I think Steven Johnson said it best about Mr. Morozov: “He’s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business.”
The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
51–60 of 84 posts
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent. Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth. Always worth reading. This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" a…
I sort of understand the value people see in Morozov as a counterweight to tech's occasional fatuousness, but this wasn't a good article. As someone who is morally (if not intellectually) coming from a similar place as him, I found myself getting progressively more and more unhappy with the article the farther I got; it became a caricature of a point that deserves to be made more carefully.
I thought it was ok, and I don't actually usually like Morozov much. But I think it was confusing in being nominally about O'Reilly. The bulk of the article is only tangentially about O'Reilly, and is more along the lines of a reprise of Richard Stallman's essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", but for a non-tech audience who probably wouldn't read Stallman (he does at least cite/credit that Stallman piece, though he paraphrases it in more words than the actual original piece). O'Reilly seems to get grafted on because he organized some conferences and promoted the term among businesspeople, and is taken to be emblematic of a certain kind of Valley culture.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#53The comments on this article is that it is: "without...a thesis or a point", "hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking" This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air. I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the…
I'm not sure that the throwaway metaphor in the seventh paragraph is in any way related to a reader's dismissal of each argument in the article. Each piece of evidence presented in the article is poorly analyzed, even when it could provide a solid foundation for an argument.
As far as verbosity goes, a longer collection of ad-hominem attacks does not equal a stronger or more persuasive argument.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#54Stylish and smooth-talking are the last words I'd use to describe Tim. Whereas they do fairly accurately describe the tone of this article.
I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent. Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth. Always worth reading. This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" a…
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
A writer who can't seem to get to the point because he needs more paragraphs to showcase additional literary allusions is not going to hold me hostage indefinitely. If the first two thousand words of an essay are not a sufficiently representative sample on which to base conclusions about the essay, then the writer is not a good writer. He may of course reveal the cure for cancer in the final paragraph, but given the opportunity cost of missing out on more important things I could be reading, I'm willing to take the risk.
I discovered long ago that "intellectual" did not mean "intelligent"; it was about style of presentation, not importance of ideas. You be the judge of whether that is a symptom of intellectual decline.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#55The comments on this article is that it is: "without...a thesis or a point", "hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking" This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air. I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the…
Thanks for this counterpoint to the glib dismissals around here. The message of the article is hard to hear if you already have ideological commitments to the transformative potential of entrepreneurial activity and to the power of Web 2.0.
It's a long, difficult article. So, pick something you didn't like, and dismiss it all wholesale? Too easy.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh please, Morozov's appeal lies almost exclusively in his ability to teardown strawmen of his own creation ("oh look, some stupid startup thinks it can save the whales, isn't Silicon Valley so stupid?") or inciting fear over technological advances by citing obscure studies and anecdotes. He's like an Ann Coulter sans brevity.
This is a disappointing criticism of someone who presents some very interesting ideas. Morozov is definitely guilty of tearing down some absurd strawmen, but that doesn't invalidate his criticisms of, say, SV's "solutionist" culture.
His style might not invalidate the criticisms, but it can certainly obscure and blunt them.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#57The author invents new words regularly in this article. Stephen King's "On Writing" talks about this, and I'm paraphrasing: "Writers who invent words are bad writers."
Which is hilarious if you've read much King (he was my favorite author for a very long time), unless he actually claims to be a bad writer himself, in which case writing a book called On Writing is a questionable endeavor.
Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#58Good 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…
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Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness to the author, this piece was written for a print publication, The Baffler, and included in that magazine's most recent print issue. Longer-form articles fit better in print than they do online.
OK, thanks to this and a few other intriguing defenses I went back and finished. It does eventually make a real point, although the ratio of actual quotations and other data points to the vaguely FUD-ish storytelling that he starts off with is pretty poor, especially considering the amount of research he claims to have done. I'm left with the vague feeling that I could probably use the same approach to tear down Gand…
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Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
#60Good 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…
I tried to read it, but my brain kept powering itself off as a self-defense mechanism. Then I tried to skim it, and it started getting worse, e.g.: "Another apt example of O’Reilly’s meme-engineering is his attempt to establish a strong intellectual link between the development of Unix [...] and the development of open source and the Internet." At this point I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to clean…
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