Salon: Don’t tweak the geeks! “Hacker historian Eric Raymond critiques Kakutani’s “wrongheaded New York Times assault on digital culture”, and gets some licks in for Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish as well.

…Kakutani and Borsook’s failure to notice the native

generosity and sustained cooperation typical of hackers and

geeks makes the predictable slam at libertarianism and Ayn

Rand that follows unintentionally humorous. Borsook and

Kakutani are correct in describing the “cyberculture” (not a

term hackers would use) as implicitly libertarian. Where

they go wrong is in their presumption that this means my

peers desire to kill and eat the weak. The truth is, we don’t

build our networks to abolish ordinary people — we do it to

empower them.