> michael at ecst.csuchico.edu wrote:
>
> >Yes, until you get to be about 40 and the industry considers you to be so
> >much dead meat.
> >
> >You have a still immature sector where start ups are still common, unlike
> >the mature sectors, such as steel, coal, textiles, but also media. Little
> >by little, the AOLs
> >and the Microsofts invade this still fertile turf. As that happens, the
> >brave libertarianism
> >common to that sector will dissipate.
>
> Still it's amazing how long an ideology can outlive its material roots,
> whether we're talking about broad fantasies of universal middle classness
> in the U.S., despite the smallest middle class (in income terms) in the
> First World, and of unique upward mobility, despite flat to declining real
> incomes and mobility stats in line with other OECD countries. Regionally,
> though Texas, California, and Arizona have become heavily urbanized states
> (an urbanization accomplished with decades of heavy federal subsidies),
> lone wolf/cowboy frontier thinking lives on. And among the
> cyberlibertarians, contract programmers seem to figure themselves as heroic
> entrepreneurs - or free agents, as Fast Company calls them.
Two points:
(1) Back in the mid-late 70s and early 80s hacker culture was far more anarchic than libertarian. Bill Gates was despised for trying to charge people for software and keep a proprietary claim on it when thousands of folks were constantly modifying each others work -- a process that was absolutely VITAL to the evolution of microcomputers as useful gizmos for the world at large, corporate as well as individual citizen/consumer/etc. And of course, Apple Computer was started with equipment "liberated" from HP, an act far more in keeping with an anarchist than a libertarian ethos.
(2) There's nothing whatever new about cyberlibertarianism, as Doug's comments about frontier thinking remind us. The mythic individualism of the frontier, heavily subsidized by the metropole is in one sense THE story of America, dating back to Colonial days.
Conclusion:
The ability of an ideology to "outlive its material roots" in this case applies to cyberlibertarianism, but not to cyberanarchism. The reason lies in much older, and more deeply culturally integrated elements of ideology on which it draws.
If America had been settled without the firepower of Europe supporting the frontier fantasies, with a Native American majority in America today, I daresay that cyberanarchism would have fared much better and cyberlibertarianism much worse.
It's all a matter of which notes get damped, and which get sustained.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"