So, Howell Raines isn’t a complete waste of air

The NYT ran a
pro-Linux editorial
today.

That’s good. They had to slip their “communitarian” spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping Mother Jones readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.

Hah. If they only knew. I’m not going to say my gun-toting
red-meat libertarianism is typical, because it isn’t. Actually
the mass centroid of hackers’ politics is a lot like the
blogosphere’s, a sort of soft-libertarianism-leaning-towards-conservatism or vice-versa
(the centroid used to be further left but a lot has changed in the last decade).
Much less radical than me, but still enough to give the likes
of Raines a bad case of the vapors.

But let’s keep that our little secret, OK? If Raines wants to believe that open-source people are some kind of cross between Greenpeace and the Ethical Culture Society, that’s just fine. We’ll
take the Gray Lady’s backing. It’s another small step on the road to world domination.

The day will come when we will be the guys running the
world’s entire digital infrastructure (not such a stretch; we
already run the Internet). Our example will teach Howell’s
kids stuff about the power of decentralization and voluntary cooperation, all the things leftists pay lip-service to until the
last second before they’d have to actually apply them. And
the world will change out from under him. Subtly. Powerfully.
And in ways he can’t guess at yet.

It should be a fun ride.

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