No, I mean "hackers". Obviously it's not a monolithic set of attitudes & beliefs. There are obviously pockets of leftie hackers and geeks. But I still stand by my claim that the dominant ideology is right libertarian. I'm thinking of the Slashdot crowd, Eric Raymond and his hangers-on, and the like. Obvious counterpoints include Richard Stallman, the IMC hacker crowd, many anarchist groups who actively use Web tech, and so on.
I have been working in computing (Tandem/Apple/Sun) for 20 years, and I would say that though there are a lot of "libertarians," they seem to me to be pretty even split between the right and the left. There are also a fair amount of socialists. Then I would say that the current and continuing outsourcing of techhies to India and China is likely to polarize this group even further.
(I thought HTTP was big because it could get you through fire walls, but ravi, please correct me if I'm wrong. Oh, and that "IP over XML" was hillarious.)
Joanna
