Lance Murdoch wrote:
>The idea that the counterculture spawned the PC and the Internet is
>ludicrous. As I said before, there is no real story of computer gurus
>who are left-wing, the story is more the few leftists who are computer
>gurus. There has been a ton of hype about how computers are
>empowering, how it was spawned by entrepreneurs in their garages and
>so forth, and a lot of people swallow the hype. They were the
>creation of either decades of government R&D (the Internet), or a
>government-granted monopoly to a massive corporation, or both
>government money and a monopoly (the PC). That a few left-wing
>hippies made some money out of it is a sideshow. And the real story
>of the left-wing hippies, or even apolitical techies who did not have
>the hard-nosed evil businessman mentality, is that they usually got
>screwed out of their inventions.
>
Agreed. I have worked in hi-tech for twenty years and I have met very
few radicals there -- none of them engineers, though software engineers
are the best part of my job. By and large they are humble, patient,
knowledgeable, competent, and friendly lot. Mostly good plain folk. Most
of them run the gamut of democrat to liberterian. The real problem is in
the layers and layers of management above them.
Joanna