Of course it is not reasonable to generalize but a couple of comments... The major change that I've seen (and it is fairly recent.. say coincident with "the mobile revolution" is that the small "l" academic unreflective techie liberal is now probably a small "l" academic unreflective techie neo-liberal--socially liberal economically very conservative...
The folks before who were rather more politically aware and say were conservative are now much much more conservative and even militantly so... The few on the left are mostly based in universities, or NGO's, are very young and are linked to the environment movements of one sort or another but they in many cases morph into category one above. Overall a major shift rightward... FWIW, a sequel to my earlier blogpost http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/in-defense-of-multistakeholder-proc esses/ M M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 1:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Blogpost: Multistakeholderism vs. Democracy: My Adventures in "Stakeholderland" 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/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
