Previous: On Tolerance
You may have have heard that in the Ostblock if you were opposed to the regime your kids won't be admitted to the college.
But how exactly was that accomplished?
Punishing kids for ideological sins of their parents was too nasty, even in the real socialism, to be an official policy. In fact, real socialism tried to present itself as a better, more just, alternative to capitalism. So how could they practice collective punishment, which is, legally, a war crime?
Well, at least in Czechoslovakia in 1980's kids applying to a college were classified either as "from a worker family" or "not from a worker family".
I am not sure how this thing originated. It could be a worthwhile topic for a historian. However, I imagine it must have been some kind of affirmative-action-style policy introduced early on, maybe during the Stalinist era, or maybe, if it originates in the USSR, even earlier. Kids from worker class have been truly disadvantaged in many obvious ways, so giving them preferential access to the college education would only be fair.
Anyway, there was a problem with the approach. If a member of politburo had a kid, guess what? Kid's dad was an administrator and thus the kid wasn't from a worker family. And the same thing applied to every single person in position of power. Apparatchiks would have been dumb if they hadn't found a loophole.
Enter "working intelligentsia". You see, you dad may be a big boss in the party and your mom a ballerina, but your parents were "working intelligentsia" and so it was all right to classify you as coming from a worker family.
This hack renders the entire mechanism ineffective. If everybody comes from a worker family nobody has to be treated preferentially.
If you were naive, you would say that that's the end of the story. But not so fast!
No instrument of power is ever left unused.
In this case, it became a powerful weapon against dissent. If your dad was a renegade professor who got demoted (as the stereotype goes) to a boilerman, he was not a worker. He was a parasite of the people, forced to do manual work to teach him better ways. And no, his kids would not be classified as being from a worker family.
And given that "not coming from a worker family" was now a code word for having a dissident in the family, admitting such a kid to college was an unwise thing to do.
My intention with this article was not to teach a moral lesson. Rather, I've realized that people from the west and even young people from the former Ostblock are often blind to these kinds of mechanics. Where a Eastern European goes "we fucking used to have this shit during communism" a person from the west tries to apply moral philosophy to find out whether the policy is fair or not. But it's not about morals. It's about social mechanics. If an instrument of power is left unguarded, not protected by checks and balances, it will be appropriated, repurposed and abused by the most reckless and selfish members of the society to further their own interests.
Martin Sústrik, August 20th, 2017
Previous: On Tolerance
I know that you had a bad past with pieter hintjens.
The book he wrote before he died, social architecture, explains the economics of open source projects in depth. It spends a lot of pages to explain how C4 works well.
His strategy is to keep projects small by splitting big projects into smaller ones.
You used the same strategy in nanomsg.
Reputation economy works in small projects.
That's why small modular open source softwares are the way forward.
However, the difference C4 makes is that it doesn't treat outsiders poorly.
There's no clear border between core contributors and outsiders.
Whether or not ZeroMQ is technologically brilliant, I have to admit that pieter hintjen's community strategy reduces friction significantly in open source communities.(except when the owner tries to legislate the process in an already established project)
I conjecture that C4 is compatible with technological brilliance in the form of remake. nanomsg is a brilliant remake of ZeroMQ although it is in need of more manpower.
Actually, I made a comment about C4 as it seems to be an alternative to the "feudalization" model, but I've finally left it out not to distort the message. (I delete ~50% of what I write.)
It still would be interesting the investigate the outcomes for the 0mq experiment from both sociological and code quality perspectives.
You remind me that code quality overlaps with, but is not the same as technical brilliance.
A machine learning scientist may be technically brilliant but poor at coding due to lack of enough programming experiences.
Software engineering or code quality is not machine learning nor network protocols like zeromq or nanomsg.
Pieter hintjens and C4 didn't directly focus on code quality. In his talks, C4 could improve code quality indirectly by making a community work better and stick to certain rules of API evolution.
C4 is like a set of documented habits for an organization. Even a project without a process has implicit habits that maintainers follow. The feudal model also has implicit habits.
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