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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#111

Post by a-dub »

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…

Truth be told I've actually been considering Wall Street. With all the jerkwads wandering around SF in forced-chillax-corporate-uniforms (hoodie, t-shirt with company logo, jeans), it might actually be pretty chill. : )

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#112

Post by tvanantwerp »

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.

"Brett Scott writes about financial activism and social and environmental finance. He is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance (2013)."

Without knowing anything else about the author, this byline does give a bit of a left-wing impression.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#113

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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…

If you're a big landowner or cattle baron in the Not So Old West, gunslingers are a fungible commodity in steady supply.

I mean - who was Leland Stanford, anyway? Railroad baron. Similar deal.

This IS normal for America, from the Mississippi Bubble onward.

If there is a 'hacker ethic', it's a variation on ham radio, maintaining your own vehicle ala John Muir, the Unix philosophy and possibly DOS using int21 calls. That's not a complete list.

I knew of much more Hacker Ethic in the people who went through the Depression and WWII. They were Maintainers, the sworn enemy of the dread lord Entropy. I worked for one; he used a 40 horse Ford tractor to move these giant sandstone rocks - hydraulics popping like doom; stand carefully - to build these phenomenal, beautiful houses of native materials. The houses looked a bit like Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

What came later is a caricature of this; college kids who'd read about Emma Goldman, or read Jack Kerouac, or Richard Farina, or...

The counterculture per se got coopted long ago. "Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don't kid yourself." - Frank Zappa.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#114

Post by steveklabnik »

reb wrote: post #98
thwest wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism redirects to that section.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#115

Post by danjc »

It's pieces like this that keep me coming back to HN. They also make me wish I could write as well!

It always irks me when I hear people refer to themselves as hackers (Zuckerberg for one) and this article articulates why far better than I could.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#116

Post by rancur »

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…

there actually is something wrong with profit: that desire never stops, never says enough, and is oblivious to human suffering.

there are plenty of lazy people, but in their midst are hardworking people trying to survive. Profit chooses to oppress.

The optimal system grows only for the sake of its own employees.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#117

Post by kazinator »

andyl wrote: post #73
Gigamouse wrote: post #13

For 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…

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.

Of course, in the old days, the hacker worked with integrated circuits that were made by a multi-million dollar fab that was funded by yuppie venture capital.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#118

Post by kimdouglasmason »

ryanSrich wrote: post #109
sanoli wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's been almost ten years now since my punk friends from the US told me the Bay Area was gone and that the new punk/alternative capital was Portland. Don't know if it still is, but they had all moved there or somewhere else. Almost ten years ago.

Portland is slowly losing it's edge. I say slowly because the wages here are silly low so that does keep out a lot of the yuppies the article is referring to (although many will come here and take advantage of that). I've only been here for a little over a year but I've seen the city change very much in that short amount of time. Old abandon buildings are now apartment complexes for tech kids. In May of 2014 there wa…

"at least I didn't move here from California"

Yup. You being born in a state that is not California and moving to Portland makes you very superior to those living in Portland but born in California. You should put on your very superior hat and feel good about your total authenticity and unquestionable non-yuppiedom.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#119

Post by justizin »

jkot wrote: post #28

Lets be grateful for yuppies and their money. Computers and gadgets are today cheap and widely available. And there is finally no social stigma related to nerds. 'Real hacker' who works on AI, security etc.. has now life easier.

> And there is finally no social stigma related to nerds.

People are just not telling you to your face anymore, because they want your money. :/

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#120

Post by nostrademons »

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.

I dunno, building a wall around SF sounds pretty SF-ish and weird to me.
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