Technocrat.net has shut down [LWN.net]

Bruce Perens's news and comment site Technocrat.net has shut down for the second time (it was off the air 2001-2004). A message was left at the site explaining the move: "When it became evident that Technocrat was un-viable as a business, I found that I did not wish to keep supporting the site as a hobby. Certain elements of the community that developed here, unfortunately, creep me out. At the end I faced the decision of asking for donations to keep the site running, or letting it die, and it became clear to me that I'd feel better if it would just die." (thanks to Rick Moen).

Technocrat.net has shut down

Posted Dec 27, 2008 1:07 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

Well, darn. I do understand and respect Bruce's decision, though, especially given the sorry state of the current economy.

Bruce: Thanks for your online site, and I do hope you'll continue to participate and contribute to the discussions here at LWN!

Technocrat.net has shut down

Posted Dec 27, 2008 2:12 UTC (Sat) by jcorgan (subscriber, #47213) [Link] (2 responses)

@sbergman27: While technocrat.net was Bruce's blog, anyone could post a story, and he had a group of editors (I was one of them) that could approve, edit, or reject them. I had actually dropped out about a year ago as I found less and less in common with the community that had developed around the site, so I can't comment on recent events. My only real disappointment was that the site content submissions were very rarely about the stated purpose of the site (as documented in the now unreachable 'How to Write For Us' document. Bruce sold advertisements and shortly before I left, began to pay for certain types of content submissions.

"How to write for us" is archived

Posted Dec 29, 2008 8:17 UTC (Mon) by JesseW (subscriber, #41816) [Link] (1 responses)

via the Wayback Machine. Enjoy!

"How to write for us" is archived

Posted Dec 29, 2008 9:20 UTC (Mon) by wingo (guest, #26929) [Link]

From that page:

Who Are We?

We are literally the smartest individuals in technology.

Yikes.

I do not mourn the passing of this particular cultural forum.

Technocrat.net has shut down

Posted Dec 28, 2008 20:20 UTC (Sun) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (4 responses)

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.

Nifty expression

Posted Dec 28, 2008 23:48 UTC (Sun) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (2 responses)

> the sort who stick to the bottom of the nut bowl.

That's a really nifty expression!

You should consider writing LWN articles. ;-)

Nifty expression - Invitation to argue

Posted Dec 31, 2008 3:01 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

It may be nifty but it just begs people who disagree with being so categorized to argue about it.

Me, for example. But I am firmly resisting. No off topic politics from me. Nope. Not gonna do it.

Nifty expression - Invitation to argue

Posted Jan 3, 2009 1:55 UTC (Sat) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

I've no idea what he's talking about, the sentence that expression came
from is grammatically incomplete anyway, nor do I've any idea which
subculture of which culture he's talking about.

But it's still a nifty expression, which is my only opinion about this whole matter. ;-)

Technocrat.net has shut down

Posted Jan 6, 2009 16:43 UTC (Tue) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

"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."

That's freakin' beautiful, man. I hope it ends up in .signature files across the globe.

Technocrat.net has shut down

Posted Dec 29, 2008 18:02 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

"""
Bruce Perens's news and comment site Technocrat.net has shut down for the second time (it was off the air 2001-2004).
"""

Just reread that and it called to mind a humorous comment from an end of year retrospective of bygone days in which a commenter observed that in that particular year, Bruce was leaving, in a huff, organizations which he had created faster than he could create them. :-)

Tip o' the hat

Posted Dec 29, 2008 21:18 UTC (Mon) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

Frankly, it's not surprising that a blog shut down because it was "un-viable" as a business. While some organizations are making a living at distributing information, a whole lot more aren't, and the economic downturn is felling many much bigger organizations. I think we should encourage people to try starting up new stuff, and then permit them a graceful exit if it doesn't pan out. That way, we're more likely to have new stuff that we want.

I wish Bruce well in whatever he's up to next.