>We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class.
Ouch. That hits hard.
How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
161–170 of 221 posts
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#162The main objection against the ending refrain of "go home, yuppies" is that, since hackers (however you define the term) have valuable skills, they should be able to earn money using them. If the alternative is working in a menial capacity for some large alienating infrastructure (see what I did there?) with hacking as a hobby, then I'd rather be working on something interesting, even if it makes me complicit in gent…
My impression from the article wasn't an objection to hackers making money per se (indeed, most of the original "hackers", back in the days of Lisp machines and ITS and early Unix, were - if not academics - professional, paid programmers), but rather an objection to the characterization of hackerdom as a collective conformance to multi-million-dollar companies and investors in Silicon Valley rather than its proper (to the author) characterization as individual resistance to such collective conformance.
The article misses the mark here mostly because it swings a bit too hard toward crackeresque antisocial anarchy in order to compensate for the Valleyesque prosocial conformity being criticized. Really, the "hacker ethos" leans closer to asocial ambivalence.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I want is for a common person to not need to pursue a high income career in order to support themselves and their loved ones, persue their hobbies/education/passions, and stay culturally engaged. The cultural necessity of careerism limits the general options available and accelerates the course of the dominant culture, which as we know, primarily consolidates wealth and attacks sub-scale forms of ownership. We n…
That's not "freedom" you're describing. You're wanting "freedom to pursue "hobbies" and free "perks" without having to work for it" for yourself, at the expense of the general society. And by expense of general society, what that really means is that someone with the means to production/capital/etc has to part ways with some of his (labor, gasp he's no longer free), in order to fund your "free" lifestyle.
Beyond my belief that apriori human happiness should be the highest priority for society, youre misunderstanding me. Yes, it is obvious that we rely on society to sustain modern life. I'm pretty sure that in 2015 America the main economic problems to be solved are about efficient distribution of the fruits of capital. Maybe I'm wrong, and food, housing, transportation and communication really are primarily supply constrained where I live. Maybe I'm wrong and people who have the means to live satisfying lives, in general, really do suddenly withdraw from society and stop doing and making things.
Regardless, we'll agree to say fuck basic income. I like this even more radical idea: There must be <= 10x total income spread within any company. (I have no idea how to handle the obvious loopholes)
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#164Here's the key point where the author and me diverge: > 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'…
Oh they quote Morozov?
That's an instant fail.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#165Here's the key point where the author and me diverge: > 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'…
Trade is an interesting term, because in our experience (for those of you in developed economies) it is circumscribed by a legal framework. So to partipate in legal trade is to implicitly accept the boundaries of law.
I think the article does rightly note that hackers in a historical sense haven't had that same fundamental limit.
Who win-wins if Uber satisfies a need by flouting established taxi law and asking forgiveness instead of permission?
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'll be honest, I disagree here. I know on the onset 10-18K is a lot. In fact I warn people before they do a bootcamp: "Do you want to spend what would fund a trip around the world?" But over a life time, if they work hard after and keep coding after, they can 10 fold reap what they sow. If they get a tech job, it might be a 10-20k a year increase from whatever other field they're in, more if they were a barista or s…
18K + loss of income while in class and job searching + inability to write off the expense as job search/education costs. Even now making twice my previous salary, come tax time I will have taken home half of my income from the previous year. I'm not knocking my school for a second; it was great...
But for someone with a decade of work experience in tech before switching and no degree, I found the opportunities available -- especially fulfilling ones that provide the mentorship to give foundation to a long career -- few and far between post-graduation. The opportunity that I did take will lead to another year of just scraping by and a lot of uncertainty while I continue to "prove myself" worthy of a decent fulltime offer.
And I'm on the better end of the scale technically and "work-culturally" compared to my peers. There is a huge glut of devs around this experience level out there.
I learned too late that there are better options available. I wish that I had taken them, because now I'm faced with poor options ahead: a) great opportunity but stay poor a while more, b) financial security but no mentorship, c) great opportunity with company with incredibly uncertain future.
Because of my background, most of the places that interviewed me wanted to stick me in a 100% DevOps role, regardless of the position applied for. Frankly I am not interested in that at the moment.
I know it sounds like I'm complaining - honestly I have great options available in front of me and some of that credit surely goes to my school, but the best option and the one that I am taking would have been much more financially acceptable had I not done the school in the first place.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wouldn't say it gets coopted. I'd say it has historically gotten appropriated, and then the public has been too ignorant to tell the difference.
(Either through the unwillingness or incompetence of any of the original disciples to popularize the true meaning, or simple giving way beneath ever better funded commercial interests)
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be honest, I disagree here. I know on the onset 10-18K is a lot. In fact I warn people before they do a bootcamp: "Do you want to spend what would fund a trip around the world?" But over a life time, if they work hard after and keep coding after, they can 10 fold reap what they sow. If they get a tech job, it might be a 10-20k a year increase from whatever other field they're in, more if they were a barista or s…
18K + loss of income while in class and job searching + inability to write off the expense as job search/education costs. Even now making twice my previous salary, come tax time I will have taken home half of my income from the previous year. I'm not knocking my school for a second; it was great... But for someone with a decade of work experience in tech before switching and no degree, I found the opportunities avail…
> I found the opportunities available -- especially fulfilling ones that provide the mentorship to give foundation to a long career -- few and far between post-graduation. The opportunity that I did take will lead to another year of just scraping by and a lot of uncertainty while I continue to "prove myself" worthy of a decent fulltime offer.
I appreciate the honesty. I think you hit upon a common problem. There's really not a great job track for people coming out of bootcamps. Also, you're right, it deserves mentioning that those months afterward while you hunt for a job are lean months indeed.
I think a company that goes all in on bootcamp grads and makes what is essentially a second program for them might really find themselves with a lot of talent on their hands. But sadly most jobs you'll get afterward lack mentorship.
Which, not to beat a dead horse, but this industry needs to get a better grasp on tech mentorship.
I'm curious to know what better options you're talking about?
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#169Garbage article.
Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
#170I 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…
> 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.
Depends on how you define "buck". The Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation both have explicit agendas and goals that they wish to be promoted.
In terms of DnD-style character alignments, folks like the EFF and FSF can be characterized as "chaotic/neutral good", whereas the hacker ethos is closer to "chaotic neutral". The article's Wikileaks and Anonymous both lean chaotic good/evil (depending on perspective). TOR is closer to that "chaotic neutral".
The differences among hackerdom, Valleydom, and crackerdom lie in these alignment deviations, too. Valleydom swings hard-lawful, while crackerdom tends to swing too far in either direction on the good/evil spectrum for it to really fall into the realm of hackerdom (which tends toward neutrality). The cases where crackerdom and hackerdom overlap (including the cases that the article describes, like "Cap'n Crunch") tend to share that "chaotic neutral" alignment; the differences between a grey-hat cracker and a hacker are often nonexistent in this particular sense (though differences may arise based on ingenuity; for example, a grey-hat cracker might not be a hacker if one relies heavily on existing information (i.e. a "script kiddie") instead of seeking to discover new things for oneself).