Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now.
If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was actually a point besides "Tim O'Reilly is evil incarnate", which he established in the first two paragraphs. And then re-established in the third. And the fourth...
Don't get me wrong, I whine bitterly about the over-glorified promise of the Silicon Valley techno-drome, where raw technology is supposed to solve all of humanity's woes. I fail to see how this article addresses this, at all.
I tried to read it, but my brain kept powering itself off as a self-defense mechanism. Then I tried to skim it, and it started getting worse, e.g.: "Another apt example of O’Reilly’s meme-engineering is his attempt to establish a strong intellectual link between the development of Unix [...] and the development of open source and the Internet." At this point I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself...
Ironic that it should deface Unix, because I think that dmr's immortal words[1] are particularly apt here: this piece is "a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy."
>I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself... Ironic that it should deface Unix
Agree with him or not, all he's saying is that the code sharing involved in creating Unix was no more than regular academic sharing of ideas, and that retroactively claiming it for "open source" is spin. The article takes no issue with Unix, maybe you should read in more detail before becoming enraged?
Morozov is wrong; you just don't know the history.
Keith Bostic has gone on record as saying that he was inspired by Richard Stallman to try to make a fully free version of BSD. The GNU tools were a crucial tool on every Unix by the mid-1980s, and indeed played a major role in making Unix useful. While you can argue about whether it was a good idea to try to rebrand Stallman's "free software" movement as "open source", it doesn't make sense to argue that Unix was somehow unconnected to the free software movement.
Furthermore, there was already a movement afoot to build software under free-software licenses in commercial companies many years before the Open Source Initiative was founded: Sun, DEC, HP, and so on, were members of the X Consortium, which continued the development of X-Windows as free software many years after its original (academic) maintainers had stopped; Cygnus effectively took over maintenance of GCC and the rest of the GNU toolchain from the GNU project by about 1990; Sun published NFS, Yellow Pages, Sun RPC, and so on under free-software licenses starting in the mid-1980s, and later funded development on Emacs; Lucid forked Emacs to form the basis of its IDE, giving us XEmacs and its high-quality open-source C compiler, lcc. None of this was "regular academic sharing of ideas" — while these were companies with academic roots, they were judged by standards of business, not academia — and it all happened on Unix.
And many of the people who built that open-source software that made Unix what it was were also founding members of the Open Source Initiative.
At the same time, there was perhaps an order of magnitude more programmers using IBM PCs under MS-DOS. The only significant open-source software I can think of from this era on that platform is the various open-source FORTH systems. There was lots of user-group and BBS-scene software, but it was usually distributed without source, or occasionally with source, but under "no commercial use" licenses — you could maybe even put the IBM PC BIOS source code into this category. There were occasional exceptions — the WaZOO source code from Opus, say, or PC-HACK, ported from Unix — but not many.
So I think that it's perfectly fair to describe the "code sharing involved in Unix" as a unique nascent movement, separate from the "regular academic sharing of ideas", which at some point decided to (mostly) call itself the "open source" movement.
It's not entirely spin. The free software movement was largely a reactionary movement to various attempts of that era to take the "academic sharing of ideas" back in to the proprietary fold. It (and the later open source movement) was very much trying to defend/establish/whatever the environment under which Unix evolved.
So it is not so much retroactively claiming it as open source as it is acknowledge open source's heritage.
Yes, it's a long-ish article but it covers a lot of factual ground (it's in effect an O'Reilly biography from a very critical perspective). It contains a lot of historical detail that is interesting in its own right; the author has done a lot of research, down to digging up some notebooks edited by O'Reilly in '76. There's a good summary in smacktoward's comment below:
Several points were being made, as I can tell from a single reading. Note that I don't claim to do anything more than summarize, and that, probably badly. Read the original to rebut/clarify my take...
- The open source movement separated from libre source in the pursuit of profits; Mr. O'Reilly was heavily involved in that.
- Mr. O'Reilly has changed & massaged certain words and meanings in a masterful art of propaganda.
- Mr. O'Reilly's influence & the approach he favors has demoted the individual's ability to effectively govern themselves.
Additionally: the author does not support O'Reilly's (or any "Randian" for that matter) politics.
That the author (a great writer) would use Rand (an awful writer) as the strawman here indicates he's never read her work (it sucks, fyi) and is only reacting to what he thinks it is.
Say what you want about Rand's political views, it's clear that the author doesn't understand them... implying that he doesn't understand O'Reilly's either.
The first half of the article was an interesting historic lesson for me. The last half of the article, less so.
Hey, what a surprise - the top comment on a HN post comes from a reader who dismisses the post outright despite failing to actually read it in its entirety.
Your ad hominem attack against me is not appreciated, nor is your attempt to treat me as a category and stereotype rather than a real person behind a keyboard.
Like others here, I make it a general rule to read everything, and even consulting other sources, before commenting. Like others here also, I had not the time nor the inclination to go through the entirety of a 16,000 word behemoth of writing when the first 8,000 words were rote reptitions of a single point already copiously made within 1,000 words. Being no stranger to long-form writing, and seeing no visible structure to the work that would suggest it's going anywhere besides more reptition of the same point, I gave up - like others here did.
A basic modicum of civility is desirable, and this includes blatant labeling and name-calling.
I did not call you any name (unless you count "reader"), nor was I attacking you. I was merely sarcastically expressing my frustration at a trend I've observed on HN in which the top comment on an article which I highly enjoyed is almost invariably someone disagreeing outright, often without having read the entire post.
If you read half of that behemoth of an article, good for you - you can't be accused of not giving it a fair chance (although I found that second half to be more interesting and insightful myself).
I just find it aggravating and perhaps indicative of a negative attitude amongst HN readers that contrarian comments almost always end up at the top of the thread. That is all. Sorry if I hurt your feelings.
I think this wasn't a case of middlebrow dismissal which you rightly rail against. The original comment seems to be directly complaining about the style of the author rather than just dismissing it off hand. When it comes to Morozov this is a salient aspect, because while he certainly does his homework he tends to revel in polemic bordering on vitriol.
I'm sad 'potatolicious got to say this before I did; he's one of my must-reads on HN. It's also sad how quickly a critique Paul Graham has of the environment on HN gets twisted into another way to degrade the environment on HN.
LOL. After skimming a few pages, I was hoping to just skip it and find the discussion about what this article is actually accusing O'Reilly of. I can see why the author may feel threatened by anyone who actually has communication skills.
In fairness to the author, this piece was written for a print publication, The Baffler, and included in that magazine's most recent print issue. Longer-form articles fit better in print than they do online.
OK, thanks to this and a few other intriguing defenses I went back and finished. It does eventually make a real point, although the ratio of actual quotations and other data points to the vaguely FUD-ish storytelling that he starts off with is pretty poor, especially considering the amount of research he claims to have done.
I'm left with the vague feeling that I could probably use the same approach to tear down Gandhi or any other more or less untouchable folk hero by using long tracts of insinuation interspersed with a few phrases in scare quotes.
They could have at least provided IDs for the paragraphs so I could book mark where I left off. At 16,729 words I don't think you can call this a single serving read.
I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent.
Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth.
Always worth reading.
This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" and "free software".
I had no idea Tim O'Reilly actively barred Stallman from his early conferences, which crucially helped create the competing open source community.
Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
I first found the tone of the article harsh and unjustified, and stopped reading after the second section.
I don't think I've read Morozov before, so after reading your comments, I dove back in for a second take.
I agree that it is an impressively concise and clear history of free vs open source - that alone made the article worthwhile, I think.
Regarding HN readers dumping on him:
> Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression—the religious fervor that many users feel about the Internet has helped catalyze a lot of activist campaigns—but, by and large, the concept also blunted our analytical ability to balance rights against each other.
This is spot-on, and is especially poignant when applied to sites such as Reddit, where users championing "Internet Freedom" occasionally eschew morality in order to create an ethical martyr for their cause - see the case of the 'jailbait' subreddit. I have no doubt that those users and similarly minded users who browse HN would find the above insulting.
He makes other insights throughout the article that would apply to similarly ardent groups of users that are around the HN-sphere.
I sort of understand the value people see in Morozov as a counterweight to tech's occasional fatuousness, but this wasn't a good article. As someone who is morally (if not intellectually) coming from a similar place as him, I found myself getting progressively more and more unhappy with the article the farther I got; it became a caricature of a point that deserves to be made more carefully.
I thought it was ok, and I don't actually usually like Morozov much. But I think it was confusing in being nominally about O'Reilly. The bulk of the article is only tangentially about O'Reilly, and is more along the lines of a reprise of Richard Stallman's essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", but for a non-tech audience who probably wouldn't read Stallman (he does at least cite/credit that Stallman piece, though he paraphrases it in more words than the actual original piece). O'Reilly seems to get grafted on because he organized some conferences and promoted the term among businesspeople, and is taken to be emblematic of a certain kind of Valley culture.
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
A writer who can't seem to get to the point because he needs more paragraphs to showcase additional literary allusions is not going to hold me hostage indefinitely. If the first two thousand words of an essay are not a sufficiently representative sample on which to base conclusions about the essay, then the writer is not a good writer. He may of course reveal the cure for cancer in the final paragraph, but given the opportunity cost of missing out on more important things I could be reading, I'm willing to take the risk.
I discovered long ago that "intellectual" did not mean "intelligent"; it was about style of presentation, not importance of ideas. You be the judge of whether that is a symptom of intellectual decline.
>Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).
Or he is just in love with the allusions. A good essay should not require independent research to figure out an allusion-it should be evident in the essay itself.
The article just doesn't have any sort of flow. It feels like Morozov had a pile of things he wanted to talk about, references he wanted to include, and points he wanted to attempt to make, but wasn't able to(or didn't bother to) make a coherent narrative out of the entire thing. The end result is that it feels disjointed and is very hard to read.
The 13th paragraph starts talking about O'Reilly's origin. But why is it there? The closest reference to his origin is in the 5th paragraph. The next 8 paragraphs are spent jumping all over the last 15 or so years.
Another example is the reference to Neil Postman. The two paragraphs dedicated to him is absolutely worthless, as Postman is used to refer to Alfred Korzybski, who Morozov then related to O'Reilley. There isn't any reason for Postman to be in there other than to have the reference. There is no link to O'Reilly, aside from a throwaway sentence referring to Postman's work 31 paragraphs(and 2 sections) after the last Postman reference.
The Neil Postman reference is to establish the distinction between stupid talk (i.e. statements which are demonstrably false) and crazy talk (i.e. statements which rely on such a different semantic frame that they are meaningless except in that frame.) This distinction comes up throughout the entire essay, most prominently in the title.
No essay can really be understood in a vaccuum. There's always some manner of background information which has to be absorbed in order to understand its gist, even if that background information is just a rudimentary grasp of the language used to write it. The purpose of Morozov's allusions is not to just allude, but rather to give explicit links to concepts he's drawing on. In the Postman case, Morozov wishes to use the distinction Postman drew up, but without spending too long reiterating it (and thus cluttering up an already cluttered essay) he describes it briefly, notes the source, and then figures that if you want to understand the distinction more thoroughly, you can look up the original.
I can't argue that it's a bit overwrought and thick—at the very least, I concur it needed some manner of chapter headings or other structure—but Morozov is most certainly not alluding for the sake of alluding.
So I've just looked up Morozov's book and then realized I could get it at.. Safari Books Online (an O'Reilly Media venture.) Oh the irony. Still, it's free. Free as in I already pay for the subscription.
Oh please, Morozov's appeal lies almost exclusively in his ability to teardown strawmen of his own creation ("oh look, some stupid startup thinks it can save the whales, isn't Silicon Valley so stupid?") or inciting fear over technological advances by citing obscure studies and anecdotes. He's like an Ann Coulter sans brevity.
This is a disappointing criticism of someone who presents some very interesting ideas. Morozov is definitely guilty of tearing down some absurd strawmen, but that doesn't invalidate his criticisms of, say, SV's "solutionist" culture.
Evgeny Morozov is just a poor man's Malcolm Gladwell, and one focused solely on being contrarian to anything future-thinking, which makes him a darling for old media.
Here's he talks about something he thinks he read on Hacker News:
http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779
> I don't think we should ban them. But boy most of tech blogs would SO MUCH benefit from being ridiculed. Do you read the stuff they publish? I recall seeing a headline - on Hacker News, I think - on how "Uber will disrupt racism." I mean, what on earth is this? The Onion is less funny.
While I have no doubt that there are some HNers who are "Yes, startups can fix ANYTHING", I had a feeling that most HNers were not so credulous. So I did a search for "Uber" and "racism":
Turns out the headline he mocked was from Reason magazine ("How market forces undermine racism: Uber Cab Edition").
But it figures that someone like Morozov who reflexively shits on anything Google or any tech giant tries to do would not be bothered to conduct a simple Internet search before making a mocking assertion
Are you saying that Morozov should have been talking about ridiculing Libertarians instead of ridiculing tech blogs when he brought up that assertion? Perhaps that seems like a major error to you? I don't think it would to him.
> He could just have easily picked out a narrative that highlighted all the criticisms I've made of Silicon Valley "solutionism" (his current bete noir). If he'd really done his research, he would have found Steve Talbott's book The Future Does Not Compute, which I published all the way back in 1995 in a first attempt to get people thinking about the ambiguous gifts that technology brings us. He could have also discovered my distaste for Libertarian fairy dust, my warnings about loss of freedom in the cloud era (which I started making back in 1999, before they became fashionable), or my arguments for the moral basis of both corporate and government decision making.
By the way, how pathetic is it that only 18 hours after this item was posted to HN, it's already off the front page of the site, and the conversation here is nearly dead? That's virtually guaranteeing that most of the comments will be made by people who haven't read the article.
Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is happening: while global mean surface temperature is rising, climate change may cause cooling in other areas.
If people were to accept the phrase "climate change", perhaps it would help end comments like "scientists say the earth is getting hotter... why have our winters been extra cold?"
Luntz was the one who picked up on the emergence of the new term and urged Republican policymakers to use it in place of "global warming," because to people unschooled in the details of the subject "climate change" sounds less dramatic and therefore calls less for immediate action. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.cli... for background on this. Luntz took a term that scientists developed and turned it against them, very effectively.
This is part of why science communicators keep losing policy battles to Luntz and others like him -- you're right that "climate change" is a more scientifically accurate term, but it's also a less scary term, and therefore if you think that something needs to be done about the problem anytime soon you would be better served to avoid it than to embrace it.
EDIT: If you want more examples of how science communicators fail and guidance on how to do better, Randy Olson's book Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/15...) is a good place to start.
Yes, it's long. No, I didn't finish it - yet. I fully intend to. I thought it would be a relatively quick read and then it turned out to be more of an intellectual exercise than I anticipated. Still, it kept me interested enough to make me want to go back and read more. Even though I took it all with a grain of salt, I started viewing O'Reilley from a different perspective - maybe not so much different as more complex. And his view of Silicon Valley was certainly a breath of fresh air compared to what normally makes it through the media filters.
It is for articles like these, that TL,DR was created.
EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes"
is clever and good.
I didn't think it was so bad. I don't have time to go into detail, but briefly:
If you read it as a critique of tech culture generally (and not Tim personally) it's interesting. The critique about polluting language is the crux of it. This is a critique worth diving into more. But the author didn't do a good job of it.
It reads like the author got a whiff of some Philosophy, and then rather than expand the ideas and connect them to the larger culture, he just found a convenient figurehead and wrote some link-bait. He could have easily targeted Richard Dawkins (inventer of the term meme) or any number of others.
The reason I think the article wasn't as bad as some is because I'm just so hungry for philosophical thought in the tech world. Maybe this will make some hackers think critically.
"In 1981 the young O'Reilly even wrote a reputable biography of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, in which he waxes lyrical about Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers."
This article, and its presence on the front page of HN, helped make it abundantly clear to me that I should probably be working right now instead of wasting my time on Hacker News.
I was kinda interested when I started reading this thing, but the article assumes you're already a Tim O'Reilly scholar -- the article is devoid of examples of his behavior. Whenever an article makes claims about a figure, I like to have an exhibit A, B, and C for every point argued.
Having been a developer through the last couple of decades, I've appreciated some of the books that ORA has published. But I'm wary of Tim pimping the the latest wave that sells books and conferences. The current wave is "Big Data" and my spam folder has countless missives promoting this conference or that gathering. Sigh...
I think Steven Johnson said it best about Mr. Morozov: “He’s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business.”
Whew, I read 4500 words, then paused to see how many more I had to go, and quit at that point. (As you will see from this comment, I'm pretty patient with length, but Morozov defeated me.)
Here's my review of the first 4500 words:
1) There's a lot of really fucking useless ad hominem. Offensively useless, offensively voluminous. Do you actually have something substantial to say about the man, or is it just linkbait? Oh, I see. Anyway, after the first ten paragraphs, I just assumed that the author couldn't be trusted in his analysis of O'Reilly, the person.
Oh, and there's some hilarious ranting in the first paragraph or four about the offensively bland jargon of silicon valley PR machines. But it has nothing to do with the rest of the article (even less than the ad hominem on O'Reilly).
2) Morozov makes a case that O'Reilly is more interested in Randian entrepreneurship than in user freedom. I'm not clear how fair it is to tar O'Reilly with the Randian brush (obviously many HNers will say "tar?!? laud! gild!", and we can quietly disagree about that), and again, I no longer trust any assertion Morozov makes about O'Reilly. But certainly some people exist who are pro-open-source but anti-free-software (especially anti-stallmanite), and many of them are laudable and reasonable people.
3) Further on free software vs open source, there's a useful discussion about how Stallman is interested in ends, but open source (and perhaps O'Reilly) is about means. Particularly interesting is how, in an era of desktop software, licenses were an important means to Stallman's ends, not an end in and of themselves. If you confuse the means for the ends, then in an era of cloud computing, you might say "oh these licenses no longer matter so the ends are accomplished", but of course that's emphatically not the Free Software position. And maybe we should give serious consideration to the free software position. (I think we should give serious consideration to the free software position!)
4) As Morozov points out, "open" is a slippery word, and he has some citations of O'Reilly using it in hilariously slippery and demagogical ways. I think this is a good point, and I hate that kind of slippery reasoning-by-analogy. Morozov says "Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as 'open'". Well, that's true, Morozov, but I can think of a word that's slipperier and sexier: "free". (It's still super-slippery and super-sex if you somehow restrict yourself to the "libre" sense.) Free software advocates are forever trying to explain that my freedom to restrict what you do with software I wrote isn't freedom, and while I support that cause overall, I'm not entirely enamoured of the doublespeak inherent in the branding.
And at this point, I ran out of patience with TFA. Maybe I'll come back to it later, read another 3000 words, and add another comment.
Avalanche of verbosity notwithstanding, I think there's an important thing here for hackers, buried in 15k words of bad writing. I think Stallman's movement is important as a matter of ethics. And I think the ethics-free engineering-and-business-focused open-source movement is important. And I think that hackers/coders/developers/compscientists who are also citizens should think seriously about both of these movements.
And I think anyone who says "FLOSS" is either perpetrating doublespeak, or a victim of it, because "Free/Libre Software" and "Open Source Software" are different things, which only-sometimes have common cause.
anyone who says "FLOSS" is either perpetrating doublespeak, or a victim of it, because "Free/Libre Software" and "Open Source Software" are different things
They are different things - though mostly in terms of goals and priorities, since the actual definitions are very similar - but I disagree that doublespeak is required to use that term.
"FLOSS", at least the way I've used and understood it, is not intended to equate them but simply to refer to both at once. In my view, FLOSS is the union of the two sets.
"And I think the ethics-free engineering-and-business-focused open-source movement is important."
There is potentially a common thread in Morozov's discussions that would rally against this sort of statement. Arguably the article is just such an assault.
The notion that technology can be unbound from ethics is a very libertarian one.
At risk of incorrectly paraphrasing Morozov, I would think he is taking issue with a hijacking of language with neutered terminology. Worse, the neutered and euphemistic phrasing, while more palatable, is forwarding another ideology.
Aside from the actual content, I'm intrigued how working on this sort of content can pay. The author claims to have spent three months (not necessarily full-time, I assume) reading everything O'Reilly has personally written in public and this gigantic article must have taken a good week or two to write and edit alone. That's several thousand dollars of effort there and I can't imagine it ever getting paid back by this article, no matter how good it is (or not).
What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
I wonder if this makes more sense if you've never used or written free and/or open source software.
Which is hilarious if you've read much King (he was my favorite author for a very long time), unless he actually claims to be a bad writer himself, in which case writing a book called On Writing is a questionable endeavor.
The article raises some interesting ideas but I think it misses some really big things. I've always seen O'Reilly as more of a passionate commenter/pundit as opposed to a influential operator. This isn't to say that he has no influence, but I think he's mostly just synthysizing the Valley zeitgeist. In other words, he seems like an odd target for what I see as a cultural critique. Maybe I'm not smart enough to actually disagree with Morozov, but I find it difficult to see the problem here. Even if Morozov is right, is O'Reilly really the most guilty party and why exactly are the things he is doing bad? For such a long article, there seems to be a lot of unstated assumptions. FWIW I live in SF so maybe I can't see forest for the trees.
I'm disappointed in Hacker News. The top comments seem to be about people lacking the patience to read the article and then criticising the article for being too long!
Please either spend real time reading the article and thinking about it and then comment, or don't comment at all.
It's not his best work by any stretch (its overly dense and repetitive) and some factoids are off the mark, but I do like that he has pointed out that the kind of back-patting altruism everyone likes to pretend is the best reward for their efforts is exposed as the barely upright rationalization for what is otherwise what I call "benign greed". I'm not exempt from it either; I like money, and I like doing interesting things to earn it. If I can make the world a better place for the effort, all the better, but it isn't the raison d'etre, and I won't posture otherwise...a large number of folks in the value do though (possibly to the point of self-denial).
I find it absolutely amazing that a guy who coined the term "mindless clicktivism" spent more than 14,000 words on an attack on Tim O'Reilly. Aren't there more important things to worry about?
While Morozov's essay to some may appear to be coming out of left field, it's actually appearing in a venue that takes ethical concerns in relation to technological innovation quite seriously as evidenced by whom it associates with.
Metacomment: I don't think that it's a bad thing to consider and reconsider the ideas being pushed and pumped by various parties. Even when the party being critiqued is pushing the agenda you favor.
The article could stand to be a higher-entropy source though. It proved distressingly low-entropy after a while.
The comments on this article is that it is:
"without...a thesis or a point", "hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking"
This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air.
I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the readers here. In the seventh paragraph it says "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101". Do you understand what he means by saying that? Do you know who Bernard-Henri Levy is? Do you know why the Baffler crowd holds him in contempt? Can you give a detailed explanation of the disagreements between the New Philosophers and the post-structuralists? Most Baffler readers can answer these questions, and it is assumed that someone reading the article could fully answer what "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101" means. If you don't understand that, you won't understand the article, and can not dismiss it other than to say you don't understand it.
As far as verbosity - Noam Chomsky often says if you repeat popular propaganda bromides, you can just stop there. If you say something counter to the cultural hegemony, it will need a long explanation, footnotes, multiple references and so forth. This is one reason articles like this seem long, if he is making a point about O'Reilly, he will have to point to multiple instances of things O'Reilly said, to nail down the case he is making.
Thanks for this counterpoint to the glib dismissals around here. The message of the article is hard to hear if you already have ideological commitments to the transformative potential of entrepreneurial activity and to the power of Web 2.0.
It's a long, difficult article. So, pick something you didn't like, and dismiss it all wholesale? Too easy.
I read the article, and disagreed with half the message. The first (Specificity is important) was very good, well defended, and made me think about how I use language in my life. The second (O'Reilly is a shill for Rand) was soapboxing about a topic the writer didn't appear to understand.
I'm not sure that the throwaway metaphor in the seventh paragraph is in any way related to a reader's dismissal of each argument in the article. Each piece of evidence presented in the article is poorly analyzed, even when it could provide a solid foundation for an argument.
As far as verbosity goes, a longer collection of ad-hominem attacks does not equal a stronger or more persuasive argument.
I read the article and think the point is deeper than that. I would summarize it like this:
Tim O'Reilly's business has changed from selling things (books, conferences) to selling ideologies ("Web 2.0", "government as a framework"). This is a relationship that goes both ways: the books and conferences provide crucial support for the ideologies he sells (the existence of a "Web 2.0" conference can be cited as proof that "Web 2.0" is a real thing), and the ideologies create demand for books and conferences as they spread.
The primary problem the author (Evgeny Morozov) has with this isn't that O'Reilly profits from it, but rather that the ideologies O'Reilly sells tend to provide corporate-friendly alternatives that are used to marginalize rising ideologies that could threaten existing power structures. Examples discussed:
- "Open source" as an ideology focused on the rights of the software developer, as opposed to the ideology it was explicitly designed to compete with, Richard Stallman's "free software" movement, which focused instead on the rights of the software user
- "Web 2.0" companies wanted to package up information about their users and sell it to the highest bidder; the ideology supported this by positioning it as a natural evolution of the Web rather than a major power shift
- "Government as a service" would involve taking major systems currently run by government and privatizing them, but covers this with a layer of techno-dust to avoid having to talk about the negative implications of privatization
Hence the comparison of O'Reilly to famed Republican spin architect Frank Luntz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz). Luntz has made a career selling policies to people they will hurt by packaging them up with attractive-sounding words. Morozov argues that O'Reilly is in the same business.
I also read it, and I think you summarize it well. I'd like to add that the author's main aim seems to be in revealing a strong technocratic tendency underlying O'Reilly's thought. The technocracy is shown for example in the naive assumption that political decisions can be calculated algorithmically with enough data and intelligent algorithms. According to the author, O'Reilly hides the political claim that small government is good behind technological newspeak about governments providing only the essential APIs for the private sector to build on. In coining new terms for old ideas he is ignoring the vast literature of political and philosophical thought discussing these matters and gaining the support of hackers for a political agenda. And, most importantly, dismissing tough ethical and political decisions by claiming that government is some kind of an optimization problem.
I'm not sure if he convinced me regarding O'Reilly specifically (haven't read O'Reilly enough), and I agree with others about the repetition and bad style ("crazy talk"?). But some actual thoughts were hidden in there.
I wasn't able to wade through it all either, but I thought it was clear the point was that O'Reilly bends thought and attitudes in Silicon Valley through PR and marketing of memes and buzzwords.
To the OP, this has had negative consequences, and he goes through them point by point.
If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was actually a point besides "Tim O'Reilly is evil incarnate", which he established in the first two paragraphs. And then re-established in the third. And the fourth...
Don't get me wrong, I whine bitterly about the over-glorified promise of the Silicon Valley techno-drome, where raw technology is supposed to solve all of humanity's woes. I fail to see how this article addresses this, at all.