[stalcottsmith]

I remember all this fondly since I became a young adult during the early years of the Internet when I setup up my first Unix system with a public TCP/IP address in 1990 and read Usenet back before endless September. I read the first year or two of WIRED magazine cover to cover.

It seems there is now a four-way breakdown among American techies:

  * Mistrust BigGov but trust BigTech
  * Trust BigGov, mistrust BigTech
  * Trust both BigGov and BigTech
  * Mistrust both BigGov and BigTech

And it all depends on your base political philosophy or leanings.

This article is a pretty formulaic example of what happens when someone from the 2nd perspective discovers John Perry Barlow's writings.

[wyclif]

I'm a child of the 80s and I always went for option #4.

[stalcottsmith]

Well option #1 and #2 are untenable and result from uninformed naivete or deliberate head-in-sandism. You could rationally go for option #3 but you'd be rooting for the dark side. Cheers.

[swatow]

I personally consider myself part of the alternative right, but my views are overall fairly mainstream. I fall into #3 not because I'm part of some "dark side" but because I think both big government and big tech largely do what they claim to, and the negative side effects are exaggerated.

I am very wary of "X always ends up as Y" arguments. If you don't like big companies abusing power, then close the loopholes or break them up (though I much prefer the former). If you don't like big government abusing citizens, then change the laws to limit government.

I like big government because they really do tend to work towards the public good. Look at healthcare or welfare in Australia for an example. I like big tech because they really do increase economic efficiency, and drive technology forwards.

I think as poorly of the conspiratorial thinking of #4's as they do of the "dark side".

[pnathan]

My suspicion is that this symptomatic of the mainstreaming of tech. AFAICT from random techie documents from before the web, the 4th perspective was broadly held. (Or perhaps I just have read primarily from hacker sources, which by definition lean towards #4).

[stalcottsmith]

Yes. Reddit 9 years ago was different. Usenet 15-25 years ago was quite different than any significant forum today. Sometimes it feels like I grew up in a country that doesn't exist any more.

[wutbrodo]

I wasn't aware there was really anyone in #2. I also don't think "Trust X" is an atomic unit that you can permute over (i.e. there are significant further divisions). I'm rather liberal by the standards of the average American when it comes to the role of gov't in the economy (mostly because I have an actual education in economics), and yet for things like government surveillance, I'm as opposed as they come. Those two things are conflated in "Trust BigGov".

I'm aware you were simplifying a little, but I think that's more than an insignificant divide.

[thesteamboat]

To my mind, the reason that #2 has any merit is that governments claim (at least in liberal democracies) to be beholden to you while corporations are not. The government is accountable to you in ways that companies are not.

In theory at least. I end up much closer to #4 since I'm not convinced that the government-people feedback loop works correctly, but I can imagine circumstances in which I might be #2.

[te_chris]

I think these qualifiers could make more sense if we substitute 'trust' for 'believe in'.

[walterbell]

Are there any offline archives of pre-AOL Usenet? These topics must have been discussed at that time, would be interesting to compare relative segments, then and now. Archives of The WELL would also be relevant.

[stalcottsmith]

Google bought the company that had the archive and for a while it was searchable as part of Google Groups. Now it is gone. I hope archive.org can put it online if it isn't lost forever.

[enkiv2]

It's still up. They just broke search-by-date, which makes it fairly useless for finding particular posts.