Has tech culture changed?
It’s an oversimplification, but it seems like up until now tech culture has been dominated by an idealogical war between two broad idealogical movements. One is the free software movement, and you can find it presented in its greatest idealogical purity by Richard Stallman. I will call this the anarcho-communist movement, because that’s pretty much what it is, though one can quibble over details, I think it’s hard to deny that the point of GNU and free software movement is the conviction that software, at least, is the leading edge of a coming post-scarcity society, and their reponse to that is that software has to be liberated from IP for the good of society.
The other is anarcho-capitalist and is expressed in its greatest idealogical purity by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
The point is not that everyone in tech believes one of these two idealogies, or that very many people believe either in full idealogical purity. I hew closer to the later, but I can’t stand the last two-thirds of Atlas Shrugged (though I could find lots to like about the first third.) I think the motives of aggressive copyleft licenses are dangerous, but a common base of free software that proprietary software can run on is beneficial. There are all sorts of disagreements in techie culture, but the common core is an assumption of personal autonomy and individualism as the ultimate and self-justifying good. The disagreement is really a relatively technical matter of how consistent is that principle with private property, and with private IP in particular.
These fit within older debates, but they are also much narrower than many debates that consume society. And that is changing.
The culture of many tech companies is no longer an uneasy truce between the libertarians and the Open Source movement. Progressives have moved in. Here I define progressive as the enlightened technocrat. These are all smart people, but they are smart people that believe, for example, that it is the role of Google not to index the world’s information, but to mold the world’s view of that information according to their own enlightened ideals. Half the time, they are right about the positive influence the world’s tech giants could make with their fingers on the scales of public debate.
It’s still frightening. I can disagree with Richard Stallman, but feel safe interacting in his world because Richard Stallman’s whole bit is that he doesn’t want anyone controlling how anyone uses their computer. Copyleft is not intended to ensure you can’t run your graphics hardware with good drivers. I can hand my data over to a principled libertarian. But the prospect of the major tech infrastructure being under the thumbs of SJW busy-bodies frightens me.
And every day it seems like things which would have been unthinkable for a major tech company are happening. Google bans gun videos from Youtube, Github deletes open source projects for using offensive terms in the commit comments that would not cause a movie to lose a PG rating. PragerU has videos systematically banned from Youtube for…for providing mainstream Republican propaganda. I mean, let’s be honest, PragerU is overly simplistic propaganda. But it’s propaganda that lines up pretty well with mainstream thought within one of the two major political parties in the US, and there are far more extreme and more malevolent examples of propanda out there, including on Youtube, from left and right.
Our generation raked Microsoft over the coals for anticompetitive behavior like coming with a crappy non-standards compliant web browser installed by default. We ran Linux, even though it remained consistently five years behind the curve. Now, MacOS is the hot stuff. Today, by the hour, MacOS blocks third party applications from even running in the default configuration unless they are signed by Apple.
That’s not a dig at Apple. Or Microsoft. I’m not even sure Apple realized just what a master-stroke it was to build OSX on top of BSD, and expose the underlying BSD system to the power users. Suddenly, we could have all the linux servery power tools on a box that wasn’t Linux but you had to look real damn close to see the difference. (Stallman could point out the difference: you don’t control a single damn thing about the box, and who cares if it ships with awk, sed, vim, and emacs installed out of the box if Apple controls it all.)
It’s a dig at us.
Everyone is fretting about fake news right now. And everyone who knows me knows that I was not exactly pro-Trump. I gave money to his primary opponents. I gave money to his general election opponents. I lost friends trying to convince people that Trump is a problem, during the primary and during the general election. I took part in protests, I canvassed voters. I opposed Trump.
But, it is extremely obvious that 90% of the fake news panic is people being upset that Trump won the election. 90% of the outcry is really saying, “Facebook, Google…put your fingers on the scale.”
I don’t want Zuckerburg’s finger on the scale of public debate. I don’t want Google filtering public information down to it’s own ideas of what people ought to read.
I’m all for community standards. I don’t think trolls should be tolerated, or cyber-bullying, or insulting random people behind a veil of autonomy, or any of the other nasty things that the internet has given us.
But the emphasis is on the community part. The oldest rule on the internet is, if you don’t like it, don’t click it. Ignore it and let it die. Facebook, Twitter, and Google can give us more sophisticated tools to accomplish that old adage so that we can police our own communities. That will make those communities more, not less, insular. It will make those communities even more echo-chambery.
That’s fine.
Making people into open-minded cosmopolitans is a good goal for a parent or a teacher to set for their wards. It’s a good goal for a person to have for themselves. It is not at all an appropriate goal for a tech company with 90% market share in their space.
I have never, ever, ever had a bad experience on Facebook that didn’t involve something from a distant faceless third party. I’ve argued with friends about openly bigoted memes, but never seen a friend actually compose and post bigotry.