In college, I met a number of sincere libertarians that were skeptical of authority and very interested in a wide range of people having a pretty broad set of freedoms. When I started work in SF in 1997, I saw similar attitudes in a lot of people.
In that time, it seems to me the definition of "libertarian" has shifted to be much more about the freedom of people with a lot of money to do what they want without constraint. And a great deal of SF culture has since been priced out of the market; a lot of the weirdos, hippies, artists, and other people marching to the beat of their own drummer have had to march elsewhere.
The same seems to be true online. Eternal September is more than 25 years old. The early flowering of small communities, individual bloggers, and digital anarchosyndicalists seems to me to have been mostly supplanted by profit-seeking services run by a small number of very rich people.
It's probably inevitable. All that money was basically lying there. I can't be shocked that a bunch of people rushed in to scoop it up and damn the consequences, just like San Francisco's first gold rush. [1] But I do miss the more innocent times.
In college, I met a number of sincere libertarians that were skeptical of authority and very interested in a wide range of people having a pretty broad set of freedoms. When I started work in SF in 1997, I saw similar attitudes in a lot of people.
In that time, it seems to me the definition of "libertarian" has shifted to be much more about the freedom of people with a lot of money to do what they want without constraint. And a great deal of SF culture has since been priced out of the market; a lot of the weirdos, hippies, artists, and other people marching to the beat of their own drummer have had to march elsewhere.
The same seems to be true online. Eternal September is more than 25 years old. The early flowering of small communities, individual bloggers, and digital anarchosyndicalists seems to me to have been mostly supplanted by profit-seeking services run by a small number of very rich people.
It's probably inevitable. All that money was basically lying there. I can't be shocked that a bunch of people rushed in to scoop it up and damn the consequences, just like San Francisco's first gold rush. [1] But I do miss the more innocent times.
[1] E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining#California_Go...