From hippie to loony

2025-09-20

This is a continuation of my earlier post about “Why FOSS”. It’s a bit of musing about the ideological motivation of various silicon valley figures.

What was it like to work with computers in 1985? A fun read on the mater is The Cuckoo’s Egg.

In the book, there is a sense of freedom and candid collaboration, even between hippie academics and FBI agents. A certain Robert Morris is a fairly important character in the book. His son made the Morris Worm, which was the first computer worm¹, Morris happens to be close friend with a certain… Paul Graham².

Oftentime, the hippie movement is associated with “The Left”³. It’s a mistake. Hippies didn’t have much of a consistent ideology, opinions were held without much rigor, second thoughts, or attempt at consitency.

A major hippie figure is Timothy Leary. I don’t want to say too much about him, because I’ve no knowledge of the subject. Timothy Leary, himself, took a lot of inspiration from cybernetics (which was born with computers) but adding woo the same way we have AI-woo and quantum-woo in alternative medecines nowadays.

The idea was that we could grasp the world by “unlocking” our brain through alternative conscious states. Leary’s stuff was extremely individualistic with a focus on individuals and power through self development and discovery, with a complete disdain for organization around multiple people. You could “know” without really having to understand.

Leary’s influence in Silicon valley is today blindingly obvious, especially around AI and cryptocurrency. For cryptocurrency, you also have the weird fixation around the printing press from austrian economics.

Let’s give a passing mention to Steve Jobs, who was raised in a hippie commune.

And finally, let’s mention the number one reason techbros are so boring. Their sci-fi lectures. American sci-fi is drivel. I’ll let Charles Stross do the talk though: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html

But let’s focus on Wikipedia for now. I’m going to quote Jimmy Wales Wikipedia page, Wales is the founder of Wikipedia:

Wales has previously referred to himself as an Objectivist, referring to the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand⁴ in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism.

and

Wales has cited Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek’s⁵ essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, which he read as an undergraduate, as “central” to his thinking about “how to manage the Wikipedia project”.

It’s worth noting that Wales genius doesn’t lie in his ideas, but in his capacity to listen to people who disagree with him⁶, and his acceptance of the idea of collective intelligence. Hilariously, there are folk in Silicon valley who despise the idea of collective intelligence, I wrote about it in an older post.

For the matter, if you think that a room with a nuclear physicist, a biologist, and a psychologue is more apt to answer any given question than a room with just a psychologue, you believe in collective intelligence.

So what’s the link between Jimmy Wales and free software? God, why is the world so complex? I hate it.

There is two things. The first relates to Free software. It’s the idea of self-governance. Wikipedia works because it organizes many people so that they work together to preserve some common resource, that’s self-governance. The four freedoms are cool, but they would be better expressed with a single right, the right of taking part in the decisions over the computer systems we use every day. Ie: self-governance, or democracy, if you feel especially dramatic.

The second relates to Open Source. And it shows the corporate roots of Open Source, because it’s also tightly tied to Hayek’s thinking. It’s the idea of exit⁷.

Exit as a concept is very simple. You remember how Stallman imagined a tax on software, so that people could allocate democratically resources to software projects? Gosh, that sounds complicated. What if instead of trying to build up a system that work, we just said to people that they have the right to quit, fork, create their own little fenced community the way they want and be done with it? Surely, eventually someone would make a great system and we could just all go behind them! So nice, I don’t even have to imagine the perfect system, I just say it’s possible. That’s exit for short.

Exit as a software development strategy is not exactly optimal. Sure you can fork an OSS project, but if you don’t have a roadmap to motivate people to contribute to your project, you become simply dependent on upstream, as it has more developer resources. The result is that two OSS projects that are fork of each other will often become a single OSS project. There are examples of forks going their ways, and coexisting, but those are the exception rather than the norm.

Invertly, if the new project has more resource than the original, the original will die.

Exit, like a software license, is a tool. It cannot be an end in itself. It needs to be embedded in a larger strategy of community building and sustainable process around software. We need to ask: exit to where? When to exit?

Now it would be all cute and silly if it stoped there. But really, exit is just a way of avoiding talking about the end goal.

Behind the idea of exit. And here, I talk more at a societal level. There is the idea that we should put different systems of society in competition between each other. And that, of course, the best one would win and take over.

Sounds good right? But remember what experience shows: it’s the most well resourced that wins, not “the best” (for whatever definition of “best” that isn’t “has the most resource”).

So the only possible outcome of exit is a society shaped by the people with the most resource today. Is it far fetched to say this is loony, if the person with the most resource today literally calls for the extermination of minorities, and do loony salutes?

Yet here we are.

There is a straight pipeline from Leary to Musk. It’s all based on individuality with a complete disdain for the complexity of interpersonal relationship. A society is nothing if relations between people. Collective intelligence cannot exist without society.

Innoculating against the sad mindset that besets people like Musk requires one thing only: care. We need to pay attention to each other, listen, accept that relations of dependence are not unilateral, listen to others weaknesses and accept ours.

Isolation is what creates a society where one can yearn for the destruction of their neighbour.