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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#12I scanned this before coffee this morning and in short I'm not sure anyone else should read it in its present state. Although the author poses some interesting ideas the piece feels long and muddled and I'm not at all sure who the audience is or what the call to action might be. Voice is unclear as some paragraphs are personal statements ("I") and others are observations about culture and economics. It might be more…
Go home, yuppies. The last few paragraphs bring it home: hacking is being subverted as a tool of the establishment and no longer, in common use, means working against the establishment.
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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#13For those who think this article is too long, here is summary:
This gist of the article is that the hacker impulse or ‘hacker ethic’ is a natural human response to large alienating infrastructures that allow little agency on the part of individuals. Hackers take different forms, but are identified by 1) a tendency towards creative rebellion that seeks to increase the agency of underdogs in the face of systems that are otherwise complex or oppressive or that limit access to experts 2) a tendency to acting out that rebellion by bending the rules of those who currently dominate such infrastructures (this is in contrast to the open rebellion of liberation leaders who stand in direct defiance of such rules). They thus are figures of deviance, seeking to ‘queer’ boundaries that are otherwise viewed as concrete and static.
Having set up a definition of what the hacker ethic is, the article goes on to argue that the ethic has been corrupted due to its association with computer culture in the public eye.
On the one hand, in a world where people increasingly rely on computers for subsistence, the bogeyman figure of the criminal computer ‘hacker’ has emerged, a figure of media sensationalism and moral panic.
On the other hand, the increasingly powerful technology industry has honed in on the desirable, unthreatening elements of the hacker ethic to present a friendly form of hacking as ‘on-the-fly problem-solving for profit’. This is described a process of ‘gentrification’: In most gentrification you have twin processes: On the one hand, a source culture is demonised as something scary to be avoided. On the other hand, it is simultaneously pacified, scrubbed of subversive content, and made to fit mainstream tastes. This has happened to rap culture, street culture, and even pagan rituals. And the article argues, it is now happening to hacker culture: “The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class.”
The article concludes with a reflection on whether you abandon the gentrified form, or whether you fight for it. There is reflection on whether the hacker impulse perhaps has always been an element of capitalist commodification processes, but argues that it is an ethos that needs to be protected: “In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit.”
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#14This unremarkable essay is another one of hundreds repeating the theme about "money destroying true hackers". One can rewrite the same article using other synonyms such as "Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way" or "How Greed Is Ruling Silicon Valley."
This theme can be further generalized into "money is ruining ".
"Money is ruining music. Bing Crosby was a true artist; Today's performers like Lady Gaga is a commercial pandering."
"Money is ruining movies. The 1970s had auteur directors but now all we get at theaters is superheroes in spandex and Disney princesses because they need ROI from international blockbusters."
Writers, thinking they have something new to say, like to write on those themes. Readers, with a predisposition to seeing what's wrong with the world, like to read them. I suppose it's some sort of 1st-World ritual of commiseration. Personally, I find those essays devoid of any insight. I can acknowledge that there are undeniable trends there but I try to avoid categorizing them into value judgments of "good vs evil". I understand the economics of why Disney's "Frozen" is the type of film that theaters prefer to show rather than Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate".
An example of force-fitting his observations into categories of Hackers-vs-Yuppies (aka good-vs-evil) is his claim:
"I’m going to stake a claim on the word though, and state that the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets."
That broad-stroked brush is amateur writing. Google is a big place with ~57,000 employees. Sure, there are probably engineers doing soul-crushing work of parsing logs for server reliability or optimizing ad click conversions. But I'm sure there are other pockets of engineering where "hackers" are innovating and trying to change the world: driverless cars, balloon wifi, etc. It's the same contradictory pockets of bored employees coexisting with passionate hackers in different areas of large companies like Lockheed, AT&T Labs, Apple, etc.
As far as "yuppies" ruining the hackers, I'm not sure who's supposed to be an exemplar of the "hacker" that he wants to run SV. Steve Wozniak & Steve Jobs both came from middle class families. They weren't hobos living out of their cars and overturning the world with their hacker ethos. Apple took money from VC investors within 1 year of its founding. Even Richard Stallman's family background can also be considered "yuppie".
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#15This unremarkable essay is another one of hundreds repeating the theme about "money destroying true hackers". One can rewrite the same article using other synonyms such as "Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way" or "How Greed Is Ruling Silicon Valley." This theme can be further generalized into "money is ruining ". "Money is ruining music. Bing Crosby was a true artist; Today's performers like Lady Gaga is a commercial pan…
Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a moment. Let's not call parsing logs and server reliability soul crushing, some of us in the ops world enjoy that kind of daily excitement.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#16I scanned this before coffee this morning and in short I'm not sure anyone else should read it in its present state. Although the author poses some interesting ideas the piece feels long and muddled and I'm not at all sure who the audience is or what the call to action might be. Voice is unclear as some paragraphs are personal statements ("I") and others are observations about culture and economics. It might be more…
Go home, yuppies. The last few paragraphs bring it home: hacking is being subverted as a tool of the establishment and no longer, in common use, means working against the establishment.
According to whom? I have seen the hacker culture straddle the line of the traditional definition and a little bit of this newer corporate definition of which the author speaks. My experience is obviously anecdotal, but other than this article, I've never seen nor heard anyone say that hacker culture is being co-opted by corporate.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#17You know what's cool? Ignoring what other people think is cool.
Who cares if 'yuppies' 'gentrify' hacking. You neither have to stop doing what you like because groups you don't care for have noticed nor do you have to waste energy and time and fight against them for doing so.
Do what you want to do regardless. That is the answer to the author's questions.
If you are a hacker, or artist or music lover or anything else of a certain type merely because someone else isn't of that type you are not really that thing.
You are going to find posers as a sub-culture enters the general awareness but you are also going to find trickster godlings in suits with boring titles on their business cards if you don't let the trappings blind you.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#18If you want to see how true "hacker ethos" existed as compared to today's "WE HIRE HACKERS" brandvertising placed in IPO filings, check out early or pre-www FAQs.
Here's a good one (a few MB of text) about hacker encryption: https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.... — other traditional sources are the anarchist's cookbook and anything with more of a "fight the man" sense from the 70s and less of a "give us billions of dollars" sense from the post-popular-Internet era.
Hacking is about a nerd underclass fighting an oblivious overclass. Up until the late 90s, hackers had never "won." But with Internet mania sweeping the world, the nerds started to win. They became "the new man." Now the new overclass needs to be brought down themselves. You don't win hacking, you just become a more prominent target.
Hacking is also about exactly not that.
Hacking is just ignoring everybody else and doing good work you can be proud of. It's the only reason Apple exists. Hacking is about not trying to win, it's just about being clever.
Companies promote hiring the second kind of hacker because those people pay no attention to the value they create as long as they're having fun. So, you get someone puzzle-obsessed, give them a $50 million problem to solve, they solve it, and you keep paying them their $125k/year. Everybody's happy and the CEO gets to join the three comma club even sooner thanks to the selfless hackers who enjoy subsidizing billionaires while living at the bottom of the org chart.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#19This unremarkable essay is another one of hundreds repeating the theme about "money destroying true hackers". One can rewrite the same article using other synonyms such as "Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way" or "How Greed Is Ruling Silicon Valley." This theme can be further generalized into "money is ruining ". "Money is ruining music. Bing Crosby was a true artist; Today's performers like Lady Gaga is a commercial pan…
The core argument isn't "money ruining X", but that business flocking to acquire the term hacker. The money entering the scene is just a consequential outgrowth.
The author is making a stronger case than that, the article is an examination of a culture being diluted by misappropriation of the term "hacker".
Hacking is subversive at its core, it's an exploration of technology, and in many regards generally pointless, done for ones own curiosity or to change the rules of a system to perturb the owners of that system.
One can't hold onto their own culture for long, thanks to the internet, but the reimagining of hackers from basement dwelling socially awkward nerds to sleek and mysterious agents who can bend the technologies, the world, even their own bodies to their will, has influenced people's perceptions of the culture. Now that it's cool everyone wants a piece, they want to associate themselves with that term like they would a cool brand of clothing. If you can't see that then you're not looking hard enough.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#20I scanned this before coffee this morning and in short I'm not sure anyone else should read it in its present state. Although the author poses some interesting ideas the piece feels long and muddled and I'm not at all sure who the audience is or what the call to action might be. Voice is unclear as some paragraphs are personal statements ("I") and others are observations about culture and economics. It might be more…
Go home, yuppies. The last few paragraphs bring it home: hacking is being subverted as a tool of the establishment and no longer, in common use, means working against the establishment.
Here's the thing. Hacking in the sense of the word he wants it used didn't go away or get subverted. It just lost a label.
Words in the english language change all the time. Hacking in the sense of gaining a deep understanding of things by tinkering is alive and well and isn't going anywhere. So some one co-opted our label. So What? We can get a new label. It doesn't mean we somehow vanished or are dying out. We're still here. We still buy kits to get screw drivers that let us open that box and void the warranty. We still poke and prod at computer systems in ways they weren't designed to be poked and prodded. We still create things with materials no one else thought to create with. And in the sense of hacking he is referring to we still do it whether it has a label or not.
He even talks about hacking being something as old as the human race. And then he goes on to complain that this label got co-opted. Of course it did. Everyone is a hacker. Everyone is looking to game the system. Hackers don't have a monopoly on hacking. So the "yuppies" hacked our terminology. Good for them. Now we get to go hack some other terminology. Hack used to refer to a kludge. We co-opted the term to mean something else. Now it has been co-opted again.
The author is in many ways complaining about something that isn't a real problem. We were hacking before there was a label for it. We will still be hacking after the label is gone. Nothing has been lost here.