[justcommenting]

To give an example, Gladwell cherry-picks quotes to misrepresent Snowden's views in this piece. The strong stench of elitism and intellectual dishonesty in insinuating that Snowden is a fool because he claims that non-governmental institutions have important roles to play in solving social problems is typical, and I would venture to speculate that Gladwell would never say the same thing about someone like Larry Lessig (who has actually spoken with Snowden), even though they happen to hold similar views on those topics, particularly in relation to the examples Snowden gave in the quote.

Gladwell's process serves well enough as a lazy caricature for the piece but doesn't represent a good-faith articulation of his subject's views, which is hard to excuse in light of the dozens of events, thousands of tweets, etc. that are much more accessible than Ellsberg material was decades ago.

Gladwell could have interviewed Snowden and Ellsberg but probably chose not to, perhaps because it was easier to trash-talk someone whose life is under threat at an especially sensitive time (pardon consideration) for a "clever" contrast with Ellsberg than to try to represent his perspective in good faith.

[tptacek]

Which quotes are cherry picked? How is Snowden's view misrepresented? Is it your argument that Snowden has a greater respect for governing institutions (conceptual or in reality) than the piece represents?

Long before this piece was published, I had the impression of Snowden as a sort of technocratic an-cap type.

I will confess to not being the slightest bit interested in what Ellsberg thinks of Snowden, and far more interested in what people report about Ellsberg and Snowden than what either of them think of each other.

[justcommenting]

Mostly the far-from-charitable interpretation of "When we talk about saving lives, when we are talking about fighting cancer, treating AIDS, ameliorating poverty, these solutions typically are not coming from government. . . . While law is important . . . at the end of the day law is simply letters on a page."

My argument was that Gladwell is painting a cheap caricature of a "hacker" when it's both easy and reasonable to interpret a quote like the one above in the broader context of the full speech/event and the dozens of others that he's given in recent years.

I'm not trying to argue that Snowden has or doesn't have respect for governing institutions. I think that's Snowden's story to tell. But my read of the piece is that Gladwell reached some "clever" sounding conclusion - perhaps in a "blink" - and then found a quote that supported his narrative, which reads more like Harvard-worship in Ellsberg's favor than careful presentation of arguments/evidence. This strikes me as misleading and dishonest in light of the sheer volume of interviews, tweets, etc. from Snowden that (at least to me) paint a more nuanced and careful picture.

[tptacek]

I can understand bristling at the association of technophilic anarcho-capitalism with the word "hacker", but I'm less convinced by the argument that mere invocation of the concept of technophilic anarcho-capitalism is out of bounds, because it is clearly "a thing" in our community.

[justcommenting]

Invoking the concept isn't out of bounds, but having watched a decent number of presentations, talks, and interviews by/about this particular person, the lack of nuance in describing someone whose views seem especially easy to find was frustrating and likely deliberate. It took me all of five seconds to find Snowden's last tweet on the particular argument Gladwell references, which was about a week ago (bold font): https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/805868198138703873

Gladwell's uninformed gee-whiz speculation seems like an excuse to parrot the claim that Snowden "may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service" without mentioning any evidence or even a clear argument beyond its appearance in a book. Maybe Snowden was that or worse, but the only argument Gladwell seems to construct to support the claim is that he was a dupe/fool because he didn't go Harvard like Ellsberg.