> We are, sadly, entering a new age of conformityWe have always been in an "age of conformity". For example, Obergefell v. Hodges was decided less than 5 years ago. There are still children who are homeless because they aren't sexually conformant.
What is changing is not the degree to which society demands conformity. All that is change is who has to conform, and the standards to which they have to conform.
Conformity is not bad. Abstaining from wanton murder and theft is conforming to social norms. What matters is whether the norms are good ones.
> The Hacker culture from which everything we have today in tech arose.
This is a nice origin fantasy, but it's really not true.
The uniforms at DoD and the suits at IBM/Intel/AT&T/Xerox/etc. played a huge role in envisioning, organizing, and bankrolling all that work.
Also, that work was done by of hundreds of thousands of white-collar and blue-collar professionals. Many of those engineers and technicians were not self-described "hackers" or "nerds". A lot of them contributed by digging ditches and climbing polls. A lot of them were brilliant engineers who at 5pm turned off the computer screen, went home to their families, and didn't think about work until 9am the next day.
> The culture which makes this site "Hacker" news, is one in which doing something interesting is more important than anything else... why aren't you doing something interesting?
Because some times boring things are important to help society function or to make money. Examples: Attending city council/school board meetings. Being a middle man. Running warehouses. Selling advertisements. Giving away vaccines and moz nets. And honestly 99% of other work done by companies, nonprofits, and active citizens. Including software companies. Boring, not interesting, and yet to varying degrees important. In fact, some of those things are super interesting (ad auctions, for example, are wonderful fun for math nerds) but not nearly as important as the boring things (passing out vaccines or setting up moz nets or taking minutes at a city council meeting -- seriously, not fun).
> But maybe it's this fear that leads us rushing back to deep moral systems likes religious fantastics when their faith is questioned.
We all have our convictions and stories in which we find meaning.
We're all unreasonable defensive about those stories we tell ourselves.
...In fact, on that note, one more thing to add to the list of boring things that we for some reason feel the need to do: political arguments on a news forum that financially benefits VC by tapping into a fantastical ethos about the origin of modern computing.
Now, tell me no one here is going to get unreasonably defensive about that ;-)
