Here’s a great article by Bruce Sterling who’s going to be speaking at the South by Southwest festival in his native Austin.
He talks of web designers:
"Lotta Web designers. They’re always there. They travel in clumps. Because they speak their own unique languages, these people. Specifically, they speak ActiveX, ASP, CGI, HTML, Flash, and Java. It’s a wonderful thing to see a profession so young, yet already so arcane."
and Open Source:
"I’m not trying to wax all Noam Chomsky here, but those Open Source people … they are, like, a multinational, leaderless, heavily networked outfit with little-known agents and sympathizers in dozens of countries. Countries like Finland. And Norway. It’s definitely the Axis of something, I dunno what, but something Scandinavian and fishy."
If you’re more interested in reading Sterling’s science fiction, I can recommend his book of short stories, "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" which I read recently.