roundtable: Nerds vs Newbies: Cultures in Collision

roundtable: Nerds vs Newbies: Cultures in Collision

Nerds vs Newbies: Cultures in Collision

Brad Cox (bcox@gmu.edu)
Fri, 6 Jan 1995 12:30:28 -0500 

Message-Id: <v02110305ab332b6bed2c@[192.0.1.2]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 12:30:28 -0500
To: roundtable@cni.org
From: bcox@gmu.edu (Brad Cox)
Subject: Nerds vs Newbies: Cultures in Collision


>[Moderator's note: We would most certainly entertain the introduction
>of another topic, anything within interpersonal computing and
>technology...do you have any suggestions? /mauri]

Yes, I do. How about culture clash? As between indigenous people world 
wide versus the settlers who've displaced them whereever they meet.

I'm an indigeneous person of the Nerd tribe. I'm noticed a foreign 
culture coming over the horizon, typified by the students I teach in 
my "Taming the Electronic Frontier" course, or in an offensive sense, 
by radical imperialists like Canter and Siegel (internet spam lawyers). 
Let's call this culture the Newbies

As I understand history, indigenous society is invariably (are there 
*any* exceptions?)  organized around the communitarian ideal that has 
governed nerd culture since its inception. This is a short range social 
binding force because it works most effectively (Marx's disciples 
notwithstanding; note Russia's collapse) over face to face distances, 
inside family, company and tribe.

The settlers (european-style society) is generally organized via much 
longer-range binding forces arising from commercial enterprise. Unlike 
the indigeneous "everybody fabricates what they need from scratch" 
(nerd culture), this organizes people into deep specialization of labor 
hierarchies. Part of the society stays home, specializes in building all 
kinds of stuff (guns, trade goods) that winds up displacing generalist-
style indigenous culture.

The nerd vs newbie conflict is starting up everywhere I look on the
internet. The question is, will it lead to similar outcomes? Or better, 
can the power of european-style culture ever get a toe-hold in an 
electronic frontier in which property rights are undercut by the fact 
that property can be replicated and transported at literally the speed 
of light?

Current wisdom notwithstanding, this is not inevitable but is ammenable 
to technical solutions (see my article on Superdistribution in the Sept 
issue of Wired magazine).

I'm less interested here in the ethics/morality issues of indigeneous
encounters. My question is about the relative power of two opposing
cultural binding forces; the communitarian ideal on the one hand vs
commercial exchange transactions on the other.

(PS I'm finishing a book on this very topic right now for Addison Wesley.

--
Brad Cox; bcox@gmu.edu and bcox@clark.net
GMU Program on Social and Organizational Learning
(703) 968 8229 voice (703) 934 1578 fax
Web: email listproc@www0.cern.ch with body of
http://www.site.gmu.edu/~bcox/middleofnowhere.html

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