This is such a poorly thought out article. The term hacker has also meant so many different things to so many people. I grew up with the 90's hacker scene. I was a teenager for almost all of the decade and I started programming and reading about, interacting with, and being a part of the 90's hackers groups. Those groups were called criminals, crackers, or cybergangs but a lot of the old school MIT crowd of hackers. Then the mainstream media picked up the term to mean criminals. Then my age group entered the workforce and redefined the term to mean an excellent programmer, as in hacker news. It's been constantly changing and meaning different things to different groups. How can you co-opt something that fluid? This article smacks of someone complaining about a culture they don't understand themselves.
How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
41–50 of 221 posts
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#42When I realized that the kids of the old money elite began to see Silicon Valley, not Wall Street, as the means to big money, I decided I could never go back. The elitists came to Northern California - a vanguard of social liberalism, student protest, and most importantly communitarianism - and brought their elitism with them. Northern California still exists in the nostalgic hippie image of the 60s, but it's compart…
Completely agree. There's currently a Kickstarter to build a wall around SF to keep the Burners from coming back after Burning Man. Frankly, though, my first thought upon seeing it was "Geez, the Burners are the only people left in SF who are really SF-ish and weird anymore. SF has changed. It's becoming Manhattan West.
There's a peculiar phrasing of this statement. Would you happen to originally be from the Pittsburgh area?
We're dealing with a similar phenomenon here. We have a lot of Colleges and Universities and big money is coming in and heavily recruiting people. Instead of a large number of start-ups, we have a culture that favors going straight to work for big businesses.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#43For 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 ar…
The article just sounds fundamentally flawed to me.
Let's consult the Jargon File. It was written by old-school hackers, and it hasn't been updated in years. It should have a handle on what it means to be a hacker. Let their definition of "hacker": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
The first seven senses all give the same impression: a hacker is somebody who likes to tinker with stuff out of intellectual curiosity and for the sheer fun of it.
And here's "hacker ethic" while we're at it: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-ethic.html
There's nothing in there about "fighting the man".
Now, yes, a lot of the more traditional aspects of hacker culture would recoil at the idea of "on-the-fly problem solving for profit" (in fact, the entry on "wannabee" appears to hold "professional programmers" in disdain). But that's because the old-school hackers did what they did for fun. No, they weren't interested in profit, but they weren't interested fighting "the man" either.
And while we're talking about "large alienating infrastructures", that probably applies now more than ever, what with the rise of walled gardens, proprietary APIs, and the resurgence of closed-source software thanks to mobile and web apps replacing desktop apps. If the hacker ethic was a response to "large alienating infrastructures", it would be stronger than ever right now.
Actually, I'd argue that hacker culture flourishes more in the absence of "large alienating infrastructures" than anything else. Hacker culture started at universities where students all had access to powerful timesharing machines (or, hell, even access to the batch-job machines that preceded timesharing). Then, it underwent a resurgence in the '90s with the open-source revolution... because suddenly the entire world was connected through the Internet, so anybody could download, run, and hack on an entire open-source operating system, and they could submit their patches or host a server in their living room and post new software up for the whole world to see.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#44[deleted]
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#45When I realized that the kids of the old money elite began to see Silicon Valley, not Wall Street, as the means to big money, I decided I could never go back. The elitists came to Northern California - a vanguard of social liberalism, student protest, and most importantly communitarianism - and brought their elitism with them. Northern California still exists in the nostalgic hippie image of the 60s, but it's compart…
Completely agree. There's currently a Kickstarter to build a wall around SF to keep the Burners from coming back after Burning Man. Frankly, though, my first thought upon seeing it was "Geez, the Burners are the only people left in SF who are really SF-ish and weird anymore. SF has changed. It's becoming Manhattan West.
There are some strange contradictions here. There's a huge overlap between burning man culture and tech culture. Part of the sentiment against burning man is because of this. The world may not be as simple as you think.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#46This 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…
> "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."
The funny thing about this statement is that the auteur era was a very short-lived period created by the collapse of the old studio system until the studios regrouped and the blockbuster era began.
Go back to the truly old-school days of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and you'll see an environment uttely driven by the bottom line, where oppressive contracts and shady deals ruled the day. At least nowadays you don't have studios signing exclusivity deals with theaters like you had back in the day, the epitome of this was Paramount signing every single theater in Detroit to such a deal. Just imagine living in a major city and only being allowed to see movies made by a single studio.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#47When I realized that the kids of the old money elite began to see Silicon Valley, not Wall Street, as the means to big money, I decided I could never go back. The elitists came to Northern California - a vanguard of social liberalism, student protest, and most importantly communitarianism - and brought their elitism with them. Northern California still exists in the nostalgic hippie image of the 60s, but it's compart…
> instead relying on mercenary college grads who put up with the cost and the crazy for a few years before moving on to a more fulfilling job
Good mercenaries know a lot more than fresh grads.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#48When I realized that the kids of the old money elite began to see Silicon Valley, not Wall Street, as the means to big money, I decided I could never go back. The elitists came to Northern California - a vanguard of social liberalism, student protest, and most importantly communitarianism - and brought their elitism with them. Northern California still exists in the nostalgic hippie image of the 60s, but it's compart…
Completely agree. There's currently a Kickstarter to build a wall around SF to keep the Burners from coming back after Burning Man. Frankly, though, my first thought upon seeing it was "Geez, the Burners are the only people left in SF who are really SF-ish and weird anymore. SF has changed. It's becoming Manhattan West.
It's not a Kickstarter, it's a parody. You're right about the sentiment, though.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#49For 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 ar…
The article just sounds fundamentally flawed to me. Let's consult the Jargon File. It was written by old-school hackers, and it hasn't been updated in years. It should have a handle on what it means to be a hacker. Let their definition of "hacker": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html The first seven senses all give the same impression: a hacker is somebody who likes to tinker with stuff out of intellectual…
ESR's "How to be a Hacker" essay explicitly lists anti-authoritarianism as part of the hacker ethic/attitude, however: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#attitude
Not that I have much of an affinity for ESR, but he is a spokesman.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't like the link to "the profit fetish" in the last paragraph and the implicit undertone of profit being a bad thing. In fact I completely disagree and would call hacking (in the sense it is used in the article) a very direct expression of profit seeking. You change one state to another one that you prefer. If the costs to achieve this are less than the added value that's (economic) profit.
The point of being a hacker (in the traditional sense) is that your utility function is completely wack. You prefer to make the lights on the screen (and by proxy, the state of the registers) the way you envision than to have free time for hobbies intrinsically inbued with external relevance. The prevalence of computers in modern commerce makes this easy to overlook. Hacking isn't about building things the rest of th…
There's nothing wrong with profit. What's wrong is monopoly and oligopoly. Defining an activity as only being up to your ideological standards if it is done for free means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor. Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.