--- joanna bujes <joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com> wrote:
> 5. Which class do they identify with? From what I
> can tell most do not
> identify with the ruling class; they tend to be
> skeptical and fairly
> well-informed.
Most American programmers that I know (and I am one myself) tend to be either libertarian (and very money driven) or they tend to be leftish. A lot of the foreign programmers from poor countries tend to have a lot of ambitions to make it "big". I realize that is a generalization, but it is a generalization that holds up.
I think a lot of programmers here in Silicon Valley got a wake-up call with the recent "lay-offs". The CEO of the company for which Joanna and I both work is fond of talking about how we are all "one big team"...well, a whole lot of "our team" (10,000+) got laid off at the end of November.
Which way will programmers go in a revolution? I think there will be a split. I would hope that the split would go at least 60 for, 40 against.
In previous revolutions, you had to
> take over the telephones
> and media. In the next revolution, it is more likely
> to be that you need
> the cooperation of the computer programmers.
Indeed. And I think that it is going to be computer systems that allow us to create a more decentralized model than seen to date. I will tell you this much right now: bringing this system to its knees will be easy if we have the majority of programmers on our side.
Thomas
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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