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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#91

Post by bpyne »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #30

When 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…

Kind of funny you mention Detroit. My in-laws just moved out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I mentioned to them the edgy art studios around when they moved into Brooklyn. Their comment was that the artists have been moving to Detroit for several years because the gentrification in Williamsburg makes it impossible for them to live.

From everything I've been reading, Detroit has become THE place to live now if you like more edgy, but affordable, neighborhoods.

(EDIT: grammar)

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#92

Post by rndmind »

zaphar wrote: post #20
baseballmerpeak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

hope you don't mind -- I've shared this quote publically on my diaspora page. I can link you if you would like.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#93

Post by daveloyall »

logicalmind wrote: post #80
daveloyall wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. When I first came here, I was shocked how often the comments about some cool tech would be focused on how to monetize it, how to commoditize it. After a while, I just accepted as fact the existence of a large contingent of "hipster web 2.0 wanks" (well, that's the tag I use internally). But today I'll start an experiment. I'll adjust the internal tag to recognize them by their true name. An old name... Posers.…

And this whole thing came full circle once Paul Graham stepped away. YCombinator was initially cool because it was a hack on the incubator/vc scene and a successful one. Now it seems more like an MBA-esque scheme replete with spreadsheets.

I came across PG because he wrote some battlefront story about using lisp in the early days of dotcom[0]. Probably found a link to that on some emacs site or channel.

Come to think about it, I've only heard the HN crowd praise him. Oh, well, and he does it himself.

What HN does do is give me a steady stream of content to consume. Articles about physics followed by code demos followed by ethnographies.

Shit, have I really been spending time in a pro-money, anti-woman poser circle-wank fest just for the free links?

I wonder what's up on mefi today...

0: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#94

Post by thearn4 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #40

This hits home. I read hacker news and sites like it, but I know in my heart that the people here are not, for the most part, hackers.

I find that it's a mixed bag. There are some good technical discussions had here (far better than one would find on /r/programming most of the time). But the discussions about tech monetization and SV startup life in general don't hold great appeal to me.

But, I'm a midwesterner with a fair salary who's happy with where he is, which is probably a bit alien to begin with (at least in tech circles).

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#95

Post by steeples »

Hacking for me was always about pushing the envelope, and if that meant getting the right tools for the job, then that also meant working for old industrial monopolists and building out my crystal palace in my own free time. After work I would come home, switch on my Pandora's box, and use my paycheck to have fun. The problem with doing this for extended periods of one's life is that you see all your peers getting stinking rich, and you almost feel left behind, like a lone wolf hacker who missed the proverbial boat of investor money. On one hand this can feel miserable because Fear of Missing Out (F.O.M.O) feels like a legitimate thing to be concerned about. On the other hand, the hacking escapades are exhilarating and quickly drown out F.O.M.O because those same people that are getting rich are missing out on the joys of low level disk hacking, and twitter bots that can disrupt markets and sway the stock market any way one wants. The F.O.M.O is quickly drenched by fun. Let fun precede every other activity. This is the hacker way.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#96

Post by davidgerard »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #30

When 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…

I am reminded of James Hughes, a transhumanist but also a proper sociologist, who wrote about the change in transhumanism from democratic left-leaning people, whose vision of technology was for the good of all, to libertarians (and thence singularitarians and neoreactionaries): http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughes20130501

> In 2009 the libertarians and Singularitarians launched a campaign to take over the World Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, pushing out the Left in favor of allies like Milton Friedman’s grandson and Seasteader leader Patri Friedman. Since then the libertarians and Singularitarians, backed by Thiel’s philanthropy, have secured extensive hegemony in the transhumanist community. As the global capitalist system spiraled into the crisis in which it remains, partly created by the speculation of hedge fund managers like Thiel, the left-leaning majority of transhumanists around the world have increasingly seen the contradiction between the millennialist escapism of the Singularitarians and practical concerns of ensuring that technological innovation is safe and its benefits universally enjoyed. While the alliance of Left and libertarian transhumanists held together until 2008 in the belief that the new biopolitical alignments were as important as the older alignments around political economy, the global economic crisis has given new life to the technoprogressive tendency, those who want to organize for a more egalitarian world and transhumanist technologies, a project with a long Enlightenment pedigree and distinctly millenarian possibilities.

It isn't something that just happened. It's something that was done to the area.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#97

Post by heurist »

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…

It seems to be more about not perpetrating destructive cultural values. Tech elite use the natural curiosity of tech lovers for their own benefit, sometimes subversively. Is that good or bad? Depends on whether the tech lover cares or not. But if the tech lover doesn't even realize they are contributing to potentially detrimental cultural values then they can't make an informed and mindful decision.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#98

Post by reb »

thwest wrote: post #82
andyl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a summary? tldr My summary: the article is a cultural-marxist parable. The victim is the hacker. The oppressor is the yuppie. In olden days the hacker lived in a sort of eden, but now the oppressor has trapped the hacker in webs of capitalist bondage.

Cultural-Marxist? I thought he was an economist.

Lately "Cultural-Marxist" has become shorthand for anyone holding beliefs even slightly adjacent to "the rich/powerful are evil and they're corrupting the pure and poor/powerless" or "there are two kinds of people: the oppressed and the oppressors".

Whether this characterization of the article is fair or those beliefs about the world are true are both reasonable questions worthy of consideration.

Anyone looking for a little information on the origins of the term "Cultural Marxism" should take a look at the wiki entry for the Frankfurt School, under the subheading "Conspiracy Theory".

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#99

Post by zaphar »

rndmind wrote: post #92
zaphar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

hope you don't mind -- I've shared this quote publically on my diaspora page. I can link you if you would like.

Help yourself. My ideas are free for the taking no charge :-)

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#100

Post by sbilstein »

VonGuard wrote: post #33
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #30

When 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.

Honestly I see Burning Man as a sorta weird expression of the same elitism, except in this norcal style. Rather then these tech/artists/trustafarians/whatever investing their energy into arts and music in public spaces in the Bay Area they work year round to build a completely inaccessible community hundreds of miles away and light it on fire. Nothing more indulgent than that in my opinion.

I have mixed feelings about it...my burner friends (most are techies) do some incredibly weird and impressive things as part of Burning Man but why can't some of that happen right here in the Bay for everyone.

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