Mike G. wrote:
> Ahhh Mike, you seem to buy into the tech hero as John Galt
> self-aggrandizement...
Er, um, I don't think so. A majority of the techies -- wizard hackers
in the original sense -- that I've known personally may have had
personal faults or variously narrowed vision but they more or less
exhibited the Hacker Nature. The minority could suitably be
represented as weasels and other scary/creepy/mythical creatures in a
Dilbert strip.
> The guys I'm dealing with aren't preserving the Internet for
> humanity they are protecting their their own little patch of very
> well funded non-accountable paradise...
Which is why I alluded to such folks "putting together their personal
Delta Force squad" and with similar metaphors.
It may well be that in retrospect we will see that the untimely demise
of St. Jon [1] in '98 marked a cusp between net techies being
dominated, collectively, by exploratory and creative minds and being
dominated by ladder-climbers and power-gatherers.
Such changes -- hackers are, I think, inclined to call them "phase
changes", drawing a metaphor from physics -- such changes happen all
the time on various scales in various venues. In the group I
described, in which an artist played a significant role in determining
the group's direction, there was a similar phase change in which the
shared creative impulse morphed into a shared pursuit of funding and
status within the larger organization. There was a nearly complete
turnover or personnel in the space of 5 years. The only survivor of
the original group was the late hire who ridiculed the artist's
contribution.
OTOH, it's been 17 years since I mixed with institutionally connected
techies so things may be even worse in that domain than I imagine.
FWIW,
- Mike
[1] Jon Postel, cf RFC 2468
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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