The Fall of Hacking

This really strikes home for me. Hacking used to be very intellectual, especially in the open source world. Robert Morris created the first worm as a test to see how large the Internet was. RMS hacked out Emacs (mostly) on his own to build a Lisp interpreter/text editor. Linus made Linux so he could experiment with Unix for free.

Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore.

That said, I do think that it is really more of an evolution instead of a redefinition. I'm not sure that it's all bad and in some cases it's good; many startups have a really clever idea about software or technology behind them. Maybe it's that hacking is now about finding new and clever ways to integrate technology and computing into our lives instead of finding clever things in technology. In essence, maybe it's about writing for the world instead of writing for the programmer.

I'm not sure this is correct, but thoughts/comments are welcome (even from me, I might come back and edit this later as I think about it more).

I mean, I almost feel bad obviating your entire post, but you're just playing games with the semantics of the word "hacker", not observing useful phenomena. I even think that part of the semantic drift is quite possibly just reflecting a drift in the places you hang out, rather than fundamental changes in the real world.

If you want to go find those hackers, I'm sure you can still find them. I'm not very interested, myself, but I'm pretty sure they're still out there. Not so much on web forums, though.

In the meantime, if you want to do "hackery" things by pretty much any definition, you can find people to do it with online. The existence of "posers" doesn't make the real people go away.

Then those hackers grew up, got jobs, and started making real social connections. They learned that it's much more fun when people get to know the real you, when you can cooperate on projects with other brilliant minds instead of competing in secret, and that the UI (or even marketing) of something can affect its contextual "meaning" just as much as its technical design does (e.g. text messages and IM conversations are basically the same thing—but you use them for different things, at different times. This is, oddly, a sort of postmodernism.)

Inspired by their newly discovered social reality, and the suddenly-available power of the Internet to achieve it, the focus of hacking turned from "technical hacks", (which stood on their own and, as much as they positively benefitted you, never benefitted anyone else, and possibly harmed them) to "social hacks", which revealed that it was possible to have a non-zero-sum game, a program that benefits both you, and other people, because of the new interactions conceivable through it.

The former has definitely been diluted. But the latter is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof (apologies to Alan Moore).

If you want to know the internals of a project/framework, other people's perceptions of what 'hacking' means doesn't stop you from looking at the code (assuming foss).

You say "Does anyone really understand the internals of Ruby on Rails". Well, go look at it and understand it. Then look at the MRI and JVM implementations of Ruby -- and understand those. You can keep drilling all the way down until you're generating assembly.

The majority of your complaints is that the industry has moved in the direction of the assembly line. That may be the natural gravitation, and you may just be filling in a spot at work. But no one can stop you from learning the lower level details on your own time.

Read the linux and bsd kernel mailing lists. Find some irc channels for embedded systems. Check out what people are doing with CUDA. By definition, the mainstream will always bubble up on social aggregators. If you look elsewhere, you'll find the hacker culture is alive and well.

I think you went to the wrong place.