and free markets undermine that entire system.
(And seriously... if you're going to say that we should use tools to get back at the wealthy, why stop at government? Why not expand into physical coercion with guns, like government seems to?)
Speckpot?
"(Hackers) can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm."
that's more apt than you realize. After all, how many times have I gone jogging down the forest trail and seen every small furry critter flee in a blind panic because I happened to pass near by.
In other words - for every time a rabbit correctly "senses danger" they over-react to 99 completely benign events.
Clear, Dark Skies
In several ways, perhaps it is not that bad a thing after all - there needs to be a mix of both the kinds - hacker and non-hacker.
The problem with the intellectual elite is just that - they are the intellectual elite. Often times, smart solutions on paper is not the same as applying them in the real world - socialism/communism is a classic example of this.
You can see this at work in real life, when you notice that geeks make bad business men. True, some of what the businesses needs is some amount of bullshitting capability, but that's not always true - it's not enough if you can just code up a smart hack. You need to be able to market it and sell it, if you want to be able to sell it to the _layman_. Hackers miss that vital element - they are almost quite incapable of thinking like the common man.
The common man does not care about the things that hackers care about, his needs are simpler - get the food on the table, buy the new SUV and get a holiday week off to some tropical island.
The problem is that the other side (corporate/government) is extremely anti-liberal, while hackers are most often extremely liberal. Both of these are bad, and a balance needs to be stuck.
We need that - a balance between the two. But entire control of America under hackers may not be a good idea.
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I started crying out like an animal sensing a thunderstorm shortly after November 2000.
I'd say that, generally, old-school hackers are more respectful of intellectual property than new-school hackers. (yes, that was a generality)
For example, most grey-beards that I know don't really favor the idea of p2p being used to share files against the wishes of the author.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Is it just me or is this one of the more ridiculous sounding things you've heard in a while?
It's you. I thought the thunderstorm was a nice metaphor. Here's another good line:
"A society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people."
But here in the Rush Limbaugh era, we place as much value on making fun of something as on making an actual point. Oh well, too bad for us.
That keeps them alive, doesn't it?
If you think about it, a rabbit is quite an apt analogy... They may overreact to a lot of things, but that prevents them from getting dinged from some of the real threats.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
By now, I should know better than to read the Paul Graham essays when they're posted on slashdot, but I can't help myself. I think it's my sick obsession with lisp.
Now that I've read a few in the space of a few weeks, I think I'm able to pin down what bothers me. Graham is really good at a certain rhetorical style: he talks at length about a topic that really isn't the topic at hand, until you start to wonder if you're really reading the essay that you thought you were reading, and suddenly the focus shifts to the target. "Maori customs are really a metaphor/synedoche for the perl philosophy!" or whatever. The change is so dizzying (because it is unexpected but not completly random) and such changes come so fast that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate the correctness of Graham's assertions or the depth of what he's saying. It's like a cheesy magic show...the magician distracts you by waving the wand around, so that you don't see that he's actually pulling the rabbit out of his sleeve, rather than out of the hat. To his credit, I think Graham does this trick really well, and it's hard to do.
The thing is, I can appreciate cheesy-magic-show writing, but at some point, I would like to take away an actual idea from what I'm reading. And what are Graham's ideas? Lisp is really l33t! Hackers are really l33t! Graham's ideas are really that simple; they're not refinements or unexpected corrollaries of ideas that were first trotted out ten or twenty years ago. After a few essays, it becomes apparent that all of these ideas really reduce to I, Paul Graham, am really l33t because I like this l33t stuff! I don't fault Graham in the slightest for thinking this, or even about writing it, but since I'm not Paul Graham, it's not a very interesting idea to me.
I'd relpace "hacker" with "artist" (particularly writer) and then accept that what is good about "hackers" is what has always been good about artists.
This would, of course, inflame those who have invested ego in the idea that programming is "a science" instead of an art.
They, in turn make bad scientists too, because good science is an art too.
Basically, anybody who understands how much their daily work depends on the exchange of information will be drawn into odd persuits and will "sense totalitarianisim like animals sense an oncomming thunderstorm." (or whatever the quote was.)
To lionize "hackers" over, say "sound techs" or "teachers" is huberous.
The problem is that the world is full of machinests and sheep. Machinests want the world to conform to plans, and sheep want someone else to handle it. Between those two large groups, it is hard to get an artistic thought in edgewise.
So South America or Aferica will "be the next America" and it is almost too late to do anything about that. Europe has learned to turn-on-a-dime and will hopefully maintian a stolid bullwork in the current first-world economic structure. America will be the new Africa (but with some good natural resources to totally exploit into garbage) whith increasingly "Bushist", "we cannot possibly be wrong" tendencies to ossification that will ride us deeply into hunta-styled default and decay.
Then who knows?
As a side note, wihout space, as in outer space, as a frontier, expansionisim cannot be sustained; and all we humans are expansionest. We have until the count of "no cheap fuel" to get off this planet, elsewise we will have to eat our own offspring and call it meet. So all this short term lionizing means little, and the real issues remain. Will the machinists hold us to the ground and kill us all, or will we escape?
Screw the hackers, lets get the artists and the scientists moving again. If some of that art is computer programming, all the better.
But I ramble... 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press