Linux

[sokol at jhu.edu]

At 04:58 PM 2/23/99 +0000, Alex LoCascio wrote:
>
>That's because all of us socialists are hopelessly second wave luddites
>who are unhip to the Brave New World of liberation through technology. 
>Somebody named Postrel just came out with a book on this subject.  
>
>The good folks at the Baffler have skewered the techno-libertarian
>geekazoids ad nauseum, and one woman wrote an article in Mother Jones
>awhile back showing that the cybertopians are ignorant of the fact that
>most technology today was developed through government R&D.  I mean, how
>many of the cybernerds got their start at a well-funded public
>university?

Or, for that matter, publicly subsidized "private" university (e.g. about
50% of Johns Hopkins' revenues comes from the public sector).

 A larger point is that the yuppie techno-libertarian geeks are nothing
more than a bunch of ostentatious nouveau riche parvenus and behave as such
most of the time.  Let's not forget that these are often social climbers,
lower middle class people working their way up through the
academic/corprorate ladder.  Their big problem is, as they say in my old
country, "straws sticking out of their boots" or their social awkwardness -
so they are desperately trying to cover that unpleasant fact by being "more
Catholic than the pope." That translates into conspicuous embracement of
what they see as the epitome of their newly acquired urban upper class
status - from their latte to dress code and to techno-libertarian outlook.

Wojtek
(downwardly mobile)