In response to Jeri Ellsworth’s question, “[Nerds are the heros. Why don’t people treat them like they are?] [0]”
[0]: http://www.facebook.com/jeri.ellsworth?v=feed&story_fbid=343478556355 "Facebook status, posted 2010-03-03 at 21:39" Part of it is animal herd dynamics. Humans are social animals, and social animals generally function according to a dominance hierarchy that derives from physical strength, friendships and alliances, and looking normal and healthy, not solving equations and figuring out how to make more useful artifacts. Part of it is cultural. We have four hundred generations of stories in which killers are the heroes, so the notion of confident, aggressive, violent, yet honorable heroes has much more emotional resonance than the notion of shy, absentminded, highly-educated heroes who like to set things on fire, tell uncomfortable truths, and violate social customs. The cultural mythos may be a reflection of the biological proclivities, but at the very least, it makes them much more powerful by giving them social sanction — unlike, say, our biological proclivities to lie or eat unhealthy amounts of sugar. Part of it is that nerds are heroes not because we preserve the status quo but because we destroy it. This quote from Machiavelli is applicable: > And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult > to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its > success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of > things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have > done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those > who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear > of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from > the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things > until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that > whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they > do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such > wise that the prince is endangered along with them. That’s all nerds do! Most people are more comfortable with things staying the way they are than with some radical change that they can’t control or understand. They may not wish to go back to times before grid power, automobiles, or flintknapping (although some do!) but that doesn’t mean they want *further* radical changes in our way of life. Part of it is that many of us aren’t really shining examples of the uplifting power of the Hacker Mentality. If a random person off the street goes to hang out with some Mormons, they will generally be impressed by their meticulous grooming, their strong work ethic, their lack of drug addictions, their neatly cleaned houses, and the fact that they’re mostly well-educated and, if not all rich, at least not poor. If they go hang out with some hackers, as often as not, they will instead be impressed by their large girth, their unconcern for their personal health problems, the absence of pictures on their walls or really any concession to aesthetics in their dwelling, the kludgy repair job they did on their rust-heap car, the piles of disorganized equipment in their garage and paper on their desk, and their social isolation. Plus the stuff I mentioned earlier. In theory, daily life — our physical health, the ambiance of our dwelling spaces, the image we project to other people, although maybe not social relations in general — should be nearly as hackable as a poorly-specified piece of hardware, or quantum physics. (Although it might take a higher ratio of self-discipline to smarts than the hardware or physics.) In practice, there’s a strong tendency for hackers to feel that these things are unimportant, or a waste of time. Jeri Ellsworth and David Weekly are kind of exceptions to this rule, I think. There’s one more thing. Due largely to the work of hackers of generations past, **we’ve been living in a post-scarcity world for about 40 years** — in the sense that the economic production of material necessities like food and shelter has been greater than the world population’s needs, and growing faster. (Even in health care, scarcity rarely rears its head; Argentina and Cuba have health-care outcomes on par with the US, despite lacking material resources.) And yet there is still hunger, homelessness, widespread death from easily-treatable diseases, and even direct slaughter of groups of people by other groups of people. So although the great promise of the hackers of Edison’s and Ford’s and Buckminster Fuller’s generations has been largely realized, the world has become somewhat disillusioned with it, because it has become increasingly clear that Progress and Development can continue while leaving behind the masses. Nerds can sure figure stuff out, but whether that benefits humanity as a whole generally isn’t in the hands of the nerds, because business and political leaders generally control what problems the nerds try to solve and whether their solutions get applied. Is it any wonder that the people look to the leaders instead of the nerds for their heroes? Are they really wrong to do so? For the internet, should we honor Paul Baran or Al Gore? -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-tol
