As a Libertarian Conservative of sorts I can literally rant for years about all the elitist little bastards in Government. There are loads of elected progressives that consider themselves as the conduits of special wisdom. How about outside of political life however? There is a massive culture of 'Geek knows best' collectivism that is as irrational as the same behavior. The place I see it most is with web standards.
Geeks seem to believe that standards are to be defined through authority before they make it to the Internet. In the old days we cared about what the W3C had to say, and about the contents on an RFC. However, as the Internet became more popular these things were discarded. Browser developers were the ones who really 'invented' the Internet. People willing to make everyone else incompatible and defunct are the real innovators.
There are still dinosaurs in the Industry that hold onto the remnants of imposed fiat. Then there is the real world.
People at Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, and Google can beat off all day about being 'standards compliant.' I use Opera 10 as my browser, the Interface is superior and it has had features for years that Mozilla have just decided to standardize on themselves (read: copy). Despite the virtues of Opera Link and Opera Turbo, having a "standards compliant" browser fucking sucks.
What I have noticed is that this browser, and obviously many others, is clearly "Standards compliant." Though only by some odd definition of "Standards." In reality, Opera is an authority compliant browser. Since 90% of web developers don't care at all for "standards," it is entirely lost. Facebook innovates by stretching the capabilities of javascript, and the "Standards" compliant browser is lost to it all.
By what standard is what the W3C does a standard? Imagine if we thought this way about linguistics. In the world of languages innovation occurs by shitting all over established conventions. Unfortunately even this point is lost, with endless hoards of pretension complaining about "Netspeak" and "Australian English." These people despise innovation and destroy it, and that is all that the W3C and similar groups have ever done for the Internet.
People complained about Microsoft innovating while everyone else circle jerked around "Web Standards." Microsoft managed to get 90% of people to use Internet Explorer 6 in the end while the rest of you acheived nothing. Finally firefox won because Microsoft stopped innovating. Now Firefox is once again the new IE6 (or Netscape 4.0) barely changing at all.
Making a browser: I don't care if it renders Experimental Internet Standard 0.11 perfectly when nobody uses it. I want to be able to type @ in a facebook status update and have javascript do its magic so I can link to a friend or fan page. I can't do that in Opera 10, simply because it tried to be "Standards" complaint (complaint with elites) rather than standards complaint. That being: complaint with the fucking user.
Freetards are still a bigger culprit than Opera. You all fucking suck, go find a revenue model and then you might have the right to dictate a standard.
