The Fall of Hacking

There is clearly a subset of hackers that is intelligent, thoughtful, logical, motivated, resourceful, and creative. If you go to TechCrunch and read the articles and comments, that subset is either diluted or non-existant. On the other hand, Hacker News is filled with that subset. It's amazing. So while the hacker culture as you describe it may indeed be dying out, I think that the real hacker is thriving, as evidenced through the community here. Let that old hacker culture die out. Let us build a new hacker culture that emphasizes that way of thought. And hope that this way of thought becomes mainstream.

Honestly, for me, increasing the number of Americans (and people elsewhere too) who can think more intelligently would be the holy grail of hacking problems. Can we create more hackers from modern society?

Putting aside the security aspect, I think that the terms hacker and programmer as still disparate. They're separated by structure.

If you still through and design something you're programming - putting a fair amount of thought and structure in it before you hit the editor. Just coding and coding is probably closer to hacking to me - it's a messy art but capable of brilliance.

On the security side of things there seems to be a split between 'white hat' security professionals which includes a few blowhards by all accounts, and 'black hats' who have changed from just mischief to working for nefarious types for money. Supposedly there are still quite a few 'grey hats' who are just about playing around and finding out interesting new things while ignoring the black and white side of things.

Sxsw is an awesome conference full of startup founders. People who make things.

If you take this perspective, hacking has progressively been dying since 1940. So choosing the prototypical 1990s hacker is quite arbitrary. In the 40s Turing had to make his own electro-mechanical computers from scratch and invent his own statistical techniques. In the 1990s, assembling computers was already vastly simplified. Whereas today you might buy a motherboard with integrated video, audio, and I/O, back then you had separate cards for everything and perhaps a choice of upgrading to 512 kB of L2 cache with a COAST module. In the 1990s you had to worry about IRQs and perhaps roll your own autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make sure you had enough conventional RAM to run your favourite game. This knowledge was much less technical than what our predecessors had to know and I'm sure they were saying the same things about us back then.

The thing is, most of the hackers that lament a bygone era have simply had the tasks they knew well made obsolete. They are upset because they learned tasks and not skills. Nobody cares today if you can roll a kick-ass DOS boot disk unless you were skilled enough to translate that knowledge into, say, fitting OS X Leopard onto a 1 GB USB memory stick.

Hacking is a human activity and as such will follow the same patterns and cultural cycles you would expect.

1. A Space Becomes Wide Open.

2. Legends Are Made Taming The Space.

3. Others Rush In And Establish A Second Tier.

4. Then A Third Tier.

5. Then A Fourth Tier.

6. Then A Fifth Tier.

7. Eventually, A New Crop Decides They Don't Want To be Tier 6 Because They Hate The Output Of Tier 5.

8. A Few Brilliant Minds Focus The General Angst Into "The Better Way" aka "A Space Becomes Wide Open"

GOTO 1;

Good, bad - this is how it has and will always work. Good output is rare and imitated to death over time. Every genre exists because someone did good work in it. Someone, somewhere, once wrote a good country western song. :)

I've been thinking of this in the context of YCombinator. The cost of launching a start up is low with a mix of wise guidance and smart, talented, relentlessly resourceful founders. So the space is wide open. PG and co are taming it and building legend and second tier imitators in the process. This is good. Why? Solely because the work coming out of the companies they fund is good.

The second tier companies are producing good work too. However, there will be a third and then a fourth and eventually the quality will dip. It won't be about building, it'll be about flipping - and flipping will fall in on itself in time.

At that point, either the whole thing becomes a smoking hole in the ground (unlikely) or there will be a reaction against it by the best and brightest. They will accomplish a piece of what PG and co set out to do, but couldn't because their structure didn't inherently support it. The "reaction against" will accomplish it, even though it will itself be flawed in some way and sow the seeds of its eventual demise as it ascends.

I think lamenting a decline is the wrong focus. Do good work yourself. Be the change you want to see, or be the spirit of what you value. So long as you are, it can't die. If it is dying and its outside of you, what was it to you anyway?