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.
I see a lot of comments advocating for more regulation, more policies, more government control, less individual freedom. Many that argue the other way are down voted.
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.
It's just what I (remember) seeing. My own views and biases may certainly have an effect on that.
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.
Times have changed greatly since the Great Recession. Individuals in general are more materially dispossessed than they were in the end of history '90s. Even well-paid hackers in San Francisco or Seattle can see poverty all around them. Meanwhile, corporate wealth and power have risen to the stuff of cyberpunk fantasies. Less luxury, nowadays, to be an absolutist individualist. Not to mention, libertarianism as a American political ideology has fallen by the wayside with the failure of the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
Because they believe people should have freedom to say what they want. Most downvotes seem to come from people vouching for big government regulation, oddly enough.
I tend libertarian sometimes. Downvoting on HN reduces the readability of the post, so if I downvoted posts I disagreed with, it would be to reduce the influence of people that disagree with me. I'm not very comfortable with that, to be honest. I have opinions, but they can't all be correct, so reducing the ability of the community to read posts that contradict my own seems counter-productive, and imposes the will of the collective (through voting) on the individual by reducing the reach of their speech. I feel this is somewhat anti-libertarian.
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.”
I'm not actually silencing anyone by down voting, but if enough people down vote then it does make it slightly harder to see the post. Of course, if you don't have showdead enabled in your profile, you don't get to see those posts. I'm not opposed to collective actions in a venue designed for it, such as this one. When I make a comment I am aware that it might be down voted to oblivion, and that's something I accept. I'm free to disassociate myself with Hacker News if I don't like it.
I tend more libertarian than anything and I mostly down-vote. That's because most people have too low of a threshold for what constitutes a valuable comment.
Being pretty far-left (by American standards, anyway), I feel extremely out of place on this website for reasons that I think are pretty benign in the grand scheme of things. I support programmers unionizing, but the overall vibe of this website is that making a little more money individually is more important. Unions just aren't that radical, though. This site skews towards high earners, but the rest of us programming grunts in the trenches could use the solidarity.
Libertarians have no problem with privately run organizations, like unions. Anyone has the right to associate with anyone they want. You just can't force someone to be in your union to get a job
Thank you. I wish more of the real libertarians would stand up like this. Unions are indeed a positive force in the world to counteract private power. Freedom to assemble is a right that's nearly extinct. It's government that is responsible for union busting, not libertarians.
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'd probably consider most closely aligning with libertarian-ism but honestly being part of any "ism" is just a drag. I don't see why you can't favor parts of different ideologies while rejecting others. A funny example... I find socialists very good at identifying societal problems and even identifying their core causes... the only problem is I can't say I find a lot of the proposed solutions all that great. One of my favorite examples of an intention != consequence:
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'd say you'd probably fit into the archetypal libertarianish techie mould - "socially liberal, economically conservative", valuing pragmatism above all with a bias towards technological/engineered solutions, and perhaps generally apolitical and disliking of labels. Not to label you specifically, but I think that sort of soft-libertarian is a common engineering archetype, both on HN and other tech communities all the way back to the BBS era.
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.
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.
Are younger hackers trending libertarian as well? Maybe there was something about society back then which caused hackers to lean libertarian, but it seems like there is nothing intrinsic that correlates hackers with libertarians, at least from my (extremely limited) observations.
Back in the '80s and '90s there were both from the bottom-up with anarchistic, civic liberties-focused phone phreaks, greyhat hackers, cowboy coders and the like, as well as from the top-down from free market tech entrepreneur types.
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.
Once the human became the focus of the computer and internet usage, I think that's when it lost that amazing feeling. When the real identity became central to the majority's experience of the web.
If you stay out of that (decidedly big) circle, you can still get a bit of that sparkle.
this is a huge part of it. I was a dork in high school and the Internet let me connect to communities of people all over the world and make relationships I wouldn't have had otherwise, and all of it was just cool as shit. nobody cared who you were in real life or what your social status or physical appearance there was, people were just handles creating and playing and talking about stuff together. it was great. I joined a group of kids making a far-too-ambitious Game Maker game and became close friends with one guy, and we IMed almost nightly on MSN for like a year before he even mentioned that his skin tone was different than mine. none of that shit mattered at all, and it felt like the future.
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.
Corporations becoming People would be the natural outcome of a libertarian society as well. That’s what happens when they have unchecked influence and power. It just took ours a little longer to get to that state.
sure, but my point is, that happened right around the same time that everyone got used to having a a 3G-connected screen in their pockets at all time as a societal default. if you wanted to get on the Internet, you had to use a desktop computer in your house, school, or place of work, or take your laptop to a coffee shop or McDonald's or whatever. when smartphones because a societal standard and social media proliferated, that's the vector corporations used to become People, Too, and also when the Golden Age of the Internet Libertarian died as well. the Internet Libertarian future of the Internet is Mastodon et al. and federation and such, but it's not going to catch on because normies don't want anything it has to offer over the mainstream social media networks. the inevitable thing that killed the Internet Libertarian future and gave way for everything to be an ad-filled walled-garden corporate nightmare world was mass walled-garden smartphone ecosystem adoption by the general public instead of a more Internet Libertarian open, federated software landscape. we figured this out too little too late and were in the process of dying out, no longer the Default Internet User, and then #Occupy happened, the concept of modern identity politics were deployed as a countermeasure, various political subfactions formed in the online space, and now few people who were Internet Libertarians at the time of the article's writing would still consider themselves to be such today, and with good reason—the Internet of today is not the same Internet that they were absolutely sure would lead to the culmination of their techno-libertarian ideals at a global scale, through proliferation of Internet connectivity. whoops. things didn't end up working out that way because nobody foresaw how utterly chemically addictive the average person would find stroking a piece of glass to consume a literally endless supply of visual stimuli—whoops.
What you have described would happen as the natural end result of a libertarian state. Because before smartphones we have seen how postwar industrialized America foster all sorts of addictions in consumers. From self-medication, which started in the '50s (watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers and count how many times characters casually pop pills or imbibe in the background), to fast food, to television, and then on to social media and everything else that the internet enabled that is what unregulated industry does where there is no opposing force- whether governmental or otherwise- to check its power.
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.
I think you're conflating Ron Paul's brand of (populist) libertarianism, with its embrace of everything from abolishing most of the federal departments to returning to the gold standard, with the cyber-specific futurist hacker variety. The EFF and the Mozilla Foundation and other FOSS orgs are still there, but certainly there's been a lot of setbacks. Pirate Parties never caught on in the U.S., unlike in Europe where they're more of a presence for whatever reason.
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.
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.
Re: pirate parties, there actually was such controversy surrounding the more prominent instances just as they acquired public attention in their respective countries. For example, AFAIU, the current gender-politics situation arrived in Germany slightly earlier than it did the US. And so in 2009-2010, there was much media scrutiny of the low female membership of the German pirate party.
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.
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-...
Author of the essay here. I did a double take at seeing it posted here because I thought it was completely forgotten, nearly including by myself. I think the actual date of this essay is 2007 or maybe 2006, because I remember writing it from my university computer lab and I was class of '07. Anyway, there's certainly a lot of water under the bridge since then and the political composition of hackerdom today looks nothing like it did 15 years ago. With the growth of the FAANGs there are far more hackers today than there were then, and the younger ones are a lot more likely to be leftists than libertarians. Still, though, when I travel in libertarian circles it's pretty clear to me that hackers are overrepresented there, so I think the reverse remains true as well, even though it's not as dramatic or obvious as it was in the '00s.
The freedom to posses and share knowledge is much more libertarian than socialist.
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.
No, no no no no no no. Perhaps this made more sense in 2008, and I was there for the 4chan and the glory days of Usenet and all that magic jazz and in my early twenties, sure, you could have unironically called me a libertarian and been almost right. but not now.
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.
Anarchists tend to oppose all kinds of power and authority. Governments, leaders, rich people, corporations, political parties, thought leaders, and so on are all inherently suspicious. From an anarchist point of view, the society should try to limit what those authorities can do with their power.
This sounds exactly like a libertarian to me. Don't make laws against Google, I will just avoid using Google myself.
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 difference is that libertarianism focuses on the form, while anarchism is more about the outcomes. Libertarians talk about states and governments and regulations, while anarchists oppose influence of any kind.
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 the corporation is still giving a good service then libertarians like it. If it acts as a monopolist, then libertarians would dislike it and look for alternatives in the free market. That's why libertarians want a free market, to be able to do that when there's natural monopolies.
If you use the government to split up the big corporation, you're not an anarchist.
which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that FAANG companies have a massive lobbying spend.
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.
I tell people I'm an anarchist, and the libertarians throw a fit at me. I tell people I think the government should stay out of my business, and the libertarians love me again.
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.
> FAANG, unrestricted, is far more dangerous and toxic to innovation than any government.
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.
Yeah, that was 2008. Before GamerGate happened, back when we as a society could still comfortably think marginalizing BIPOC, LGBTQ, genderqueer, otherkin, plural, and otherwise neurodiverse folk was okay.
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...
I remember those times, and over the years what I think I can distill it to is that when you have physical competence at something, you come to believe, understand, and respect the effects of things like work and truth. When you don't have physical competence, you respect alignment to power and its narratives because you know truth does not always prevail, but power and alignment to it invariably does. Material rewards come from alliances, not knowledge or work, etc. They're irreconcilable poles that we can generate some temporary value from with finesse and management, but I think the libertarian urge comes from a belief in truth that is demonstrably not universal.
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. :)
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