The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
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The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
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Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#2i got through about 15 pages without finding a thesis or a point being made.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#3Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now.
If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was actually a point besides "Tim O'Reilly is evil incarnate", which he established in the first two paragraphs. And then re-established in the third. And the fourth...
Don't get me wrong, I whine bitterly about the over-glorified promise of the Silicon Valley techno-drome, where raw technology is supposed to solve all of humanity's woes. I fail to see how this article addresses this, at all.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#4i got through about 15 pages without finding a thesis or a point being made.
I guess the whole point is that O'Reilly is rebranding propaganda as "meme-engineering" even though they are technically the same.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#5Is this an April Fools joke? After scrolling for pages I still hadn't read anything substantive, and I was only 1/6th of the way down.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#6Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is happening: while global mean surface temperature is rising, climate change may cause cooling in other areas.
If people were to accept the phrase "climate change", perhaps it would help end comments like "scientists say the earth is getting hotter... why have our winters been extra cold?"
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#7i got through about 15 pages without finding a thesis or a point being made.
I wasn't able to wade through it all either, but I thought it was clear the point was that O'Reilly bends thought and attitudes in Silicon Valley through PR and marketing of memes and buzzwords.
To the OP, this has had negative consequences, and he goes through them point by point.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#8i got through about 15 pages without finding a thesis or a point being made.
I guess the whole point is that O'Reilly is rebranding propaganda as "meme-engineering" even though they are technically the same.
I read the article and think the point is deeper than that. I would summarize it like this:
Tim O'Reilly's business has changed from selling things (books, conferences) to selling ideologies ("Web 2.0", "government as a framework"). This is a relationship that goes both ways: the books and conferences provide crucial support for the ideologies he sells (the existence of a "Web 2.0" conference can be cited as proof that "Web 2.0" is a real thing), and the ideologies create demand for books and conferences as they spread.
The primary problem the author (Evgeny Morozov) has with this isn't that O'Reilly profits from it, but rather that the ideologies O'Reilly sells tend to provide corporate-friendly alternatives that are used to marginalize rising ideologies that could threaten existing power structures. Examples discussed:
- "Open source" as an ideology focused on the rights of the software developer, as opposed to the ideology it was explicitly designed to compete with, Richard Stallman's "free software" movement, which focused instead on the rights of the software user
- "Web 2.0" companies wanted to package up information about their users and sell it to the highest bidder; the ideology supported this by positioning it as a natural evolution of the Web rather than a major power shift
- "Government as a service" would involve taking major systems currently run by government and privatizing them, but covers this with a layer of techno-dust to avoid having to talk about the negative implications of privatization
Hence the comparison of O'Reilly to famed Republican spin architect Frank Luntz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz). Luntz has made a career selling policies to people they will hurt by packaging them up with attractive-sounding words. Morozov argues that O'Reilly is in the same business.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#9Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now. If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was ac…
LOL. After skimming a few pages, I was hoping to just skip it and find the discussion about what this article is actually accusing O'Reilly of. I can see why the author may feel threatened by anyone who actually has communication skills.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#10I was kinda interested when I started reading this thing, but the article assumes you're already a Tim O'Reilly scholar -- the article is devoid of examples of his behavior. Whenever an article makes claims about a figure, I like to have an exhibit A, B, and C for every point argued.