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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#211

Post by kpennell »

dvanduzer wrote: post #204
kpennell wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are some decent meetups in town, but the really cool folks don't seem to leave their personal labs very often, unfortunately. They're around, though. Still new and hard to say, but this might be a good place to meet a more eclectic group: http://denvertoollibrary.org

Thanks for the breadcrumb.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#213

Post by talideon »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #49
amyjess wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article just sounds fundamentally flawed to me. Let's consult the Jargon File. It was written by old-school hackers, and it hasn't been updated in years. It should have a handle on what it means to be a hacker. Let their definition of "hacker": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html The first seven senses all give the same impression: a hacker is somebody who likes to tinker with stuff out of intellectual…

ESR's "How to be a Hacker" essay explicitly lists anti-authoritarianism as part of the hacker ethic/attitude, however: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#attitude Not that I have much of an affinity for ESR, but he is a spokesman.

I see that more as ESR's spin on things rather than being an accurate reflection of reality. He is, after all, somewhat biased in that direction.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#214

Post by selimthegrim »

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…

I left Portland a month after you arrived. The combination of lack of seriousness about education (failure to meet state minimum standard instructional hours, anyone), anti fluoride stupidity, and trustafarians got on my nerves, as well as persistently low wages. I do miss the weather (and had no trouble finding co working spaces even then)

For my part I'd recommend Montreal - I was impressed by the hackerspaces and coworking there

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#215

Post by eru »

hyperpallium wrote: post #197
veddox wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I guess there can be means of communication that are technically different at any one point in time.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#216

Post by eru »

a-dub wrote: post #111
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. : )

It's not the suits. Suits can actually be pretty comfortable, if you spend enough money. It's the culture.

I suggest you try Wall Street and Silicon Valley, both.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#217

Post by gaius »

nostrademons wrote: post #151
gaius wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's actually true; otherwise how would they be a part of a community with other like-minded people? How would they authenticate themselves to one another? Hell's Angels are another good example.

"I like hanging out with you; if you don't like hanging out with me that's fine, but you wanna get together and talk about X?"

Then why would any subculture have a distinctive style of dress?

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#218

Post by stillsut »

ethbro wrote: post #165
stillsut wrote: post #157

Here'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 forgiv…

Sure, uber's competition loses...but that's like saying Google Search sucks because what bad things happend to Alta Vista and all their employees and investors.

The ones who win: rider and driver.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#219

Post by smadge »

paulhauggis wrote: post #155

"Gentrification is the process by which nebulous threats are pacified and alchemised into money" 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 examp…

> Gentrification ... can make you money if you own property

You are incorrect to assume that poor people own property in gentrifying neighborhoods. The dynamic is usually that low income renters get priced out of a neighborhood by high income renters.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#220

Post by qu4z-2 »

woah wrote: post #50
gue5t wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's nothing wrong with profit. What's wrong is monopoly and oligopoly. Defining an activity as only being up to your ideological standards if it is done for free means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor. Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.

> means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor.

But it is fun!

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