How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

As for yuppies vs. hackers, it helps to go back further, to understand how hippies morphed into yuppies. Hippies were mostly self-indulgent types who spouted bogus philosophy to justify their existence. Yuppies are mostly self-indulgent types who spout bogus philosophy to justify their existence. Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, led the transition from hippie to yuppie, from the commune to the "lifestyle industry", from growing your own food to Whole Foods.

What happened to the hacker ethos was the absorption of computing into the advertising industry. The hacker ethos survived the Microsoft era, but not the Google era. Microsoft was about tools, which was consistent with the hacker ethos. Google is about ad clicks, and its success created a whole industry focused on ads and user exploitation, not tools for user empowerment. That's what destroyed hacker culture.

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 compartmentalised, like the Dropbox brogrammers elbowing out kids at a playground. Public spaces increasingly become private in the name of profit.

Over time, the feel of free love will fade away entirely in the Bay Area. Everyone interesting who isn't a millionaire will be pushed to the margins, and eventually, more welcoming spaces, like Detroit. I implore the tech elite of Silicon Valley to consider a future where an expensive tech-centered monoculture makes the Bay Area an unattractive location for long-term employees, and instead relying on mercenary college grads who put up with the cost and the crazy for a few years before moving on to a more fulfilling job and place to call home.

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 successful counterculture is bound to be co-opted and exploited, but that doesn't mean that true participants in that culture shouldn't be able to subsist off of it.

Author makes the comparison to hip-hop culture which I think is a good one... there is a highly commercialized side of that culture in rap music, but there are still "underground" emcees not to mention deejays, beatboxers, graffiti writers, and others who are able to build up their culture due in no small part to the money coming in. Of course, to maintain a good balance, you need keepers-of-the-faith like the author who are willing to smack down arrogant upstarts who think they can piss all over and redefine the culture they claim to hail from.

Although the author poses some interesting ideas the piece feels long and muddled and I'm not at all sure who the audience is or what the call to action might be. Voice is unclear as some paragraphs are personal statements ("I") and others are observations about culture and economics.

It might be more powerful if it was drastically shorter and simpler ... or maybe if it was three times longer with more references and a stronger set of recommendations. I really can't say.

Who cares if 'yuppies' 'gentrify' hacking. You neither have to stop doing what you like because groups you don't care for have noticed nor do you have to waste energy and time and fight against them for doing so.

Do what you want to do regardless. That is the answer to the author's questions.

If you are a hacker, or artist or music lover or anything else of a certain type merely because someone else isn't of that type you are not really that thing.

You are going to find posers as a sub-culture enters the general awareness but you are also going to find trickster godlings in suits with boring titles on their business cards if you don't let the trappings blind you.

Last time I checked my history books, hackers used to be "good" when they started out. Yes, they were counter-cultural and yes, many had more or less pronounced anarchists tendencies. But they were definitely not the rebellious threat to public safety that the author portrays. In fact, the author gets it back to front: the real corruption of the term "hacker" happened twenty-five years ago, when the media started applying that label to cyber criminals. If anything, Silicon Valley is actively countering that original corruption by their current use of the term. (Though it is quite possible that they are misusing/over-using it in smaller ways.)

In short, this is a prime example of an article about a subculture that is untainted by any understanding of the same.

This theme can be further generalized into "money is ruining <insert_whatever>".

"Money is ruining music. Bing Crosby was a true artist; Today's performers like Lady Gaga is a commercial pandering."

"Money is ruining movies. The 1970s had auteur directors but now all we get at theaters is superheroes in spandex and Disney princesses because they need ROI from international blockbusters."

Writers, thinking they have something new to say, like to write on those themes. Readers, with a predisposition to seeing what's wrong with the world, like to read them. I suppose it's some sort of 1st-World ritual of commiseration. Personally, I find those essays devoid of any insight. I can acknowledge that there are undeniable trends there but I try to avoid categorizing them into value judgments of "good vs evil". I understand the economics of why Disney's "Frozen" is the type of film that theaters prefer to show rather than Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate".

An example of force-fitting his observations into categories of Hackers-vs-Yuppies (aka good-vs-evil) is his claim:

"I’m going to stake a claim on the word though, and state that the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets."

That broad-stroked brush is amateur writing. Google is a big place with ~57,000 employees. Sure, there are probably engineers doing soul-crushing work of parsing logs for server reliability or optimizing ad click conversions. But I'm sure there are other pockets of engineering where "hackers" are innovating and trying to change the world: driverless cars, balloon wifi, etc. It's the same contradictory pockets of bored employees coexisting with passionate hackers in different areas of large companies like Lockheed, AT&T Labs, Apple, etc.

As far as "yuppies" ruining the hackers, I'm not sure who's supposed to be an exemplar of the "hacker" that he wants to run SV. Steve Wozniak & Steve Jobs both came from middle class families. They weren't hobos living out of their cars and overturning the world with their hacker ethos. Apple took money from VC investors within 1 year of its founding. Even Richard Stallman's family background can also be considered "yuppie".

[1] https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

Concern has been expressed that the new generation of artists (musicians, actors etc.) in the UK seem to primarily come from upper middle class backgrounds[0]. I have started to wonder if the same could be said of the tech startup scene, e.g. in London. This could be due to the increasing difficulties someone would have living on a period of effectively zero income, unless they had the backing of rich parents.

[0] Could cite lots of articles, but http://www.standard.co.uk/business/markets/confessions-from-... is just one recent one.

Even though many people try to draw parallels between hackers who creatively modify systems and hackers who break into systems, there is little overlap these days, except, maybe some common roots in history and the fact that the latter usually have ample skills to do "creative" hacks as well.

Hacker culture being subverted? With multitude of security conferences, daily news about research into new vulnerabilities and increasingly frequent criminal hacks, I think hacker culture is actually doing pretty well in many of its diverse forms.

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.

Most of us aren't really hackers in that nostalgic sense. We're normal people, yuppies, kids, nerds, dorks, that one dude really into Aphex Twin in your office (everyone has one). We just happen to be good with computers.

Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5gBAj1...

So, that's the whole issue right there-- being a hacker has become a career path, and it's iteratively becoming more mainstream as the expected benefits are formalized and the stigmas exorcized[1]. That doesn't really sound all that bad, but the problem with gentrification is that it pushes the original tenants out, which is kinda scary when we're talking about the gentrification of an idea.

"Real" hackers become hard to identify among the masses who can sling a little javascript, and so they end up on the fringes of their own movement.

Of course, I'm not really sure how much such real hackers care. It'll be inconvenient when you can no longer identify a member of the tribe by a simple shibboleth, but that is not an insurmountable obstacle.

In my opinion, l33t H4x0r status is something you earn[2]. A yuppie having "hacker" on their business card is likely doing about as much damage to hackerdom as the self-titled programming rock stars, ninjas, wizards, etc. etc. did to those professional groups.

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0. Incidentally, does anyone else get reminded of things like The Rebel Sell or The Conquest of Cool by pieces like this? All of this handwringing serves to subtly indicate that the author is the sort of person who happens on these scenes before they were cool.

1. Even if you can't get rid of the more Stallman-esque members of the tribe, they get romanticized, deified, reduced to stories instead of people who could be brilliant, visionary, and kind, but moments later gross or needlessly rude.

2. Generally by spelling with your number keys.

Here's a good one (a few MB of text) about hacker encryption: https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.... — other traditional sources are the anarchist's cookbook and anything with more of a "fight the man" sense from the 70s and less of a "give us billions of dollars" sense from the post-popular-Internet era.

Hacking is about a nerd underclass fighting an oblivious overclass. Up until the late 90s, hackers had never "won." But with Internet mania sweeping the world, the nerds started to win. They became "the new man." Now the new overclass needs to be brought down themselves. You don't win hacking, you just become a more prominent target.

Hacking is also about exactly not that.

Hacking is just ignoring everybody else and doing good work you can be proud of. It's the only reason Apple exists. Hacking is about not trying to win, it's just about being clever.

Companies promote hiring the second kind of hacker because those people pay no attention to the value they create as long as they're having fun. So, you get someone puzzle-obsessed, give them a $50 million problem to solve, they solve it, and you keep paying them their $125k/year. Everybody's happy and the CEO gets to join the three comma club even sooner thanks to the selfless hackers who enjoy subsidizing billionaires while living at the bottom of the org chart.

The prototypical self-described hacker is an insecure person who attaches themselves to a romantic, powerful identity in order that they might attain these qualities themselves. But the power of the hacker is that of a magician: conjuring tricks in order to amaze the public and seem mysterious, powerful, skilled.

Here you see a normal web server with a firewall. It's totally secure. Nothing up my sleeve, as you can see. But wait... Alacazam! Now I have a remote shell!

If the author wanted to 'resist' traditional economic institutions they could become a circus performer. But then they couldn't fulfill the true 'fetish', which is that anti-authoritarian action through intellectual skill and craftiness is a pursuit to be proud of; one that the audience should revere.

The fact that this author's lofty rejection of traditional economic forces packaged in a sexy identity also has the ability to provide them a very comfortable living is, it would seem, totally accidental.

That's very much how it seems in NY right now.

> 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're selling you can be self-sufficient (as opposed to dependent on a beneficent family/non-profit organization/gov't). Obviously tech startups have deviated from the hobbyist "I'm getting my kicks" ethos because they're trying to hack the softer domain that is customer behavior. Solutions to real problems are always win-win, and to believe otherwise is pretty weird.

It always irks me when I hear people refer to themselves as hackers (Zuckerberg for one) and this article articulates why far better than I could.

1. Define what hacker means (prior to the yuppie gentrification), for numerous paragraphs. Bulk of article.

2. Big drop G paragraph: point actually starts here. (Just scroll down until you see a big G).

3. Fizzle on about gentrification of hacking, sort of making a point.

4. Send yuppies home.

It wasn't colonization that yuppified hackerdom. It was evolution. Most of the old school hackers became yuppies when they found out they could make lots of money off this stuff. New school hackers are entering the scene now and this is all they know.

The same thing happened to old school counterculture hippies who found out their ideas and their styles sell. Hippies founded loads of clothing brands, trendy shops, 'new urbanism', and the whole organic food movement, all of which are now massively profitable. Whole Foods Market (Nasdaq: WFM, an S&P500 component) is a direct evolutionary descendant of the dirt-worshipping weirdos that spurned 1950s white bread culture and danced in the streets on acid.

Nothing really goes extinct. The dinosaurs are still here. In America we have a custom of roasting one on Thanksgiving.

I grew up with the old school 90s cyberculture, and I miss it dearly. I remember downloading text files on phone phreaking from H/P/V/A BBSes, hacking PBXes to dial demo scene boards in Europe, and watching Second Reality (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA) for the first time on my 80386 with 4mb RAM.

I keep a few museum pieces of stuff I made back then here: http://adam.ierymenko.name/ye_olde_source_code.html

Today I am doing this: https://www.zerotier.com/

In its original form this old hacker culture is mostly dead. Its successor in an evolutionary sense is the startup scene.

If you doubt this thesis consider that you're hanging out at Hacker News, which is run by a billion dollar VC firm. I rest my case.

Yesterday we had Future Crew and L0PHT Heavy Industries. Today we have Y-Combinator and Andressen Horowitz. Today's hacker groups have cap tables.

By saying this I am not claiming that this was an entirely positive change. Evolution is not a progressive march 'upward'. The word evolution just means 'change over time.' Some features are gained, others are lost.

In evolving along these lines the hacker scene gained a lot but it also lost a lot. It lost the creative ethos of play and experimentation, replacing it with an engineering culture ruled by the hidebound plodding competence exported by top-ten universities and their engineering programs -- excellence at doing things we already know how to do. It also lost its countercultural and social ethos, replacing it with a yuppie get-rich mentality. But it gained the ability to act on the world stage. I would argue that hackerdom evolved into a global economic superpower with the capacity to influence not only global geopolitics but the future of human evolution.

You'll say it lost its soul and I won't argue with you. It certainly lost the things that made it great in its time and its place.

But that's the thing. Dinosaurs became birds because the dinosaur thing was played out. 90s hacker culture was great in its time and place. I wonder how relevant it would be today. This is not the 1980s or the 1990s. Everything has changed.

I think the question we need to be asking is what now? Where can we go from here? What might we evolve into that is perhaps more interesting than what we are today and how do we get there? The answer (IMHO) is never going back to the way things were. It's always the forward escape.

Edit: another useful question to ask is: what was it about old school hacker culture that predisposed it to evolve into this? It's particularly interesting to ask this about aspects of today's startup scene and Silicon Valley culture that you don't like. For example: I find the fratty 'brogrammer' thing irritating, but I can see its ancestry in the overwhelmingly male and somewhat sexist hacker culture of yore. It's just that minus the counterculture trappings.

Ouch. That hits hard.

This gist of the article is that the hacker impulse or ‘hacker ethic’ is a natural human response to large alienating infrastructures that allow little agency on the part of individuals. Hackers take different forms, but are identified by 1) a tendency towards creative rebellion that seeks to increase the agency of underdogs in the face of systems that are otherwise complex or oppressive or that limit access to experts 2) a tendency to acting out that rebellion by bending the rules of those who currently dominate such infrastructures (this is in contrast to the open rebellion of liberation leaders who stand in direct defiance of such rules). They thus are figures of deviance, seeking to ‘queer’ boundaries that are otherwise viewed as concrete and static.

Having set up a definition of what the hacker ethic is, the article goes on to argue that the ethic has been corrupted due to its association with computer culture in the public eye.

On the one hand, in a world where people increasingly rely on computers for subsistence, the bogeyman figure of the criminal computer ‘hacker’ has emerged, a figure of media sensationalism and moral panic.

On the other hand, the increasingly powerful technology industry has honed in on the desirable, unthreatening elements of the hacker ethic to present a friendly form of hacking as ‘on-the-fly problem-solving for profit’. This is described a process of ‘gentrification’: In most gentrification you have twin processes: On the one hand, a source culture is demonised as something scary to be avoided. On the other hand, it is simultaneously pacified, scrubbed of subversive content, and made to fit mainstream tastes. This has happened to rap culture, street culture, and even pagan rituals. And the article argues, it is now happening to hacker culture: “The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class.”

The article concludes with a reflection on whether you abandon the gentrified form, or whether you fight for it. There is reflection on whether the hacker impulse perhaps has always been an element of capitalist commodification processes, but argues that it is an ethos that needs to be protected: “In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit.”

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 example of politicians decreasing social mobility under the guise of helping the poor.