Date: Sun Jan 20 01:53:18 2002
realname: Goetz Kluge
username: kluge@BRAINSnCHIPS.org
comments: What I read in "Cyberselfish" seems not to be limited to California. I work in the German and Japanese semicon industry. At least in Germany the technolibertarians are not too different to what you observed in your book. And - as in California - reality bites here too. It had to happen. http://www.BRAINSnCHIPS.org

Date: Mon Mar 4 06:32:24 2002
realname: Georg
username: gr@tplus.at
comments: hi to all music-lovers around the world from austria and www.race.at

Date: Wed Apr 3 11:14:54 2002
realname: Peter Gotohellenback
username: derrida316@yahoo.ca
comments: The Cato Institute apologist who mentioned Lieberman's chapter should not have made it sound as if Lieberman exaggerated the number of Cato publications on Head Start. Her point was about the media's magnification of this one, trivial, poorly researched, ideological piece of junk through muddle-headed journalists until it seemed like more than it was.

Date: Wed Apr 3 11:16:02 2002
realname: Peter Gotohellenback
username: derrida316@yahoo.ca
comments: Review 67 - The Cato Institute apologist who mentioned Lieberman's chapter should not have made it sound as if Lieberman exaggerated the number of Cato publications on Head Start. Her point was about the media's magnification of this one, trivial, poorly researched, ideological piece of junk through muddle-headed journalists until it seemed like more than it was.

Date: Sun Apr 21 20:40:39 2002
realname: Edward G. Nilges
username: spinoza1111@yahoo.COM
comments: Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech by Paulina Borsook Reviewer: Edward G. Nilges from Evanston, Illinois, USA The following summed it up for me, on p. 163 of Ms Borsook's excellent book Cyberselfish: "POP connected the dots. 'It's sick and it's immoral. A friend of mine was beeped to work...on a weekend, on his wife's birthday, and he didn't return home until 2AM. The videogame he was working on had a bug. The videogame.'" On Dec 20 2001, I was assisting a co- worker in installing a data warehousing system written in Visual Basic. Visual Basic 6 has a problem called "DLL Hell" by insiders; it's the fact that actually creating a shippable large program is unnecessarily difficult because the underlying architecture (known as COM) was designed for smaller, desktop applications. Microsoft has to its credit repaired this problem, as of this year. However, my co-worker, who had a young family, completely missed his daughters' Christmas party since he was committed along with me to meeting a promise made to our boss. When I spoke to our boss about what I considered an unfair insistence on a deadline later made quite meaningless, he was unsympathetic, and said that my coworker was "responsible for his choices". My (former) manager considers himself liberal, but in technology, the default libertarianism of the leaders tends to do our thinking about technology and work on our behalf. This is natural because it is risky to acquire, as I have, a reputation for dissidence. In thirty years of experience I have seen a number of examples of Cyberselfishness, and the frequency is increasing. In 1984, a supervisor, who knew nothing about my area of specialization, was assigned to my group and it appears my supervisor needed to give some bad reviews in order to establish his authority. I was selected as one of the fall guys. I replied by refusing to participate in the process and by writing a detailed reply to his review. As a result, my supervisor was re- assigned but I gained a reputation for being difficult. Perhaps because of this reputation, a year later, a woman engineer (a disappearing species even then) came to me. Her supervisor in a different group had given her, out of the blue, a bad performance assessment. To her surprise, it was not based on her vices; instead the poor review was based on her virtues. This engineer would delay projects in order to make sure that her own subordinates documented their work and performed due diligence in the form of a structured design. The male reviewer told her that "we are now in a new, dog-eat-dog world." He meant to say, perhaps, that technology had evolved beyond the 1970s when people in large companies could use structured design principles in order to ensure quality products. "Dog eat dog" was a tellingly adolescent phrase. This was about the same time Joni Mitchell came out with an album of that title, which was a commemoration of the increasing brutality of life under Reagan. Recently, the company at which we both worked announced the second-largest loss in corporate history; for it had rejected the very idea of engineers creating telecom products on-site and had adopted "make, don't buy." The problem was a massive load of debt acquired in a buying spree, in the expectation that sales would increase: the inevitable (and by June 2001, overdue) technical recession showed this to be foolishness. So much for dog, eat dog. Part of the problem is that we're encouraged to say like the mad woman Margaret Thatcher, "there is no such thing as society." There is no such thing as slipping a deadline for compassionate reasons, nor is there recognition of what at IBM used to be called "best effort": indeed, the trade journal Computerworld, a few years ago, had an article which rudely attacked the very idea of "best effort" as allowing mere programmers to slack off. If there is no such thing as society, then my co-worker's insistence on structured design was out of date, for structured design attempts to relate the bits of a system to something outside cyberspace including the rules of the business and social norms. The result is that the systems actually created by the cyber-libertarians are increasingly blind mechanisms. At Enron, blind mechanisms created companies out of thin air without any sense of whether these companies needed to exist. The underclass of our society is increasingly confined in an electronic Bantustan in which the code of computers (developed by anonymous third parties without publicity or public oversight) is assumed to be always correct. The young men who now write the code are entranced by an apparent escape from economic reality. The old fraud, Marx, shows how capitalistic societies have a tendency to replace "use value" by exchange value. Programming represents the chance to create at least the simulacrum of genuine use value. At least in terms of the needs of one's team-mates and sometimes (as in the case of useful word processors or pacemakers), a software program can have striking utility, and one of the genuine joys of the field is fixing or writing a module that everybody needs. However, this may lull programmers into thinking of a world free of the tension between satisfying our genuine needs, and the various forms of exchange value generation including gambling, stock jobbing, and other forms of churn 'em, and burn 'em. During the 1990s boom, these young men were betrayed by the Cyberselfish avatars of exchange value, slightly older, slightly chunkier siblings who stopped coding and started trading on futures and illusions...as seen in the film, startup.COM. As a result, we can go to the Web and find wrong answers, at high speed; for no less than John Hennessy has said, the fast pushes out the slow even when the fast is wrong (something only an adolescent male would really believe, and something to which it takes the stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, to reply, "what's worth doing well is worth doing slowly.") Ms Borsook names the process with a much-needed Bad Attitude.

Date: Sat Apr 27 15:49:23 2002
realname: Ed Nilges
username: spinoza1111@yahoo.COM
comments:

Paulina, my apologies; the preceding post was from the land of newline characters and as such is One Big Paragraph for All the Workers.

I am trying out HTML paragraphs here to see if they woik.

But the preceding post looks at best like something out of Teddie Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, and, at worst, like some sort of nutbag post.

Therefore I request you delete it, and, when you do so I can repost it. Or, if you will, add the breaks if they are available to you.

Aren't computers wonderful? Sometimes I wonder if my thirty years in software aren't just a draft-dodging scheme that got outa hand.

Date: Sat Jun 1 14:01:01 2002
realname: James Nuclear
username: goldhands@aol.com
comments: Why is it so many of you are bleeting on about racial quotas. Whites have more intelligence. Nuff said

Date: Mon Jun 3 18:02:07 2002
realname: Edward G. Nilges
username: spinoza1111@yahoo.com
comments: James Nuclear's comment makes me sad: for this seems representative of the selfishness and stupidity which the Net "empowers."
James: FYI, I have taught at three universities and my African-American students have the same intelligence as my white students.
Indeed, a study of predominantly white mathematics students conducted in America have found that they tend to systematically overrate their competence.
Software development crises that occur regularly in America confirm this, for in significant cases they are based on WHITE overconfidence.
The typical scenario: a programmer with a math background from a "good" school is overconfident and thus what Donald Knuth has called the "concrete" nature of computer mathematics causes his programs to contain bugs dependent on features of the computation that are dependent on factors beneath the notice of a "pure" or "white" mathematics.
For example, many EXPERIENCED programmers cannot explain the difference between short-circuit evaluation and full evaluation of logical expressions, for in the Platonic world of math, this is a clerical detail, best left to assistants.
The reason why African Americans are underrepresented in the Cyberselfish world is preisely its Cyber selfishness.

Date: Tue Jul 9 11:12:52 2002
realname: Ward Kendall
username: hbtd@hotmail.com
comments: Your book sounds interesting. Ward Kendall author of "Hold Back This Day"

Date: Thu Sep 5 11:55:10 2002
realname: Rhonda

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