Tangentially related lecture: The hard parts of open source.

Collaborative engineering has more problems in collaboration than engineering. Those 'soft' skillsets do not correlate well with technical expertise, especially when filtered through asynchronous (and often pseudonymous) text-based communication. Additionally, some foundational assumptions about the nature of improving technology and society turn out to not work so good.

The patterns of behavior that people fall into because of software are rarely positive for themselves or others. Use and development both invite what Skinner would call superstitions: spurious connections between actions and outcomes. […]This extends to human interactions about software. People can be driven to sociopathy, apathy, obsessive placation, or anything in between, thanks to the sparse, arbitrary, and frankly batshit crazy stimuli they're subjected to.

We're not dutifully working around harmful narcissists out of conscious tolerance or demographic over-representation. They just blend in with all the other assholes we've become.

Reddit user "mindbleach" on Why I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz.

Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or Amazon.

[…] [Greta Krippner’s] thesis is that the liberal democratic system was dismantled because it was too explicit about who was making choices. People would get mad at politicians when they didn't have, say, mortgage credit, or when the price of milk went up too high. The answer came to be neoliberalism, or creating a veil of financial markets to make all those decisions seem apolitical. […]

Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.

Matt Stoller trying to define the word everyone tends to project their hate onto.

Noam Chomsky about the powerful’s infatuation with Niebuhr:

The inescapable “taint of sin on all historical achievements,” the necessity to make “conscious choices of evil for the sake of good”—these are soothing doctrines for those preparing to “face the responsibilities of power,” or in plain English, to set forth on a life of crime, to “play hardball” in their efforts to “maintain this position of disparity” between our overwhelming wealth and the poverty of others, in George Kennan’s trenchant phrase as he urged in a secret document of 1948 that we put aside “idealistic slogans” and prepare “to deal in straight power concepts.” Herein lies the secret of Niebuhr’s enormous influence and success.

From Jeet Heer’s article on Niebuhr ideology