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Last active August 29, 2015 13:56 — forked from mikeal/gist:7835772
A fork of mikeal's essay, with additions concerning the place of meritocracy (and exclusion) in open source software projects.

TLDR;

Libertarianism when applied to the social and political structure of technology and open source (Meritocracy) perpetuates inequality by failing to acknowledge the role of power and current state of inequality.

Long Version

American libertarianism is uniquely American, unfortunately Silicon Valley happens to be in America. It is a political and social philosophy that believes individual ownership and power should supplant collective ownership of any kind. Most immediately the ownership and interventionist powers of government should be dismantled and the free market should be left with the responsibility of creating equality and individuals expected to protect their own interests.

Filtered through the lens of technology this becomes a more unified theory of Meritocracy. For our purposes here, it is no coincidence that meritocracy ends with -ocracy, like many other hierarchy-oriented words such as autocracy, aristocracy, kleptocracy, mobocracy and plutocracy.