Markoff and fact checking redux redux

I may have been incorrect about Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart and I will submit a post concerning this after I have a chance, tomorrow, to visit the Hong Kong library and consult its copy of the ACM proceedings on a software history conference a few years ago, in which Alan Kay identified Engelbart's 1968 demo of his GUI as seminal!

However, I remain very concerned about Markoff's errors including the "1950 Peace Corps", "French Canadian Peasants", and Wirth.

More globally, Markoff doesn't see how all the "liberation" he describes was commodification, from the use of drugs for "enlightenment" (where your *guru* is your dealer) to the computer itself.

He fails to understand the Fascist process I saw at Bell Northern research, where a culture of folk-singing, hot tubs and a jargon of authenticity in 1981 was highjacked by 1985 by the suits...and local yokels who saw a sweet deal (all those flexible hours) and proceeded to drain the company of resources, showing up for work only to steal software and hardware.

The California Jargon of Authenticity was in fact used in performance reviews to dismantle the real contributions of good engineers: their Wirth-like insistence on good style and form was dismissed as European pedantry.

The process illustrated in miniature the sidetracking of Enlightenment into de Sade courtesy of Nietzche.

The result contributed in great measure to the obscene inequality of the Bay Area today.

I am not just hissing "Fascist" to make a sibilant sound. In fact, at certain junctures in modernity, the quest for Enlightenment takes a U turn.

It did so in Vienna before WWI when there were many "spiritual seekers"of a New Age who found Ayran truths, many of whom like the dancer Mary Wigman and the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl were proto-California girls.

A fascination with the cruel precision of mechanism (coupled with an anti-intellectual refusal to critically engage it) appears in Italian futurism of the 1920s.

Markoff quotes John Doerr, the venture capitalist, on the silicon "revolution" being the greatest legal transfer of money in history. He fails to mention that in this process, somehow, 80% of Americans failed to benefit.

Markoff's bad guy is Bill Gates, whose letter on "free"software criticised the culture of theft. At least billg made millionaires, not out of Princeton and Harvard graduates who'd gone to California, but of State university people and Microsoft secretaries, because billg saw to it that "mere programmers" got PAID.