[post-]

There are a lot of problems with this article, but I want to focus on this paragraph:

> What’s more, there has never been a better time to try to found a genuinely subversive company than right now. Consider Y Combinator’s new openness to not-for-profit startups. Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate. [http://www.redditblog.com/2015/02/announcing-winners-of-redd...] It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there. A huge audience. You might even call it a market.

I'm not sure that I trust Jon Evans' -- or any one person's -- assessment of subversion. The whole point of subversion is to overturn ("vertere") the status quo from below ("sub"), while this article seems content to maintain the current systems of marginalized nerd-dom (which has always been a suspect category) and capitalism (which is interesting and because as a system it preferences what's mainstream and marketable -- Evans has contradicted himself again).

When Evans writes, "Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate," in support of his call for subversion, he glosses over the fact that the list includes some of the most mainstream nonprofits in the world (plus two well-known psychoactive research organizations). I'm not saying that these charities aren't doing good things -- I think it's fair to assume that they are -- I'm saying that supporting them can't be viewed as an act of subversion, and that assuming limited resources, support for them means lost support for other _actually subversive_ organizations that mean to do just as much good in the world.

"It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there." But change doesn't mean patching what exists; change -- subversive change -- means offering a replacement.