So, Howell Raines isn&#8217;t a complete waste of air
<p>The NYT ran a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/18/opinion/18WED2.html"><br />
pro-Linux editorial</a> today.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s good.  They had to slip their &#8220;communitarian&#8221; spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping <cite>Mother Jones</cite> readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.</p>
<p>Hah.  If they only knew.  I&#8217;m not going to say my gun-toting<br />
red-meat libertarianism is typical, because it isn&#8217;t.  Actually<br />
the mass centroid of hackers&#8217; politics is a lot like the<br />
blogosphere&#8217;s, a sort of soft-libertarianism-leaning-towards-conservatism or vice-versa<br />
(the centroid used to be further left but a lot has changed in the last decade).<br />
Much less radical than me, but still enough to give the likes<br />
of Raines a bad case of the vapors.</p>
<p>But let&#8217;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&#8217;s just fine.  We&#8217;ll<br />
take the Gray Lady&#8217;s backing.  It&#8217;s another small step on the road to world domination.</p>
<p>The day will come when we will be the guys running the<br />
world&#8217;s entire digital infrastructure (not such a stretch; we<br />
already run the Internet).  Our example will teach Howell&#8217;s<br />
kids  stuff about the power of decentralization and voluntary cooperation, all the things leftists pay lip-service to until the<br />
last second before they&#8217;d have to actually apply them.  And<br />
the world will change out from under him.  Subtly. Powerfully.<br />
And in ways he can&#8217;t guess at yet.</p>
<p>It should be a fun ride.</p>
