Comments on
Chapter 2: Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists
[...] Amrica [...]
[...] object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence. 3. http://twobits.net/discuss/chapter2/16 para45 page tags: opensource page_revision: 32, last_edited: 1252915846|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z [...]
I like the description of geeks as people who create new forms of political order that are bound up with sociotechnical systems. This seems to have some similarities to recent developments in the space generally referred to as ‘Web 2.0′ or ’social media’, except that the level of expertise required to ‘build new things’ is now much lower. Anyone can create a blog and open up a space for social interaction, for example. And even though starting a blog is a much humbler enterprise than building an operating system, the proliferation of social media, when viewed on a larger scale, seems to collectively represent in some sense a new type of social space. Is this a fair and/or worthwhile comparison?
I don’t know why this comment isn’t showing up.
The use of religious narratives in the geek community to express its own role in relationship to the state and large corporations is interesting on many levels, but I was surprised that there was no mention of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Based on Weber’s description of the ties between Calvinism and capitalism, the notion that geeks seek to “save capitalism from the capitalists” becomes even more powerful. When understood in Weber’s terms, the pride and sense of morality geeks might derive from mundane work such as debugging and editing wikipedia entries correlates with the Calvinist respect for work.
[...] Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, an anthropological study of open source culture (emphasis mine, and the term “geek” [...]
[...] Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, an anthropological study of open source culture (emphasis mine, and the term “geek” [...]
