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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#61

Post by roneesh »

Look, you can construct whatever narrative you want about power, people and the ebb and flow of capital, but it's pointless.

People like nice things. There I said it. Most people like nice cedar lined floors, expensive drinks and well cut clothes. And when you have those things, it's marvelous how quickly your disdain for the 'institution' evaporates.

Most of us aren't really hackers in that nostalgic sense. We're normal people, yuppies, kids, nerds, dorks, that one dude really into Aphex Twin in your office (everyone has one). We just happen to be good with computers.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#62

Post by deanCommie »

mason240 wrote: post #56
VonGuard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is certain irony in a group of people who favor open borders, open and anarchist societies, ect, trying to erect physical, social, and "legal" barriers to keep undesirable people out.

Okay except it's clearly a huge joke, and refers to Burning Man principles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=159&v=PO_r6ndZRZY

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#63

Post by roneesh »

woah wrote: post #53
busterarm wrote: post #24

I'm working too hard and too sleep deprived to read the full article, but am I the only person noticing that every single lawyer and MBA under 35, almost without exception, is attending or trying to attend a code school to change careers? Many of the ones I meet talking about it have very limited tech experience. That's very much how it seems in NY right now.

Good to see them trying to gain some technical literacy.

Yeah, most won't really become devs, but they'll gain some newfound technical literacy and some respect for what devs do full-time.

It's important in these situations to look outside of the context and just see what's actually happening: people are learning. And that has more positives than negatives I'm sure.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#64

Post by amyjess »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #49
amyjess wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reading that article, I noticed a few things.

First, it's #4 on the list. On the other hand, #1 is "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved".

Second, it sounds less like "the hacker ethic was created as a response to authoritarianism" (which is what OP asserts) and more like "authoritarianism is incompatible with the hacker ethic, so don't support it", which is a very different proposition.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#65

Post by wainstead »

clavalle wrote: post #17

You 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…

> Who cares if 'yuppies' 'gentrify' hacking.

Indeed, the term 'hacker' has survived the media's use/definition of it through the 80s and 90s as a "computer criminal." Today we distinguish between black hat and white hat, but the term "hacker" still applies.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#66

Post by mason240 »

gue5t wrote: post #31
kriro wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

>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)

Acquiring money is not the only way to profit; it's whatever your "utility function" is. Money is just an easy one to quantify and analyze.

If you spend 10 hours on Saturday freelancing for $130/hr versus spending 10 hour working on OSS versus fucking around with code, you are still applying your capital (time, skills, hardware/software) to obtain a profit (money, fulfillment, enjoyment).

That's what's great about capitalism: you get to choose how to apply your capital to obtain the outcomes you want, even those outcomes are not monetary.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#67

Post by LukeWalsh »

roneesh wrote: post #61

Look, you can construct whatever narrative you want about power, people and the ebb and flow of capital, but it's pointless. People like nice things. There I said it. Most people like nice cedar lined floors, expensive drinks and well cut clothes. And when you have those things, it's marvelous how quickly your disdain for the 'institution' evaporates. Most of us aren't really hackers in that nostalgic sense. We're no…

I don't think this is a fair generalization. It might be correct to say 'many people think they want expensive things'.

I for one think you can keep your cedar floors and fancy wine. Maybe I'm just young but I really don't want that at all.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#68

Post by busterarm »

roneesh wrote: post #63
woah wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to see them trying to gain some technical literacy.

Yeah, most won't really become devs, but they'll gain some newfound technical literacy and some respect for what devs do full-time. It's important in these situations to look outside of the context and just see what's actually happening: people are learning. And that has more positives than negatives I'm sure.

While I see some positives there, I think that's a really expensive way to learn. I see a lot that just don't make it.

$10-18k+ that you can't write off on your taxes.

Full disclosure: I attended such a place myself as I saw it as the best way to shift my career quickly (support/ops). I've been writing code since I was 6 years old.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#69

Post by wainstead »

gluelogic wrote: post #36
clavalle wrote: post #17

You 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…

> Ignoring what other people think is cool. In the end, it really isn't though. It is a bad thing when subcultures are overrun by people who did not come to it organically. What I mean by that is at a certain point, members of a subculture gain a perceived glamour, which incentivizes outsiders to come in for superficial reasons. This dilutes the subculture's original ethos, and if it continues long enough it totally…

> It is a bad thing when subcultures are overrun by people who did not come to it organically.

Having seen an uncountable number of subcultures in popular music overrun this way, I've come to see it as an inevitability. When a subculture is pure and thriving and exciting, enjoy it while you can, for "this too shall pass."

For me the movement that was "indie rock" ended with the success of Nirvana; after that "indie rock" became the label for a musical genre (which was weird, because "indie rock" was as much the label of a business practice as it was the label of a musical genre).

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