How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos • Hacker News Board

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#131

Post by thwest » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

tvanantwerp wrote: post #112

thwest wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Marx being the economist in my post. My confusion is why the arguments presented here are being called "cultural". People are trying to frame left economics as a mere happenstance of a cultural moment (hippies or hipsters), in order to exclude it from the scientific register when we debate it.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#132

Post by drauh » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #113

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. Th…

All countercultures get coopted. "Counter" is a dynamic thing. I understand the nostalgia, but this is the same old "get off my lawn" stuff that all old punks/goths/hackers/hippies/whatever write 20 years after their heyday.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#133

Post by daveloyall » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

sixdimensional wrote: post #107

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.…

Just a thought but, I wonder if the change you describe (from discussions about cool tech to how to monetize) has something to do with the demographics of the participants of Hacker News. I'm not sure it is a completely valid generalization (there are still cool tech discussions here that aren't about money), but I can see what you're talking about. Certainly, many of us have gotten older while we've been a part of t…

Thanks, interesting.

FWIW, "cool tech" can mean different things to different people. The Y Combinator is cool tech[0]. It's also about as timeless as it gets, eh?

Trendy tech can be cool. It usually isn't, but it totally can be! :)

0: https://medium.com/@therealklanni/the-mysterious-y-combinato...

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#134

Post by nickbauman » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #117

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.

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.

Still true today. Except the original capitalists in the case of the computer industry was the government, not VCs. Almost every major technology you use everyday in your computer originated with a government grant or program. Those HD LCD screens? They were originally developed for the Abrams XM-1 tank in the First Gulf War. Google was first funded by a DARPA grant. The Internet itself was a large DARPA project. The integrated circuit, you name it.

First world nations become that way by government-led expansion. The private sector comes along later to make a profit after the fact in almost every case.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#135

Post by veddox » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

I get the distinct impression that the author of this article doesn't really know what he is talking about. He doesn't bother mentioning (if he is even aware of the fact) that "hacker" != "cracker", but kind of muddles both groups into one. The very fact that he talks about "The construct of the ‘good hacker’" tells me that he never did his homework properly.

Last time I checked my history books, hackers used to be "good" when they started out. Yes, they were counter-cultural and yes, many had more or less pronounced anarchists tendencies. But they were definitely not the rebellious threat to public safety that the author portrays. In fact, the author gets it back to front: the real corruption of the term "hacker" happened twenty-five years ago, when the media started applying that label to cyber criminals. If anything, Silicon Valley is actively countering that original corruption by their current use of the term. (Though it is quite possible that they are misusing/over-using it in smaller ways.)

In short, this is a prime example of an article about a subculture that is untainted by any understanding of the same.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#136

Post by Animats » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

I suspect that the author has read Derrida. He's obsessing on the meaning of a word and following semi-random threads trying to deconstruct it. That's classic Derrida. That approach doesn't solve any problems, but it's a useful way to generate papers. If you read some Derrida, you too can learn to generate blithering of that type.

As for yuppies vs. hackers, it helps to go back further, to understand how hippies morphed into yuppies. Hippies were mostly self-indulgent types who spouted bogus philosophy to justify their existence. Yuppies are mostly self-indulgent types who spout bogus philosophy to justify their existence. Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, led the transition from hippie to yuppie, from the commune to the "lifestyle industry", from growing your own food to Whole Foods.

What happened to the hacker ethos was the absorption of computing into the advertising industry. The hacker ethos survived the Microsoft era, but not the Google era. Microsoft was about tools, which was consistent with the hacker ethos. Google is about ad clicks, and its success created a whole industry focused on ads and user exploitation, not tools for user empowerment. That's what destroyed hacker culture.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#137

Post by rndmind » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:09 PM UTC

api wrote: post #22

Fight the man hard enough and you win. Now you're the man. It wasn't colonization that yuppified hackerdom. It was evolution. Most of the old school hackers became yuppies when they found out they could make lots of money off this stuff. New school hackers are entering the scene now and this is all they know. The same thing happened to old school counterculture hippies who found out their ideas and their styles sell.…

I don't agree that the counter-culture of the 1950's led to whole-foods or any other multinational corporation. Multinational corporations stand in clear contrast to the beatniks and the free-thinking, free-love, unifying movement of the 60's.

I think the hacker ethic is needed now more than ever. Some old schoolers are still around, and thanks to free software and open source movement it has spread to other parts of the world and is growing.

Indeed change is constant and evolution is always occurring.

I think the world-wide-web has been compromised by avarice and monopolistic corporations. But that doesn't mean the internet as a medium of transferring bytes, or that the ethics of being a hacker have changed.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#138

Post by rndmind » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #136

I suspect that the author has read Derrida. He's obsessing on the meaning of a word and following semi-random threads trying to deconstruct it. That's classic Derrida. That approach doesn't solve any problems, but it's a useful way to generate papers. If you read some Derrida, you too can learn to generate blithering of that type. As for yuppies vs. hackers, it helps to go back further, to understand how hippies morp…

Yikes well, I don't think the hacker ethos has changed muched regardless of google's presence on the internet. I do think the world wide web has been comprimised to the likes of global corporations and avarice, but not the internet as a medium, and not the mentality behind being subversive, rooting for the underdog, and manipulating the rules to work against the bureaucracy.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#139

Post by kimdouglasmason » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:14 PM UTC

ryanSrich wrote: post #128

kimdouglasmason wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I was half joking. The other serious half was in reference to Bay Area yuppies moving here and subversively driving up the cost of pretty much everything.

Overly loose credit, the decisions of companies to centralize, and NIMBYism is driving up the cost of pretty much everything. People just move to where the work is.

I have coworkers from Oregon in the Bay Area. Some would say that by moving here they're 'driving up the price of everything'. At this juncture if they move back, they'll then be 'driving up the price of everything' at home. It's meaningless.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#140

Post by klez » Mon, Aug 10, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #136

I suspect that the author has read Derrida. He's obsessing on the meaning of a word and following semi-random threads trying to deconstruct it. That's classic Derrida. That approach doesn't solve any problems, but it's a useful way to generate papers. If you read some Derrida, you too can learn to generate blithering of that type. As for yuppies vs. hackers, it helps to go back further, to understand how hippies morp…

I don't think the article is saying that hacker culture is dead, just that the term is being misappropriated (again), but this time not from media referencing criminal acts correlated in any way with computers, but with capitalism trying to make big bucks out of computers (as you said, mostly the ad industry).

It's telling that a place where products that ought to make money are showed and discussed on a place called Hacker News, and that earnest attemtps at hacks-for-the-sake-of-it are usually met here with at least 4-5 commenters asking "What's the point of this? It's not profitable.'

But the hacker culture is alive and well. Take for example the TOR project, GNU, the EFF. They don't seem to be out for a buck, at least in my view.