How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

The two groups do often overlap; even the Jargon File (which is strictly adamant in its distinction between the two subcultures) admits as much. The difference is with intent; a hacker fixates upon the exploration and understanding of a system, whereas a cracker fixates upon the breaking of a system (or the prevention of future breaking, in the case of white-hat crackers). In this sense, the article's actually one of the very few that gets this distinction even partially correct, even if it does lean a bit heavily toward the "cracker" side of said incredibly-fine line.

Even that particular fine line isn't well-defined, of course; there are plenty of cases where a hacker feels the need to resort to cracker-like behavior in order to get a point across (like "your software has this and that bug; here's a program demonstrating them"), in which case the line between "hacker" and "white/grey-hat cracker" is even further blurred.

> But they were definitely not the rebellious threat to public safety that the author portrays.

This isn't always true. See also: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html (particularly the story about 'Robin Hood' and 'Friar Tuck').

> 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.)

I'd argue that it's just as much a corruption, but in the opposite direction. The hacker ethos really lies somewhere between crackeresque active rebellion and Valleyesque conformity. The article happens to get this right, too, in its remark that hackerdom works "obliquely" and outside the conventional realm of borders and dichotomies. The hacker spirit is one with ambiguous and often even inconsistent goals (at least to someone looking into it from the outside), and this ambiguousness is in contract with both crackerdom (actively rebelling against the concept of authority, to the point of meritocratic anarchy) and Valleydom (actively striving to become authority, to the point of monopolistic totalitarianism).

Of course, the article's characterization of folks like Anonymous and Wikileaks as the modern day "true" hackers isn't exactly accurate, either, highlighting further the difficulty which exists in trying to clearly define what it means to be a "hacker". In theory, such groups could very well express the hacker ethos (namely, by doing what they do for the sake of doing what they do), but I feel that both tend to have a specific bent or agenda to them that subverts what would otherwise be much closer to a manifestation of the hacker ethos.

I never understood why the citizens of a city are against Genetrification. It improves not only the quality of an area, but can make you money if you own property there. Creating laws against it essentially keeps the poor, poor. On top of this, anyone with a little bit of succes and/or money leave.

It's just another example of politicians decreasing social mobility under the guise of helping the poor.

> In this context, the hacker ethic is hollowed out and subsumed into the ideology of solutionism, to use a term coined by the Belarusian-born tech critic Evgeny Morozov. It describes the tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for (profitable) solutions.

Trade is the ultimate form of autonomy because when someone willingly buys what you're selling you can be self-sufficient (as opposed to dependent on a beneficent family/non-profit organization/gov't). Obviously tech startups have deviated from the hobbyist "I'm getting my kicks" ethos because they're trying to hack the softer domain that is customer behavior. Solutions to real problems are always win-win, and to believe otherwise is pretty weird.

Because then all of the people that protest things like high-rise apartments, and Google shuttle buses will show up to protest that too.