Social networking for the other conservatives

Libertarians have indeed seemed to practically own the Internet for a while now. But I’ve noticed that has been changing. Actually I think it’s been changing for many years now, however, it’s been on an exponential growth curve and it’s only nowadays starting to be noticeable. Like, in 1995 maybe 70% (yes, I pulled that number out of my butt, concentrate on the train of logic please) of the political discourse on the Internet was libertarians, or had libertarians as a major presence. This even caused many libertarians to believe themselves to be the wave of the future.

In this they were much like the Marxists in the 1960s, who tended to believe that Marxism was the wave of the future because “The Revolution” seemed to be everywhere. Until, y’know, it turned out that communism was an epic failure everywhere it was tried, and the only ones really interested in it in the U.S. were pampered rich brats hanging around in college, protesting the draft, and just enjoying being brats screaming at The Establishment, and who were oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of the world’s proletariat didn’t give a rat turd for Marx’s idiotic philosophy and never, ever would.

The libertarians as a whole aren’t quite so foolish, but they can be close to it. And yes, I had my own libertarian phase, just like I had a socialist phase. But here’s what I think:

Until very recently, the Internet was dominated by techie geeks. And by that I don’t mean guys who like to hang out at Best Buy to pick up the latest neat gizmo or hot game. I mean geeks who were so in love with technology they tended to prefer it over irrelevant things like food or sleep. Who actually knew what the precise meaning of a logical shift right operation was, exactly what processor type and speed was in every model of computer currently on the market, and who actually, y’know, DID THINGS like invent modems, create the Usenet and Fidonet and FTP, and who could discourse at length over how emacs was superior to vi.

They owned the Internet, and maybe 70% of its political discourse was influenced by it, because basically they created the Internet. Not as individuals, but as a community of pioneers (several waves of them, actually, but you get the drift). Yet every year, they own a smaller and smaller and smaller piece of it, because the Internet is available to more and more and more people who just aren’t of that background.

So what could we say about the original internet pioneers? Well, they almost never came up from abject poverty, because people in abject poverty rarely grew up in an environment where they’d have ready access to such technology. And, they were only sometimes the children of the super rich, because, basically, super rich kids could afford to do all kinds of other nerdy things like bum around Europe or get involved in radical politics and sit around trying to revive the ’60s “revolution.”

So what you had in the internet pioneers was middle class and upper middle class young people (mostly guys, natch) who could either get into college by working hard and being bright, or, amazingly, could skip college entirely and become quite prosperous financially just by working hard on something they loved. I remember it well; in the 1980s and 1990s it was insanely easy to find very good paying jobs in IT with no college at all and only a little professional experience, based purely on what you could demonstrate you could do. Because the skills were so hot and in demand.

So, let’s see: you came up working reasonably hard but not scrambling just to find food or dodging stray bullets from street gangs. You had an anti-authority streak which went along very well with working with technology, because technology didn’t debate with you or order you around. And you discovered that if you loved something and you worked very hard on it, you could make a fine living.

Hmm. What political philosophy would seem most logical to you?

And that, by the way, is why I say their dominance of the internet is slipping. Because while they (as a community, ironically enough) gave us the internet, they no longer own it. They never really did, they just dominated it for a while because they were the pioneers, the ones who first showed up in the Conestoga wagons with a rifle in one hand and a hammer and stake in the other so they could claim their patch of land.

Now that anyone who wants to get there can fly in on Virgin Airlines, or just phone in from their car, the pioneers aren’t as relevant anymore. Revered and appreciated, yes, but they just don’t call the shots.

To put it another way, there was a time when you could quite reasonably say that William Mulholland was the single most powerful and influential man in the state of California and a figure of great significance nationwide. If he wasn’t quite the Bill Gates of his day, it was because he only reshaped the Western United States instead of the entire world.

But that was about a hundred years ago. Now he’s, y’know, got a famous street named after him, and most people–except in certain parts of California where he’s hated to this day–couldn’t tell you who he was. (And by the way, the entire story of WHY people in certain parts of California still hate him passionately, and how he basically created what we know of as Los Angeles, is positively riveting history).

I’m probably rambling on too long. The point is, the Internet is increasingly less dominated by the pioneers with their pioneer spirit, and more and more dominated by everyday people. And in the real world, really, only maybe 1 or 2% of the population is really libertarian, with maybe 10 or 20% with libertarian leanings but really not hard core about it. Our friend Eric Rall being a fine example; he’s too young to have been one of the pioneers who were tapping out IP addresses in Morse code on their acoustic couplers soldered to a 6809 processor. But he likes tech, he works with tech, he’s good with tech, he sees how the freedom of the market has many advantages and creates many benefits, but he’s not so crazy nutso that he thinks Ron Paul is the great leader who will one day restore this once great country, or that Ayn Rand was the most brilliant intellectual thinker since Socrates.

The libertarians are still here. But now so are the socialists (hard-core, soft-core, and nut-core), the conservatives (paleo, neo, or nutso), the traditionalists, the anarchists, and the just plain common sense folks who care more about what seems to make the most sense at any given time and not any grand philosophical movement.

Anyway: there’s my long-winded way of saying you’re right, the libertarians have dominated the internet for a while. But their influence is eroding. And this is a good thing. So good luck with your new group; I’m not all that conservative except on a few points, but I admire a lot of conservative thinkers and I think they’re a vital and important voice in our society.

So there.