Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

thebaffler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 84 posts

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#61

Post by cube13 »

teawithcarl wrote: post #23
pg wrote: post #20

Stylish 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…

>Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).

Or he is just in love with the allusions. A good essay should not require independent research to figure out an allusion-it should be evident in the essay itself.

The article just doesn't have any sort of flow. It feels like Morozov had a pile of things he wanted to talk about, references he wanted to include, and points he wanted to attempt to make, but wasn't able to(or didn't bother to) make a coherent narrative out of the entire thing. The end result is that it feels disjointed and is very hard to read.

The 13th paragraph starts talking about O'Reilly's origin. But why is it there? The closest reference to his origin is in the 5th paragraph. The next 8 paragraphs are spent jumping all over the last 15 or so years.

Another example is the reference to Neil Postman. The two paragraphs dedicated to him is absolutely worthless, as Postman is used to refer to Alfred Korzybski, who Morozov then related to O'Reilley. There isn't any reason for Postman to be in there other than to have the reference. There is no link to O'Reilly, aside from a throwaway sentence referring to Postman's work 31 paragraphs(and 2 sections) after the last Postman reference.

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#62

Post by darushimo »

dade_ wrote: post #11

It is for articles like these, that TL,DR was created. EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes" is clever and good.

Ugh...episteme's a word that dates back to Plato, although the author seems to use it like Foucault does in 'The Order of Things.'

That is--it's exceptionally NOT "coming up" with the word, assuming you mean to imply he's inventing the word for this article.

I like your first sentence though ;)

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#63

Post by foolrush »

jholman wrote: post #25

Whew, I read 4500 words, then paused to see how many more I had to go, and quit at that point. (As you will see from this comment, I'm pretty patient with length, but Morozov defeated me.) Here's my review of the first 4500 words: 1) There's a lot of really fucking useless ad hominem. Offensively useless, offensively voluminous. Do you actually have something substantial to say about the man, or is it just linkbait?…

"And I think the ethics-free engineering-and-business-focused open-source movement is important."

There is potentially a common thread in Morozov's discussions that would rally against this sort of statement. Arguably the article is just such an assault.

The notion that technology can be unbound from ethics is a very libertarian one.

At risk of incorrectly paraphrasing Morozov, I would think he is taking issue with a hijacking of language with neutered terminology. Worse, the neutered and euphemistic phrasing, while more palatable, is forwarding another ideology.

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#64

Post by MaysonL »

petercooper wrote: post #47

Aside from the actual content, I'm intrigued how working on this sort of content can pay. The author claims to have spent three months (not necessarily full-time, I assume) reading everything O'Reilly has personally written in public and this gigantic article must have taken a good week or two to write and edit alone. That's several thousand dollars of effort there and I can't imagine it ever getting paid back by thi…

See his website: http://www.evgenymorozov.com

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#65

Post by zeteo »

bcantrill wrote: post #39
potatolicious wrote: post #3

Good 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…

>I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself... Ironic that it should deface Unix

Agree with him or not, all he's saying is that the code sharing involved in creating Unix was no more than regular academic sharing of ideas, and that retroactively claiming it for "open source" is spin. The article takes no issue with Unix, maybe you should read in more detail before becoming enraged?

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#66

Post by andolanra »

cube13 wrote: post #61
teawithcarl wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

>Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education). Or he is just in love with the allusions. A good essay should not require independent research to figure out an allusion-it should be evident in the essay itself. The article just doesn't have any sort of flow. It fee…

The Neil Postman reference is to establish the distinction between stupid talk (i.e. statements which are demonstrably false) and crazy talk (i.e. statements which rely on such a different semantic frame that they are meaningless except in that frame.) This distinction comes up throughout the entire essay, most prominently in the title.

No essay can really be understood in a vaccuum. There's always some manner of background information which has to be absorbed in order to understand its gist, even if that background information is just a rudimentary grasp of the language used to write it. The purpose of Morozov's allusions is not to just allude, but rather to give explicit links to concepts he's drawing on. In the Postman case, Morozov wishes to use the distinction Postman drew up, but without spending too long reiterating it (and thus cluttering up an already cluttered essay) he describes it briefly, notes the source, and then figures that if you want to understand the distinction more thoroughly, you can look up the original.

I can't argue that it's a bit overwrought and thick—at the very least, I concur it needed some manner of chapter headings or other structure—but Morozov is most certainly not alluding for the sake of alluding.

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#67

Post by ttuominen »

smacktoward wrote: post #8
lubujackson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I also read it, and I think you summarize it well. I'd like to add that the author's main aim seems to be in revealing a strong technocratic tendency underlying O'Reilly's thought. The technocracy is shown for example in the naive assumption that political decisions can be calculated algorithmically with enough data and intelligent algorithms. According to the author, O'Reilly hides the political claim that small government is good behind technological newspeak about governments providing only the essential APIs for the private sector to build on. In coining new terms for old ideas he is ignoring the vast literature of political and philosophical thought discussing these matters and gaining the support of hackers for a political agenda. And, most importantly, dismissing tough ethical and political decisions by claiming that government is some kind of an optimization problem.

I'm not sure if he convinced me regarding O'Reilly specifically (haven't read O'Reilly enough), and I agree with others about the repetition and bad style ("crazy talk"?). But some actual thoughts were hidden in there.

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#68

Post by cbsmith »

zeteo wrote: post #65
bcantrill wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself... Ironic that it should deface Unix Agree with him or not, all he's saying is that the code sharing involved in creating Unix was no more than regular academic sharing of ideas, and that retroactively claiming it for "open source" is spin. The article takes no issue with Unix, maybe you should read in more detail before becoming enraged?

It's not entirely spin. The free software movement was largely a reactionary movement to various attempts of that era to take the "academic sharing of ideas" back in to the proprietary fold. It (and the later open source movement) was very much trying to defend/establish/whatever the environment under which Unix evolved.

So it is not so much retroactively claiming it as open source as it is acknowledge open source's heritage.

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#69

Post by rbanffy »

pjungwir wrote: post #5

Is 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.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out this article is the result of repeated iterations of a prose generator.

Re: The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

#70

Post by art_arbitrage »

The article raises some interesting ideas but I think it misses some really big things. I've always seen O'Reilly as more of a passionate commenter/pundit as opposed to a influential operator. This isn't to say that he has no influence, but I think he's mostly just synthysizing the Valley zeitgeist. In other words, he seems like an odd target for what I see as a cultural critique. Maybe I'm not smart enough to actually disagree with Morozov, but I find it difficult to see the problem here. Even if Morozov is right, is O'Reilly really the most guilty party and why exactly are the things he is doing bad? For such a long article, there seems to be a lot of unstated assumptions. FWIW I live in SF so maybe I can't see forest for the trees.
Post reply on HN