There's a lot to love about this article. She finds a common thread between reading/writing literacy and code literacy, which I think exists and is rarely discussed. She also suggests that for all the doom and gloom about tech corporatism, there are many fascinating counter-examples to the common Googlization / Facebookization of everything theme in the media.<p>It's interesting that the author chose Github and Automattic as exemplars of "next-gen" startups.<p>She fails to mention that both also happen to be fully distributed remote teams (as I wrote about in <a href="http://bit.ly/distributed-teams" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/distributed-teams</a>).<p>When she describes Automattic's vision as a "a city of interconnected developers and designers with varying skill sets" and Github as "a flat organization model that aims to eliminate middle managers by trusting that every employee can be a manager", she is not referring to the companies' missions as much as to their organizational structure, which happens to be fully distributed and high-trust.<p>She gets the business side of these companies wrong: she calls Github an "open source repository" when it's really better described as a "hosted code collaboration service"; and, she says Automattic doesn't "serve the profit motives of a few" when in reality it's a VC-funded profitable business, which pretty much by definition, serves the profit motives of the few.<p>I am not sure if there is a common thread between distributed teams and the nature of code as an artform/medium.<p>Perhaps it's that programmers, through the open source / Free software movement, pioneered many of the approaches to collaborating through the web that have now been applied to other domains, including non-profits (Wikipedia) and for-profit businesses (Github, Automattic, even my company, Parse.ly). Since code is the artifact that programmers care most about, perhaps the way programmers collaborate around code gives an indication of how other creators will collaborate around their medium in the future, once tech enables that collaboration. I think this is what the long-term bet behind Github is all about.