Technocrat.net has shut down

I think shutting down technocrat is a good move on Bruce's part. The few times I've been there in the past few years it seemed a good bit more like Eric Raymond's blog than that of the reasonable, insightful Bruce who posts here. Having a website overrun with John Birch society type weirdos -- unless you are one -- is not very professional.

There's a problem with the whole idea of nerd political activism: there's a vocal subset of nerds who tend to have very .. interesting politics.

Any time you put up a forum on the internet and advertise it as being for political discussion by nerds it's going to degrade into discussions about what sort of artillery John Galt should have in his mountain survivalist citadel to defend against the zombies streaming out of the cities. It's just a fact of our subculture that people who find the idea of arguing politics on the internet are going to be the sort who stick to the bottom of the nut bowl.

To the extent that nerds should be mobilized on issues that the greater public isn't aware of, or doesn't understand (copyright reform, net neutrality) the sort of directed campaign by the EFF or FSF seem to me to be a profoundly better vehicle to keep things on-task and on-target than a fairly open-topic slashcode blog site like technocrat.