2y ago

ardent cyberlibertarianism critic David Golumbia died yesterday morning. His loathing for orange site style dweebery could kill a cow at 20 paces.

davidgerard.co.uk

David Golumbia, 1963-2023

9 comments

David worked in financial software in the 1990s before getting the hell out of tech, never to return.
David was a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University — he was that Marxist college professor you hear so much about.
all of this is a wonderful summary of David’s work and background, but having worked on finance-adjacent software in the past, I felt this correlation in my bones. there’s a direct line from seeing how the fudge is made at a large financial institution to becoming a socialist educator, and it makes a lot of sense that David followed that path.
- I did six months in the City at a place that just did financial information, and I can assure you that each and every one of our customers was casus belli for a particularly bloody socialist revolution.
  sure learnt a lot about practical setup, care and feeding of systems that had to be flawlessly redundant, so that was something?
Witness some orange site mouth frothing generated by his last medium post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33988356
- the orange site instantly proved David’s research correct on contact by doing their best to misrepresent his views, and when that transparently failed (seriously, see how obvious it is that none of them engaged with the work), they decided to flag the post to death instead
  hacker news posters remind me a lot of vantablack paint because they use a lot of technology to absolutely fail to reflect (and they’re also owned by assholes)
What is "orange site style dweebery"?
- the main export of hacker news, a site which is very orange
- the subject of this fine sub
This sucks. He will be missed.
Condolences.

9 comments