Important Saturday Links

Teeming Brain is providing me with a number of great links to long form essays that provide me with things to think about.  The first, is The Bacon-Wrapped Economy by Ellen Cushing:

"I don't know. I don't identify with the term 'rich.' But I think I make a shit-ton of money," a 24-year-old Google employee making low six figures told me. Another told me he considered himself upper-middle-class, but "definitely not rich." Part of that's inevitable: The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance. And when industry is so intimately tied to place, as it is in the Bay Area, you get something of an echo chamber: Many young developers move straight to San Francisco when they finish college and necessarily become friends with other young developers, aided in part by the happy hours, office parties, and other events that have become an integral part of both the tech world's social fabric and every company's list of perks. "If you don't have other friends, you're surrounded by people telling you, 'This is normal, this is normal,'" an employee of a large company told me. And at startups, especially, where the culture is one of long hours and marathon coding sessions, there's an idea that, as one person said, "you deserve it, because you work hard."
Indeed, said another, "It's very easy to think, 'I am special. I am better than other people at certain things. My skills are more valuable than others.' It's easy to fall into that trap and think you're getting paid more than other people because you're better."

Second, this piece by Evgeny Morozov, The Meme Hustler about Tim O'Reilly and the mis-use and changing definitions of the word "open" with regard to software, tech and government is great:

So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”—at least not in Stallman’s sense of the word. O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied. This was the freedom of the producer, the Randian entrepreneur, who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics. The most important freedom, as O’Reilly put it in a 2001 exchange with Stallman, is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”

I highly recommend reading the whole thing.  I can't say I whole-heartedly agree with either of these %100, but they resonate strongly with my own, admittedly limited, thinking on various aspects of modern society that really bother me.  The foremost of which is increasingly the apparent lack of curiosity about the underlying philosophies driving social change, how those affect us, and whether they are consistent with our notions on what we have traditionally believed drives a good life, philanthropy, public service and effective government.