Speaking of people who like to play God, Tim O’Reilly’s bizarre ETech conference is drawing heat from diverse corners of the Blogosphere. As I pointed out, the Warblogging panel excluded actual warbloggers, an observation that’s also been made by Jason Kottke, Glenn Reynolds, and Bill Quick. Brian Carnell takes it step further and notes in the comments that the panel was 100% Anti-war bloggers, so it’s as if there was a panel on anti-war blogging manned by Steven Den Beste and Charles Johnson.
The Warblogging panel isn’t the only place where we see O’Reilly’s bias and desire to manipulate reality on display. Andrew Orlowsky rips O’Reilly and minion Clay Shirky a new one over the exclusion of incorrect thought from the Social Software track, as does blogging legend Dave Winer. O’Reilly’s response to all of this? He’s ordered Orlowsky to call him up for a chewing-out.
Now why is it that the “new technology” conferences, especially those with hefty price-tags like Etech and Supernova, promote a thinly-disguised political agenda, and exclude genuine technology innovators who aren’t on the Cluetrain? One theory: once you’ve amassed a huge fortune, like O’Reilly has, your priorities shift and you want to be King of the World, rewarding flunkies, punishing dissidents, and measuring your wealth by the power you have over others.
So where to go if you’re just interested in the tech and don’t care for the side order of left-wing politics? Hmmm….more on this later.
UPDATE: Dan says Stuart Hughes joined the Warblogging panel by phone from London. Hughes is a BBC producer, reliably left-wing, and an amputee since he lost a leg to a landmine in Northern Iraq. So not only did he add another leftist perspective, he’s a “horrors of war” story, and the most authentic of the warbloggers. But this isn’t really what “warblogging” means, is it? The point about warblogging is that it’s the breakthrough phenomenon that made blogs interesting to people who don’t make their living working with computers, and you don’t have a get a left-media amputee to prove that simple point. I made this observation many months ago on O’Reilly’s web site as a comment to Meg Hourihan’s inane “What we’re doing when we blog” article, but it’s lost on the O’Reilly cult.
I give up.
As my favorite ultimate insider, do you consider these crazy conferences the least bit influential on ANYTHING much less politics? Or are they (as I suspect) the VC version of Burning Man, with Chardonnay and comfy beds at W? And, oh by the way, not just a little bit of revenue generation.
Given the lineup at this one, it’s the same folks who have been on the rubber tofu circuit for years.
Scott, I don’t know who goes to these conferences, because I’ve never been to one myself; if I were in a conference-going mood last week, I would have gone to the Embedded Systems show for some real info instead. This is only important insofar as it helps to reinforce the idea that geeks are supposed to be vegetarian socialist members of the Cult of the Sacred Camel, so you’re right it’s more of an annoyance than a catastrophe. Given the way these folks talk Diversity until it makes you scream, just once I’d like to see them walk the walk.
May I have permission to use “cult of the sacred camel” in my sales pitches? That’s rich…