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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#191

Post by bcg1 »

veddox wrote: post #144
bcg1 wrote: post #124

This article is bound to ruffle some feathers around here. The writing is spot on but will cause some cognitive dissonance for some as the words ring true but conflict with the structures they have set up in their minds and in their lives. I think that the commercialization can be good though... the culture gets to live on and propagate when there is a way for hackers to make money doing what they love. Any successfu…

> you need keepers-of-the-faith like the author Sorry, but this author is no "keeper of the faith". He's a finance journalist, for goodness sake! See my comment above for more details.

Based on the content of his article it seems to me like he has a good grasp on the material IMHO. In any case, I generally don't equate the job title on someone's resume to the definition of what they are.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#192

Post by jaegerpicker »

yellowapple wrote: post #173
jaegerpicker wrote: post #41

This is such a poorly thought out article. The term hacker has also meant so many different things to so many people. I grew up with the 90's hacker scene. I was a teenager for almost all of the decade and I started programming and reading about, interacting with, and being a part of the 90's hackers groups. Those groups were called criminals, crackers, or cybergangs but a lot of the old school MIT crowd of hackers.…

> Then my age group entered the workforce and redefined the term to mean an excellent programmer, as in hacker news. It's worth noting that "hacker news" was probably never meant in the sense of "excellent programmer", but rather in the sense being criticized by the article: one of venture-capitalist-backed businesses "disrupting" industries to dominate said industries (bringing money to the venture capitalists in tu…

As was already pointed out this site was started with exactly the idea of a excellent programmer intended. IE PG's hacker vs blub programmers. Along with his theory that hackers will rise to the top over the blub because of their excellence in development. This was intended to break away from Reddit and other sources of news for hackers to help them elevate their ability. That's basically exactly my point hacker means many things to many people and is impossible for one group to co-opt. In short the article is non-sense.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#193

Post by kpennell »

Balgair wrote: post #79
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…

Portland, Denver, Nashville, Seattle (less so), even Boise are starting to take up that old mantel. I agree though, SF is now the gold rush town stultified by takes and not givers. Other commenters mention the Burn and that some SFers want the Burners gone, a mystery to a Bay Area native that left. I guess things really have changed there. The Burn was all about participation, not gawking, but recent Burns have seen…

Denverite I take it? I just moved there. I like it but really miss a lot of the west coast 'feel' (lived in SEA and SF before). I can't shake the sense of bro-ey white midwestern I feel in Denver, but perhaps I'm not looking hard enough just yet.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#194

Post by rayiner »

kimdouglasmason wrote: post #118
ryanSrich wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to my wife (a fifth generation Oregonian), being from "not California" is a big plus in that neck of the woods.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#195

Post by detrino »

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…

This is an over-simplification of the article which talks about much more than just labels. It talks about things like control of the internet, the destruction of the culture of Silicon Valley, and the people that co-opt hacker culture in an attempt to make money.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#196

Post by pharrington »

zo1 wrote: post #190
pharrington wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> " Maybe I'm wrong, and food, housing, transportation and communication really are primarily supply constrained where I live. " No, it's purely a governmental accountability problem. The money, the will and the goods are all there. The only problem is we're all dilly-dallying when it comes to holding the government accountable to provide basic life necessities to the needy. We all talk noble, but don't throw eggs at…

I think my main issue is that with automation and labor beyond a certain scale, there is no sensible tracing of individual labor to that which is produced. We're on Hacker News; its trivial to demonstrate that an individual or group's knowledge is often directly responsible for products and services the original party doesn't even know exists. Production and capital are no longer primarily guided by human will.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#197

Post by hyperpallium »

veddox wrote: post #184
hyperpallium wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Ham radio. It goes back further than living memory, to telegraph operators. They also used morse. And I have the impression that some aspects of unix terminals derive from those days... Edison grew up in those times, commercializing as much as he could. Yet hackers continued, as they do today. Though perhaps we've reached the end of the road with communications - the interconnected net of networks seems all encom…

> Can there be any new, technically difficult means of communication? I'm assuming you meant "technically different "? Either way: I can't think of any, but given the last few millenia of progress, it seems unlikely that we've reached the peak.

No, technically difficult. Otherwise, hackers are overrun by everyone else. Telegraph, ham radio, early computers were all technically difficult. Although new modes of communication are still coming - eg twitter, vine - they aren't technically difficult to use.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#198

Post by Mikushi »

mwfunk wrote: post #105
Mikushi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People like nice things. There I said it. Most people like nice cedar lined floors, expensive drinks and well cut clothes. And when you have those things, it's marvelous how quickly your disdain for the 'institution' evaporates. People are made to want nice thing, big difference. It's the result of the exploitation of a natural need (fear) by corporations and the 'institution' through modern advertising and propagan…

Or they have their own minds, which occasionally decide to do things you don't approve of. You're just as much a product of the media you consume and the ideals impressed upon you by friends and family as anyone else. It is much more invigorating to feel like one knows the truth and everyone else is brainwashed though.

You're putting words in my mouth, I'm very well aware of the fact that I'm the product of my experience. Though what you can't, and haven't, refute is that our consumerist society is based around advertising and manipulation techniques. The crux of advertising is "How do we get the consumer to buy product X?", and I don't think I need to tell you to what length companies go to advertise their product, regardless of their real nature.

I do not pretend to hold the truth,but I do hold an opinion based on my own experience (I work in advertising, ironic) and I stand by it as I've yet to be convinced of the contrary (and trust me, I'm looking for every chance to be proven wrong).

>Or they have their own minds

You are entirely too certain of this statement. Research/writings dating back to the late 1800' dive into the subject (and we still are) of the human mind, how it works, how and if it can be manipulated. Many of the advances of those days in phychology and neuroscience have been used as foundations of the advertising industry. See propaganda history as well since it's just another -not very liked- name for advertisement.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#199

Post by bshanks »

hyperpallium wrote: post #179
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…

Re: Ham radio. It goes back further than living memory, to telegraph operators. They also used morse. And I have the impression that some aspects of unix terminals derive from those days... Edison grew up in those times, commercializing as much as he could. Yet hackers continued, as they do today. Though perhaps we've reached the end of the road with communications - the interconnected net of networks seems all encom…

* transmission of qubits

* technology-mediated telepathy

* darknets

* internet-of-things

* space internet

* network communication to support pervasive augmented reality

* various new forms of symbolic communication supporting collaborative cognition (eg argument mapping in a way that allows a community to have a debate without any individual participant understanding all the details of either side; eg systems for an online community to speak in real-time through a human representative via voting on what the rep is to say)

* various new forms of technology-enabled language (eg going to a party and seeing a person talking and as they talk, around them appears various projected icons offering nuance, more information, or structured conversational protocol information regulating eg turn-taking; eg a form of language in which neither human understands all of the words they use, but in which both are using a computer assistant in the manner of computer-assisted chess)

* lowtech versions of advanced communications protocols, practiced by survivalists in case of an apocalypse and/or by people who want privacy from online surveillance (not that this would help unless there is no IRL surveillance in the vicinity), eg human-mediated blockchains, eg sneakernet message routing (eg Pynchon's Crying of Lot 39's Trystero), eg encryption by hand. And then variants of these which can interoperable with the electronic/high-tech versions.

* communication mediated by networks of AIs that dynamically modify/invent new communications protocols

Doubtful that all of those will be feasible/useful but probably some of them will be. I imagine that most of these will be difficult to use, at least at first.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#200

Post by akiselev »

sbilstein wrote: post #176
pyre wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why can't some of that happen right here in the Bay for everyone. Because then all of the people that protest things like high-rise apartments, and Google shuttle buses will show up to protest that too.

I'm not advocating a protest...I'm advocating that us techies should focus our extra energy for creative activities locally and share the, rather than keep them exclusive with this desert party. All these well known famous tech founders such as the FB guys or Larry and Sergey are big burners and certainly participate in arts there but are nowhere to be found right here in SF/Oakland. Same can be said about my peers s…

The grandparent is saying that the other residents of San Francisco who have no interest in going to Burning Man and protest stuff like Google buses would protest the art as well, whether it is in the form of an actual public protest or by opposing permits/funding at the local politics level. Especially when it comes to Burning Man art, one man's master piece is another's unnecessary traffic jam.

Many, if not the majority of the most interesting, art pieces can't even be safely installed or operated (yes, operated in the case of art cars) anywhere near a suburban or urban environment. Where else can you build several climbable three to five story buildings with labels like "Bank of Unamerica" and "Goldman Suchs" [1] just to destroy them in a blaze of glory more symbolic than the art itself? Where else can you drive around a giant party boat [2], explore a sunken pirate ship buried in the playa [3], or watch action movie style explosions light a giant effigy on fire [3]?

If you've ever seen the LED lights lining the Bay Bridge a few years ago, that was an art project costing in the same ballpark as some of the most impressive Burning Man art (i.e., like the dancing lady now found on Treasure Island) and took several years to get properly off the ground with all of the local politics involved in installing something on a major landmark.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KPrLgWHMF0

[2] http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/08/21/fashion/21DISRUPT1...

[3] http://blog.burningman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/pier2_...

[4] https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7414/10302625835_f9a0f51bef_b....

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