[PEN-L:1762] Re: Re[2]: THE QUESTION OF WEALTH

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect:

(These are some items that might give Laura Belle another perspective on
the "wealth creation" question. I'm sure people on this list know them by
heart now, but what the hell....)
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Hackers and the Profit Motive

Here are some further ruminations on the topic of socialism and
computers.

Some of the key pioneers in the personal computing revolution were not
driven by entrepeneurial greed. For example, the Community Memory
project in Berkeley, California was launched in 1973 by Lee
Felsenstein. The project allowed remote public access to a time-shared
XDS mainframe in order to provide "a communication system which
allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually
expressed interests, without having to cede judgement to third parties."
The Community Memory project served as a kind of bulletin board
where people could post notes, information, etc., sort of like an
embryonic version of the Interenet.

Felsenstein, born in 1945, was the son of a CP district organizer and
got involved in civil rights struggles in the 1950's. Eventually, he
hooked up with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and became a
committed radical. Lee's other passion was electronics and he entered
the UC as an electrical engineering major.

Felsenstein then hooked up with another left-of-center computer hacker
by the name of Bob Halbrecht and the two went on to form a tabloid
called PCC "People's Computer Company". Among the people drawn to
the journal was Ted Nelson, a programmer who had bounced from one
corporate job to another throughout the 60's but who was always
repelled by "the incredible bleakness of the place in these corridors."

Nelson was the author of "Computer Lib" and announced in its pages
that "I want to see computers useful to individuals, and the sooner the
better, without necessary complication or human servility being
required." Community Memory flourished for a year and a half until the
XDS started breaking down too often The group disbanded in 1975.

The PCC continued, however, and played a key role in publicizing the
earliest personal computers. One of the machines that Felsenstein and
Halbrecht got their hands on was an Altair 8800, the first genuine
personal computer for sale to the public.

So enamored of the idea of personal computing were Felsentsein and
Halbrecht that they then launched something called the Homebrew
Computer Club. The club drew together the initial corps of engineers
and programmers who would launch the personal computer revolution.
Among the participants were a couple of adolescents named Steven Jobs
and Steve Wozniak who went on to form the Apple Corporation.

The hacker ethic which prevailed at the Homebrew Computer Club was
decidely anticapitalist, but not consciously pro-socialist. Software was
freely exchanged at the club and the idea of proprietary software was
anathema to the club members. There were 2 hackers who didn't share
these altruistic beliefs, namely Paul Allen and Bill Gates. When Allen
and Gates discovered that their version of Basic which was written for
the Altair was being distributed freely at the club, they rose hell. The 19
year old Gates stated in a letter to the club that "Who can afford to do
professional work for nothing?"

Another interesting example of the anticapitalist hacker ethic is
personified in one Richard Stallman. Stallman worked at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 1970's and, no doubt influenced
by the spirit of the age, came to see the lab as the embodiment of a
philosophy which "does not mean advocating a dog-eat-dog jungle.
American society is already a dog-eat-dog jungle, and its rules maintain
it that way. We hackers wish to replace those rules with a concern for
constructive cooperation."

Stallman developed EMACS, the most widely used Unix text editor,
and went on to form the GNU foundation which distributes EMACS
and other free software. When you press ctrl-x, ctrl-w upon entering
EMACS, you can read a statement of the GNU foundation which
includes the following words "If you distribute copies of a program,
whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or get the source
code." Can one imagine Microsoft Inc. issuing a statement such as this?

I have go on at length without discussing the Internet. Suffice it to say
that the hacker ethic infuses the entire project know as the Internet.
What threatens it the most is the mindset best exemplified by Bill Gates
who would make every last thing proprietary.

In general, we should resist the tempation to put an equal sign between
the so-called free-market and technological advances. There is much
evidence that the kind of  breakthrough that personal computing
represents is to a large degree attributable to the selfless, generous and
anticorporate motives of the early hackers.

Gar Alpervowitz on Technological Inheritance

"Many times a day," wrote Albert Einstein, "I realize how much my
outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow-men, both
living and dead." The genius of an earlier era saw clearly how
contemporary knowledge and technological advance depend to an
extraordinary degree on the efforts of many contributors, not to mention
a continuing cultural investment in science and numerous other areas of
human endeavor. In fact, very little of what we as a society produce
today can be said to derive from the work, risk, and imagination of
citizens now living. Achievements from earlier eras, including
fundamental ideas such as literacy, movable type, simple arithmetic,
and algebra, have become so integrated into our daily lives that we take
them for granted. What we accomplish today stands atop a Gibraltar of
technological inheritance. Seemingly contemporary transformations
inevitably build on knowledge accumulated over generations.

For example, Richard DuBoff, an economic historian at Bryn Mawr
College, observes that "synthesizing organic chemicals...could not have
been done without an understanding of chemical transformations and
the arrangement of atoms in a molecule. After 1880, this led to the
production of coal tar and its derivatives for pharmaceuticals, dyestuffs,
explosives, solvents, fuels, and fertilizers, and later petrochemicals...By
the early 1900's the new chemicals were already becoming an essential
input for metallurgy, petroleum, and paper."

Present-day entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, one of the world's richest
individuals with a personal fortune estimated at $8 billion and hailed as
a technological genius for inventing software for the personal computer,
should therefore be seen as beneficiaries of this long and fruitful history
as well as of significant public investment.

The personal computer itself--without which Gates's software would not
be possible--owes its development to sustained federal spending during
World War II and the Cold War. "Most of [the] 'great ideas in computer
design' were first explored with considerable government support,"
according to historian Kenneth Flamm in a Brookings Institution study.
Now a specialist in technology policy in the Department of Defense,
Flamm estimates that 18 of the 25 most significant advances in
computer technology between 1950 and 1962 were funded by the
federal government, and that in most of these cases the government was
the first buyer of new technology. For example, Remington Rand Corp.
delivered UNIVAC, the original full-fledged U.S. computer, under
contract to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951.

The government's shouldering of huge development costs and risks
paved the way for the growth of Digital Equipment Corp., which
created its powerful PDP line of 1960s computers. In turn, Gate's
colleague [and now fellow billionaire] Paul Allen created a simulated
PDP-10 chip that allowed Gates to apply the programming abilities of a
mainframe to a small, homemade computer. Gates used this power to
make his most important technical contribution: rewriting the BASIC
language, itself funded by the National Science Foundation, to run
Altair, the first consumer-scaled computer. And indeed, Micro
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Altair's developer, could never
have placed a microcomputer of any variety on the market without the
long preceding period of technological incubation.

Thousands of links in a chain of development--our shared inheritance--
were in fact required before Bill Gates could add his contribution. But if
this is so, why do we not reflect more full on why Gates, or any other
wealthy entrepreneur, should personally benefit to such a degree? If we
admit that what any one person, group, generation, or even nation
contributes in one moment of time is minuscule compared with all that
the past bequeaths like a gift from a rich uncle, we are forced to
question the basic principles by which we distribute our technological
inheritance.

(Opening paragraphs from Gar Alperovitz's article "Distributing Our
Technological Inheritance" in Oct. 94, Technology Review)

On Wed, 6 Dec 1995, James Devine wrote:

> Laura Bell sent this to me, personally, in addition to sending it to
> pen-l, because she lives nearby here in the city of emphysema. I'm really
> busy. But what the heck, I'd rather reply to it than grade term papers...
> >>My personal view is that one of the reasons the world loves to hate
> Bill Gates is that he has understanding of how to create wealth.  He owns
> the 'thing'.  If you are operating a business in a manner where you have
> to continually chase a new project or client  in order to keep cash flow
> going, you are creating your business grave.<<
>
> I thought the main critique of Gates was that he was doing
> everything possible to monopolize the software market (if not
> hardware: Microsoft produces mice and keyboards). E.g., his
> effort to buy out Intuit/Quicken, his competition. I don't
> think the fact that Windows 95 isn't compatible with Netscape
> is an accident, either.
>
> In a recent PC Magazine, John Dvorak notes that MS acts as if
> it's strongly opposed to ASCII. I'd bet that this is because MS
> wants to set all of the conventions in the computer world.
>
> I need a cup of Java! :-)
>
> in pen-l solidarity,
>
> Jim Devine   jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ.
> 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA
> 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
> "It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
>
>
>
>