Most of the places I checked out wanted a blood sample, your firstborn and a monster setup fee.
Remember that 2.2% goes in Visa's pocket, so you won't find anyone that doesn't have that provision, but I'll still say that for a 1-time e-bay sale or whatnot, paypal still can't be beat.
What will this do to address the fraud? Nothing! There's nothing about using someone else's creditcard that requires 3rd party billing. If I had your mastercard info, I could shop at buy.com, bestbuy.com, compusa.com all right now and still will be able to after this rule is in effect.
I'm like 99% sure you're a troll, but if you're not I pity you. YOU chose to play, YOU chose not to quit, YOU feel bad, YOU need to fucking deal. If you're that damn weak, then next time you get a lucid moment throw the computer out your window.
So you'll let anyone who wants hook up a promiscuous NIC to your LAN? Why not, since there's no way they could put all those bits back together to get anything useful.
That's what this does, just from range and with some different hardware in between. I'm sure if they wanted to, some EE geek could use this to build the strangest wireless LAN device ever.
Wrong dumb ass AC, ya think taking Freshman english makes you a linguist? ------------------
It depends who you're talkin' to/to whom you are talking and how colloquial the situation is. Us linguists call 'we' the 'subjective case' or 'nominative case' and 'us' the 'objective case' or 'accusative case'. The modern colloquial tendency in nearly all varieties of English is to use the objective case everywhere *except* in unadorned position immediately before the verb (Us linguists call... but We call...). This is the endpoint (for now) of a historical tendency over the last several hundred years to eliminate uses of the subjective case in ever more syntactic positions. This tendency has been fought tooth and nail by prescriptivists for at least the last couple hundred years, and they don't give up easy, so in some quarters the use of 'us' in your sentence is frowned upon. It is, of course, the natural form to use (compare how unnatural it sounds to say even 'He and I went to the store.' rather than 'Him and me went to the store.'). Anyway, that's the linguistically PC answer, ie, to do what comes naturally to you. But don't go losing your job if that usage aggravates your boss, for example.
Jim
-- James L. Fidelholtz e-mail: jfidel@siu.buap.mx Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje tel.: +(52-2)229-5500 x5705 Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades fax: +(01-2) 229-5681 Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla, MXICO
This is the same as in all security, if there's a way for a legitimate entity to do it, then so can the illegitimate. We saw how well CSS worked, didn't we.
Before napster you could already steal CDs or go to the library, borrow them, copy/burn them and return them. Make a product that is worth the price you charge (and stop treating your talent like indentured servents) and people will prefer to buy the high quality original over the (no matter how close to undetectably) inferior stolen version.
Your outlook can't do what? Your copy of the program is broken not the program itself.
And let's get this straight, this is a problem with outlook in internet e-mail only mode problem. Outlook is the client that ships with exchange and works in that environment without this flaw.
Oh and so I'm not totally off-topic, this dude can do whatever he wants; no one HAS to get this mailing list and if you do, he's provided a workaround.
Or opinion in this case. She was given a special job to help accomidate her 'disability' but she bitched about that one too. Then her employer said, ok, bye-bye.
Which of course she responded to by filing a lawsuit.
As far as the law is concerned, location is easy. Does your corporation operate in the state of california? (i.e. do you pay state franchise taxes or operate a branch, warehouse, office, etc. in the state) If yes, then you must comply, if not go on about your business.
They'd just have to specialize. I mean even if it got really cheap to launch sats into space, who can go up there and repair them, or bring them back? NASA. Plus a lot of the stuff NASA does, no one with a profit motive would do. i.e. Hubble and any other experiements.
Posting the text makes it about a million times more likely to get read than posting the link, but I should have added the link to the text. (case in point: I saw nothing linking to the article before I posted it, and I felt that an intelligent/different review was needed given the treatment Katz gave.)
Since I left the author and source in the article, and since i recieved neither money nor consideration in exchange for my post, I don't think they'll mind or have any ability to do anything if they did.
Re:Your prime assumtions are different...
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Selfish Society
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Uh. No. I don't see why you keep harping on taxes, most people would like not to pay taxes and will call themselves anything and make any arguement to rationalize their non-payment of taxes.
I have full self-ownership. I also live in a country, and my citizenship is automatic. I enjoy certain rights, protections and freedoms. In exchange for these things (most tangible and least arguable to a libertarian is national defense) I pay taxes. It's an exchange of one thing of value (my time/energy/cash) for another (domestic saftey/rule of law).
My bitch is that things I have no interest in and feel isn't the role of government (subsidies, welfare, foreign aid, military actions on behalf of corporations [see columbia], pork, etc.) is where my money is going.
Remember, the libertarians are semi-anarchistic so there is no official platform. Also, I don't associate everything a self described Democrat or Republican says they believe with what they all believe. IE. I know Democrats that are full blown socialsts and some I think might really be independents.
Your prime assumtions are different...
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You dismiss the libertarian assumption that I belong to me, yet don't back this up or explain why your assumtion is correct. I don't belong to the state. I don't owe anybody anything by the virtue of their exsistance. Most intellectuals (self afixed title if I ever saw one) don't live on earth with me and my brothers. They live in a very bizarre universe. In the real world there is no such thing as tenure, you must continue to prove yourself relevant and useful at all times and we have to put into practice what we believe.
In case that wasn't sarcasm. I didn't write that, but read it a week or so ago and thought it made an excellent counter-point to Katz's glossy review. I think he found something he knew would piss people off and ran with it, no attention to detail or facts.
A Non-Katzian (that is intelligent) review
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Cybersilly By Brian Doherty
Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech, by Paulina Borsook, New York PublicAffairs, 267 pages, $24.00
This is a bad book, unlearned in its titular subject, petulant, and poorly argued. It is tempting simply to dismiss it and move on. Despite its shoddy quality, however, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech is not irrelevant. Far from it. The book is fascinating as a case study in the reasoning and psychology behind opposition to the mix of individualism and anti-statism that characterizes contemporary libertarian thought.
Borsook was a regular contributor to Wired magazine during its start-up period in the early-to-mid-1990s. During that time, she became alarmed at what she saw as the undue influence of libertarian thinking at the magazine and in the world it covered. As the dominant thought leader for computer industry culture, she suggests, Wired was a powerful vector for the libertarian "plague" or "parasite" (two metaphors Borsook uses for libertarian thinking at different points in the book). "It's worth trying to tease out what these mostly American, mostly West Coast inventors and programmer-droids and plutocrats are up to--for they have the big bucks, and cultural juice, that will be affecting us all as we head into the next millennium," she writes.
Borsook took her first swipe at the topic in a 1996 Mother Jones article. As an extension of that lament about the supposed dominance of libertarian thinking in the high-tech world, Cyberselfish can expect a sympathetic audience. Most intellectuals, after all, are not simply unlibertarian but actively hostile to libertarianism. They don't agree with the philosophy's vision of a state restricted to the protection of its citizens' lives and property (if that much--anarcho-capitalists sail under the libertarian banner as well).
What's more, most intellectuals tend to think there's something untoward about anyone who does embrace the libertarian philosophy. At best, goes this line of thought, such people are tools of moneyed interests. At worst, they are inhuman, atomistic drones. And while most Americans express sympathy for generally stated libertarian tenets (abstract visions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are A-OK), that sympathy tends to wear thin when rubbed against the sharper edge of specific policy applications (What do you mean, shut down the FDA?).
Borsook throws around enough names to suggest a knowledge of libertarianism, but it's clear she doesn't know that much about the political philosophy she's attacking. She cites Friedrich Hayek, for instance, but misspells his first name and gives a ludicrously reductive reading of The Road to Serfdom's critique of planning. "All government intervention of course," she summarizes, "irresistibly lead[s] to Stalinesque collectivization of farms." Similarly, she mistakenly identifies Ludwig von Mises as the inventor of anarcho-capitalism. (Mises was no anarchist.) She mentions Murray Rothbard, the actual intellectual father of 20th-century anarcho-capitalism, to say that he borrowed the idea from Mises and then adds, in a bizarre footnote, "Who knows if it was a conscious choice."
Borsook references Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate in 1996, and claims the L.P. "routinely" nominates him for high office. (So far, they've done so exactly once, though they may well do it a second time this summer.) She says the Cato Institute was founded a decade before it actually was and that the Scaife Foundation was one of its original funders. (Cato existed four years before getting any Scaife money, and Scaife is mentioned just to gratuitously hang Ken Starr around Cato's neck.) She brings up REASON, in order to claim that Editor-at-Large Virginia Postrel is used as a "Token Girl" at overly male and sexist computer-world conferences.
For all the names she drops, Borsook doesn't seem to know what issues are actually the dominant concerns of libertarian writers and institutions--drug laws, education, foreign policy, and trade all go unmentioned. She has only the vaguest idea of the theoretical and empirical reasons why libertarians think what they do--not even enough to argue with them.
If Borsook were your only guide, you wouldn't think there was any economic or philosophical reasoning, any history or logic on which libertarianism is based. The only apparent motivation is a snotty adolescent attitude among geeks, who have a "wicked excitement about...the Hobbesian war of all against all." Her technolibertarians suffer from "a kind of scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism." They "make a philosophy out of a personality defect" and, she insists, are disproportionately involved in "programmatic weird sex."
Borsook knows too little to contextualize libertarianism outside high- tech, and thus she equates it with "bionomics," cypherpunks, and George Gilder. Bionomics, a concept set forth by Michael Rothschild in a 1990 book of the same name, holds that, in the broadest terms, economies function like biological systems and can manage themselves. (Rothschild also created The Bionomics Institute, whose popular Bay Area conferences helped define high-tech's character and community.) Cypherpunks are radical opponents of any government restrictions on cryptography. Gilder is the great social-conservative cheerleader for high-tech, and Borsook is mostly interested in the biologically reductionist notions about sex roles and family life he has spun out in books such as Men and Marriage (1992), a revision of his earlier Sexual Suicide. Gilder is indisputably a high-tech guru, and his books Life After Television (1990) and Telecosm (2000) extol the liberating potential of technology like nobody's business. But his insistence on traditional male-female roles doesn't exactly play well in Silicon Valley. More important, such ideas have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism, techno or otherwise.
No matter--any weapon Borsook can muster to bash the libertarian enemies she sees all about her will do. Hence she mocks Wired co-founder Louis Rosetto as a "neo-caveman" for entertaining sociobiological explanations for women's lack of dominance in high-tech, yet offers up feminist researcher Carol Gilligan's similar thinking as a rational explanation for the phenomenon.
Strangely, Borsook herself frequently and frankly brings up the thinness of the factual assertions behind many of her arguments. In a typical moment, she points out that "political scientists who study the demographics of the Net do not find voting patterns that differ much from the world outside" and that political scientists have done no work on the intersection of libertarianism and high-tech.
To another author, such facts might be cause for worry. But Borsook bravely pushes on. Even while acknowledging that she meets people in the high-tech world who aggressively deny being libertarian and others who claim not even to have heard the word, she nonetheless asserts that almost all techies--the deniers and the ignorant along with those who openly embrace the libertarian label--parrot the same simplistic line, her summation of libertarian thinking: "Government bad, market good; someone said it, I believe it, that settles it!"
It isn't so much that Borsook strongly disagrees with every element of the modern libertarian message, though she surely would have problems with much of it if she knew what it was. It's that she considers libertarians unpleasant people. They're selfish, asocial, too into Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein; they indulge in impersonal, perverted sexual games because they can't stand real intimacy. She finds them "nasty, narcissistic, lacking human warmth."
She peppers little insults like this throughout the book, and on some level this book could be seen as a personal lament: "Why is it so hard to meet nice guys in Silicon Valley?" Dotting the book are tales of bad dates with libertarian geeks who make snide remarks about bums and who send her unwanted e-mail, only to get riled when she explains she doesn't believe all that free-market stuff.
But it isn't clear that Borsook has strong intellectual objections to the "free minds and free markets" matrix that undergirds most of what libertarians say and think. She spends a chapter dissing cypherpunks, for example, chiding them for being overly concerned with government meddling in their lives (she thinks they haven't suffered enough to complain). Yet she agrees with their central goal of halting government interference in the sale, development, and possession of cryptography.
So what is Borsook's case beyond pique, beyond finding Bionomics conferences to be "little shops of horror," beyond lamenting that technolibs prefer Edge Cities to "real" urban centers, beyond finding libertarians "psychically exhausting"? Boiled down, she makes two arguments: First, high-tech people have no right to attack government since their industry would not have existed without government funding. Second, successful businesses are successful because they operate in a world where governments keep schools going, food and drugs pure, banks honest, and the like.
The first argument is simply a non sequitur. Government is involved with just about any commercial transaction or field imaginable, if only because it builds roads. But the fact that the government paves streets hardly makes it responsible for all the businesses that spring up alongside them. (There is, moreover, ample evidence that road building would continue even if government disappeared.)
The Defense Department's role in developing ARPANet, the forerunner to the Internet, was more as a customer than as an engineer creating something by design; it provided money for researchers doing early work on a decentralized computer network, but didn't plan or anticipate anything like the Internet we use today. Indeed, the essentially unplanned way in which the Internet developed is an example of the biologically informed models of growth and self-regulation that libertarians celebrate. It's also worth pointing out that the Internet's huge growth, both in terms of infrastructure and customers, came about due to commercial investment, not government financing.
As for Borsook's second line of attack: Anyone advocating a smaller role for the state is by necessity thrust into the realm of historical fantasy, of imagining the way things could be. Government has arrogated so extensive a role to itself that it's understandable that many people might imagine that nothing the government has a hand in could possibly have happened without it.
One of the key insights of libertarianism revolves around the notion of the "spontaneous order," the idea that social orders and markets can, do, and will develop to meet human needs without central direction or control. For instance, just because government has taken it upon itself to finance and run schools does not mean that no one would be educated if it didn't. Nor would restaurants start poisoning their customers if municipal food inspectors disappeared overnight.
But Borsook doesn't understand what libertarians mean when they talk about spontaneous order. Thus she asserts that such a theory of "self-organization" appeals to "engineers' physics envy" and that "the reason for the rise in technolibertarianism is that engineers are practical and like to fix things and get things right, so of course only the sensible political choice of libertarianism would fit."
In fact, the engineering mentality, which presumes a single best way of doing things in accordance with unchanging "natural" laws, is the exact opposite of the spontaneous order mentality that pervades libertarian thinking. That's why Hayek specifically identified the engineering mentality as the mind-set from "which all modern socialism, planning and totalitarianism derives."
But Borsook hasn't thought about libertarian philosophy hard enough to make fine distinctions. To her, anything and everything anti-government--from militiamen obsessed with what they consider a Zionist-Occupied Government to people who want more foreign tech workers than current immigration laws allow--is tossed into the libertarian stew she finds so distasteful.
The root of Borsook's problem--and perhaps of libertarianism's problem with mainstream writers and thinkers--is encoded in her book's title: Cyberselfish. She spends most of a chapter musing over the well-known "fact" that people who get wealthy from high-tech are unprecedentedly stingy with their corporate and individual giving. When I presented this thesis to Ann Kaplan, editor of Giving USA, one of the prime data collection sources for American philanthropy, she told me there are no accurate macro data to support that contention.
In fact, even the "data" Borsook cites don't support her contention. She notes that the regional United Way goal in Silicon Valley has not increased during the '90s and that, although San Jose has double the average U.S. per capita income, local charities do not receive twice the national average in donations. (She doesn't say how much they do receive and doesn't cite any sources for the data.)
Additionally, she notes a survey by the Community Foundation Silicon Valley (CFSV) of area residents across all income lines that indicates they give to charities at a level similar to the national giving rate (about 2 percent of annual income). What's more, in Silicon Valley, "the percentages of those giving in each income bracket are somewhat above national averages."
Such data are her main evidence for the oft-bruited assertion that the high-tech world is uniquely stingy. Borsook simply assumes that Silicon Valley can be equated with the entire high-tech sector and that United Way is a reasonable proxy for all charity. And if you look at the CFSV report that she mentions, you find that 83 percent of Silicon Valley households donate to charity, compared to 69 percent nationally, and that Silicon Valley adults volunteer at a rate exactly equal to the national average (49 percent). But 40 percent of Silicon Valley charitable giving goes outside the immediate area, which might help explain the local United Way situation.
Borsook's problem with an inherent "selfishness" that may not even exist is part of a general negative feeling about people who don't want as much government as she does. She doesn't feel spiritually akin to these espousers of libertarianism; their strongly expressed belief in a philosophy she only half-understands but associates with stinginess disturbs her. That kind of sociological prejudice rests on a false supposition, reflected throughout Cyberselfish, that "social" and "governmental" are coterminous, and that anyone who is against governmental action is therefore essentially "atomistic." The libertarian insight that the state is the nexus of legalized violence and coercion--and awareness of the special moral and practical dilemmas that its use thus involves--escapes Borsook entirely; she never even mentions it to try to refute it. Ignorant of the philosophical and intellectual background behind small-state thinking, she condemns it for being against cooperation. In fact, libertarians rely on uncoerced transactions and charitable fellow-feeling as the web holding civil society together--cooperation on mutually agreed terms at its finest, without force entering the equation.
Why do Borsook and other anti-libertarians miss this? Willful, ideologically motivated blindness no doubt plays a role. But libertarians themselves must share a good deal of the responsibility. In public debate, they should be less negative and spend more time pointing out the ways in which a culture can survive and thrive by relying on spontaneous orders and voluntary exchanges that make all the world richer, cleaner, safer, and saner.
Libertarians can perhaps take some solace that in over 200 pages Borsook fails to make a coherent case against "terribly libertarian culture." But they would do well to rely less on defenses of the right to be left alone, which can be interpreted as mere selfishness and hence something easy to dismiss. Recognizing that may be the key to understanding why so many are likely to agree with Borsook despite her inability to actually prove her case.
Brian Doherty (bdoherty@reason.com) is an associate editor at REASON.
Single click: Select Double click: Activate Right click: Menu/Options
Methinks you've been doing something horribly wrong (flame deleted on second thought) with your mouse if you're not sure when to click what or how many times. I'm really confused as to how you think the right click was a replacement for the double click.
My MacOS experience: where I should be right clicking, I click and hold and then the menu appears. So simple it's stupid. Macs are for people that want their computer to be as simple to use as their toaster, too bad it ends up being just as flexible.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I got this new whiz bang computer, but it only came with Works. I guess I'll just take it into work, install Office 2000 and be on my way.
Most of the places I checked out wanted a blood sample, your firstborn and a monster setup fee.
Remember that 2.2% goes in Visa's pocket, so you won't find anyone that doesn't have that provision, but I'll still say that for a 1-time e-bay sale or whatnot, paypal still can't be beat.
You ever set up a merchant account? It ain't worth it for $100 and if that's all you plan on doing you won't get one either.
What will this do to address the fraud? Nothing! There's nothing about using someone else's creditcard that requires 3rd party billing. If I had your mastercard info, I could shop at buy.com, bestbuy.com, compusa.com all right now and still will be able to after this rule is in effect.
I'm like 99% sure you're a troll, but if you're not I pity you. YOU chose to play, YOU chose not to quit, YOU feel bad, YOU need to fucking deal. If you're that damn weak, then next time you get a lucid moment throw the computer out your window.
A 'rouge nation' would be building dirty fission bombs. So this simulator does exactly dick for them.
That's what this does, just from range and with some different hardware in between. I'm sure if they wanted to, some EE geek could use this to build the strangest wireless LAN device ever.
Wrong dumb ass AC, ya think taking Freshman english makes you a linguist? ... but We call...). This is the endpoint (for now) of a historical tendency over the last several hundred years to eliminate uses of the subjective case in ever more syntactic positions. This tendency has been fought tooth and nail by prescriptivists for at least the last couple hundred years, and they don't give up easy, so in some quarters the use of 'us' in your sentence is frowned upon. It is, of course, the natural form to use (compare how unnatural it sounds to say even 'He and I went to the store.' rather than 'Him and me went to the store.'). Anyway, that's the linguistically PC answer, ie, to do what comes naturally to you. But don't go losing your job if that usage aggravates your boss, for example.
------------------
It depends who you're talkin' to/to whom you are talking and how colloquial the situation is. Us linguists call 'we' the 'subjective case' or 'nominative case' and 'us' the 'objective case' or 'accusative case'. The modern colloquial tendency in nearly all varieties of English is to use the objective case everywhere *except* in unadorned position immediately before the verb (Us linguists call
Jim
--
James L. Fidelholtz e-mail: jfidel@siu.buap.mx
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje tel.: +(52-2)229-5500 x5705
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades fax: +(01-2) 229-5681
Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla, MXICO
Before napster you could already steal CDs or go to the library, borrow them, copy/burn them and return them. Make a product that is worth the price you charge (and stop treating your talent like indentured servents) and people will prefer to buy the high quality original over the (no matter how close to undetectably) inferior stolen version.
You asked.
This chip ain't for you or me. It's for big datacenters with processing requests that boggle the mind. Kinda like the Xeon processors.
Your outlook can't do what? Your copy of the program is broken not the program itself.
And let's get this straight, this is a problem with outlook in internet e-mail only mode problem. Outlook is the client that ships with exchange and works in that environment without this flaw.
Oh and so I'm not totally off-topic, this dude can do whatever he wants; no one HAS to get this mailing list and if you do, he's provided a workaround.
for free, as in beer. Wordpad opens word documents. So EVERY user in the windows world can open them.
Dumbass, no computers were involved in this case. She was an assembly line worker.
Which of course she responded to by filing a lawsuit.
As far as the law is concerned, location is easy. Does your corporation operate in the state of california? (i.e. do you pay state franchise taxes or operate a branch, warehouse, office, etc. in the state) If yes, then you must comply, if not go on about your business.
They'd just have to specialize. I mean even if it got really cheap to launch sats into space, who can go up there and repair them, or bring them back? NASA. Plus a lot of the stuff NASA does, no one with a profit motive would do. i.e. Hubble and any other experiements.
Some do. I like, pro-choice, anti-choice.
Posting the text makes it about a million times more likely to get read than posting the link, but I should have added the link to the text. (case in point: I saw nothing linking to the article before I posted it, and I felt that an intelligent/different review was needed given the treatment Katz gave.)
Since I left the author and source in the article, and since i recieved neither money nor consideration in exchange for my post, I don't think they'll mind or have any ability to do anything if they did.
Uh. No. I don't see why you keep harping on taxes, most people would like not to pay taxes and will call themselves anything and make any arguement to rationalize their non-payment of taxes.
I have full self-ownership. I also live in a country, and my citizenship is automatic. I enjoy certain rights, protections and freedoms. In exchange for these things (most tangible and least arguable to a libertarian is national defense) I pay taxes. It's an exchange of one thing of value (my time/energy/cash) for another (domestic saftey/rule of law).
My bitch is that things I have no interest in and feel isn't the role of government (subsidies, welfare, foreign aid, military actions on behalf of corporations [see columbia], pork, etc.) is where my money is going.
Remember, the libertarians are semi-anarchistic so there is no official platform. Also, I don't associate everything a self described Democrat or Republican says they believe with what they all believe. IE. I know Democrats that are full blown socialsts and some I think might really be independents.
You dismiss the libertarian assumption that I belong to me, yet don't back this up or explain why your assumtion is correct.
I don't belong to the state. I don't owe anybody anything by the virtue of their exsistance.
Most intellectuals (self afixed title if I ever saw one) don't live on earth with me and my brothers. They live in a very bizarre universe. In the real world there is no such thing as tenure, you must continue to prove yourself relevant and useful at all times and we have to put into practice what we believe.
In case that wasn't sarcasm. I didn't write that, but read it a week or so ago and thought it made an excellent counter-point to Katz's glossy review. I think he found something he knew would piss people off and ran with it, no attention to detail or facts.
Cybersilly By Brian Doherty
Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech, by Paulina Borsook, New York PublicAffairs, 267 pages, $24.00
This is a bad book, unlearned in its titular subject, petulant, and poorly argued. It is tempting simply to dismiss it and move on. Despite its shoddy quality, however, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech is not irrelevant. Far from it. The book is fascinating as a case study in the reasoning and psychology behind opposition to the mix of individualism and anti-statism that characterizes contemporary libertarian thought.
Borsook was a regular contributor to Wired magazine during its start-up period in the early-to-mid-1990s. During that time, she became alarmed at what she saw as the undue influence of libertarian thinking at the magazine and in the world it covered. As the dominant thought leader for computer industry culture, she suggests, Wired was a powerful vector for the libertarian "plague" or "parasite" (two metaphors Borsook uses for libertarian thinking at different points in the book). "It's worth trying to tease out what these mostly American, mostly West Coast inventors and programmer-droids and plutocrats are up to--for they have the big bucks, and cultural juice, that will be affecting us all as we head into the next millennium," she writes.
Borsook took her first swipe at the topic in a 1996 Mother Jones article. As an extension of that lament about the supposed dominance of libertarian thinking in the high-tech world, Cyberselfish can expect a sympathetic audience. Most intellectuals, after all, are not simply unlibertarian but actively hostile to libertarianism. They don't agree with the philosophy's vision of a state restricted to the protection of its citizens' lives and property (if that much--anarcho-capitalists sail under the libertarian banner as well).
What's more, most intellectuals tend to think there's something untoward about anyone who does embrace the libertarian philosophy. At best, goes this line of thought, such people are tools of moneyed interests. At worst, they are inhuman, atomistic drones. And while most Americans express sympathy for generally stated libertarian tenets (abstract visions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are A-OK), that sympathy tends to wear thin when rubbed against the sharper edge of specific policy applications (What do you mean, shut down the FDA?).
Borsook throws around enough names to suggest a knowledge of libertarianism, but it's clear she doesn't know that much about the political philosophy she's attacking. She cites Friedrich Hayek, for instance, but misspells his first name and gives a ludicrously reductive reading of The Road to Serfdom's critique of planning. "All government intervention of course," she summarizes, "irresistibly lead[s] to Stalinesque collectivization of farms." Similarly, she mistakenly identifies Ludwig von Mises as the inventor of anarcho-capitalism. (Mises was no anarchist.) She mentions Murray Rothbard, the actual intellectual father of 20th-century anarcho-capitalism, to say that he borrowed the idea from Mises and then adds, in a bizarre footnote, "Who knows if it was a conscious choice."
Borsook references Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate in 1996, and claims the L.P. "routinely" nominates him for high office. (So far, they've done so exactly once, though they may well do it a second time this summer.) She says the Cato Institute was founded a decade before it actually was and that the Scaife Foundation was one of its original funders. (Cato existed four years before getting any Scaife money, and Scaife is mentioned just to gratuitously hang Ken Starr around Cato's neck.) She brings up REASON, in order to claim that Editor-at-Large Virginia Postrel is used as a "Token Girl" at overly male and sexist computer-world conferences.
For all the names she drops, Borsook doesn't seem to know what issues are actually the dominant concerns of libertarian writers and institutions--drug laws, education, foreign policy, and trade all go unmentioned. She has only the vaguest idea of the theoretical and empirical reasons why libertarians think what they do--not even enough to argue with them.
If Borsook were your only guide, you wouldn't think there was any economic or philosophical reasoning, any history or logic on which libertarianism is based. The only apparent motivation is a snotty adolescent attitude among geeks, who have a "wicked excitement about...the Hobbesian war of all against all." Her technolibertarians suffer from "a kind of scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism." They "make a philosophy out of a personality defect" and, she insists, are disproportionately involved in "programmatic weird sex."
Borsook knows too little to contextualize libertarianism outside high- tech, and thus she equates it with "bionomics," cypherpunks, and George Gilder. Bionomics, a concept set forth by Michael Rothschild in a 1990 book of the same name, holds that, in the broadest terms, economies function like biological systems and can manage themselves. (Rothschild also created The Bionomics Institute, whose popular Bay Area conferences helped define high-tech's character and community.) Cypherpunks are radical opponents of any government restrictions on cryptography. Gilder is the great social-conservative cheerleader for high-tech, and Borsook is mostly interested in the biologically reductionist notions about sex roles and family life he has spun out in books such as Men and Marriage (1992), a revision of his earlier Sexual Suicide. Gilder is indisputably a high-tech guru, and his books Life After Television (1990) and Telecosm (2000) extol the liberating potential of technology like nobody's business. But his insistence on traditional male-female roles doesn't exactly play well in Silicon Valley. More important, such ideas have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism, techno or otherwise.
No matter--any weapon Borsook can muster to bash the libertarian enemies she sees all about her will do. Hence she mocks Wired co-founder Louis Rosetto as a "neo-caveman" for entertaining sociobiological explanations for women's lack of dominance in high-tech, yet offers up feminist researcher Carol Gilligan's similar thinking as a rational explanation for the phenomenon.
Strangely, Borsook herself frequently and frankly brings up the thinness of the factual assertions behind many of her arguments. In a typical moment, she points out that "political scientists who study the demographics of the Net do not find voting patterns that differ much from the world outside" and that political scientists have done no work on the intersection of libertarianism and high-tech.
To another author, such facts might be cause for worry. But Borsook bravely pushes on. Even while acknowledging that she meets people in the high-tech world who aggressively deny being libertarian and others who claim not even to have heard the word, she nonetheless asserts that almost all techies--the deniers and the ignorant along with those who openly embrace the libertarian label--parrot the same simplistic line, her summation of libertarian thinking: "Government bad, market good; someone said it, I believe it, that settles it!"
It isn't so much that Borsook strongly disagrees with every element of the modern libertarian message, though she surely would have problems with much of it if she knew what it was. It's that she considers libertarians unpleasant people. They're selfish, asocial, too into Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein; they indulge in impersonal, perverted sexual games because they can't stand real intimacy. She finds them "nasty, narcissistic, lacking human warmth."
She peppers little insults like this throughout the book, and on some level this book could be seen as a personal lament: "Why is it so hard to meet nice guys in Silicon Valley?" Dotting the book are tales of bad dates with libertarian geeks who make snide remarks about bums and who send her unwanted e-mail, only to get riled when she explains she doesn't believe all that free-market stuff.
But it isn't clear that Borsook has strong intellectual objections to the "free minds and free markets" matrix that undergirds most of what libertarians say and think. She spends a chapter dissing cypherpunks, for example, chiding them for being overly concerned with government meddling in their lives (she thinks they haven't suffered enough to complain). Yet she agrees with their central goal of halting government interference in the sale, development, and possession of cryptography.
So what is Borsook's case beyond pique, beyond finding Bionomics conferences to be "little shops of horror," beyond lamenting that technolibs prefer Edge Cities to "real" urban centers, beyond finding libertarians "psychically exhausting"? Boiled down, she makes two arguments: First, high-tech people have no right to attack government since their industry would not have existed without government funding. Second, successful businesses are successful because they operate in a world where governments keep schools going, food and drugs pure, banks honest, and the like.
The first argument is simply a non sequitur. Government is involved with just about any commercial transaction or field imaginable, if only because it builds roads. But the fact that the government paves streets hardly makes it responsible for all the businesses that spring up alongside them. (There is, moreover, ample evidence that road building would continue even if government disappeared.)
The Defense Department's role in developing ARPANet, the forerunner to the Internet, was more as a customer than as an engineer creating something by design; it provided money for researchers doing early work on a decentralized computer network, but didn't plan or anticipate anything like the Internet we use today. Indeed, the essentially unplanned way in which the Internet developed is an example of the biologically informed models of growth and self-regulation that libertarians celebrate. It's also worth pointing out that the Internet's huge growth, both in terms of infrastructure and customers, came about due to commercial investment, not government financing.
As for Borsook's second line of attack: Anyone advocating a smaller role for the state is by necessity thrust into the realm of historical fantasy, of imagining the way things could be. Government has arrogated so extensive a role to itself that it's understandable that many people might imagine that nothing the government has a hand in could possibly have happened without it.
One of the key insights of libertarianism revolves around the notion of the "spontaneous order," the idea that social orders and markets can, do, and will develop to meet human needs without central direction or control. For instance, just because government has taken it upon itself to finance and run schools does not mean that no one would be educated if it didn't. Nor would restaurants start poisoning their customers if municipal food inspectors disappeared overnight.
But Borsook doesn't understand what libertarians mean when they talk about spontaneous order. Thus she asserts that such a theory of "self-organization" appeals to "engineers' physics envy" and that "the reason for the rise in technolibertarianism is that engineers are practical and like to fix things and get things right, so of course only the sensible political choice of libertarianism would fit."
In fact, the engineering mentality, which presumes a single best way of doing things in accordance with unchanging "natural" laws, is the exact opposite of the spontaneous order mentality that pervades libertarian thinking. That's why Hayek specifically identified the engineering mentality as the mind-set from "which all modern socialism, planning and totalitarianism derives."
But Borsook hasn't thought about libertarian philosophy hard enough to make fine distinctions. To her, anything and everything anti-government--from militiamen obsessed with what they consider a Zionist-Occupied Government to people who want more foreign tech workers than current immigration laws allow--is tossed into the libertarian stew she finds so distasteful.
The root of Borsook's problem--and perhaps of libertarianism's problem with mainstream writers and thinkers--is encoded in her book's title: Cyberselfish. She spends most of a chapter musing over the well-known "fact" that people who get wealthy from high-tech are unprecedentedly stingy with their corporate and individual giving. When I presented this thesis to Ann Kaplan, editor of Giving USA, one of the prime data collection sources for American philanthropy, she told me there are no accurate macro data to support that contention.
In fact, even the "data" Borsook cites don't support her contention. She notes that the regional United Way goal in Silicon Valley has not increased during the '90s and that, although San Jose has double the average U.S. per capita income, local charities do not receive twice the national average in donations. (She doesn't say how much they do receive and doesn't cite any sources for the data.)
Additionally, she notes a survey by the Community Foundation Silicon Valley (CFSV) of area residents across all income lines that indicates they give to charities at a level similar to the national giving rate (about 2 percent of annual income). What's more, in Silicon Valley, "the percentages of those giving in each income bracket are somewhat above national averages."
Such data are her main evidence for the oft-bruited assertion that the high-tech world is uniquely stingy. Borsook simply assumes that Silicon Valley can be equated with the entire high-tech sector and that United Way is a reasonable proxy for all charity. And if you look at the CFSV report that she mentions, you find that 83 percent of Silicon Valley households donate to charity, compared to 69 percent nationally, and that Silicon Valley adults volunteer at a rate exactly equal to the national average (49 percent). But 40 percent of Silicon Valley charitable giving goes outside the immediate area, which might help explain the local United Way situation.
Borsook's problem with an inherent "selfishness" that may not even exist is part of a general negative feeling about people who don't want as much government as she does. She doesn't feel spiritually akin to these espousers of libertarianism; their strongly expressed belief in a philosophy she only half-understands but associates with stinginess disturbs her. That kind of sociological prejudice rests on a false supposition, reflected throughout Cyberselfish, that "social" and "governmental" are coterminous, and that anyone who is against governmental action is therefore essentially "atomistic." The libertarian insight that the state is the nexus of legalized violence and coercion--and awareness of the special moral and practical dilemmas that its use thus involves--escapes Borsook entirely; she never even mentions it to try to refute it. Ignorant of the philosophical and intellectual background behind small-state thinking, she condemns it for being against cooperation. In fact, libertarians rely on uncoerced transactions and charitable fellow-feeling as the web holding civil society together--cooperation on mutually agreed terms at its finest, without force entering the equation.
Why do Borsook and other anti-libertarians miss this? Willful, ideologically motivated blindness no doubt plays a role. But libertarians themselves must share a good deal of the responsibility. In public debate, they should be less negative and spend more time pointing out the ways in which a culture can survive and thrive by relying on spontaneous orders and voluntary exchanges that make all the world richer, cleaner, safer, and saner.
Libertarians can perhaps take some solace that in over 200 pages Borsook fails to make a coherent case against "terribly libertarian culture." But they would do well to rely less on defenses of the right to be left alone, which can be interpreted as mere selfishness and hence something easy to dismiss. Recognizing that may be the key to understanding why so many are likely to agree with Borsook despite her inability to actually prove her case.
Brian Doherty (bdoherty@reason.com) is an associate editor at REASON.
That's because there's no real choices in ANYTHING on a mac. No options, no choices, none of the things apple likes to put in their ads.
Single click: Select
Double click: Activate
Right click: Menu/Options
Methinks you've been doing something horribly wrong (flame deleted on second thought) with your mouse if you're not sure when to click what or how many times. I'm really confused as to how you think the right click was a replacement for the double click.
My MacOS experience: where I should be right clicking, I click and hold and then the menu appears.
So simple it's stupid. Macs are for people that want their computer to be as simple to use as their toaster, too bad it ends up being just as flexible.