How is the hacker culture different between the late nineties and now?
The question says it all. If you have seen or were part of the hacker culture during the early days, how do you see it different now?
I'm not active at all anymore in infosec (white or blackhat), so it's impossible for me to draw a comparison. But I can tell you that back then it was very much more about trading information and socializing. Google around for anything published from a guy named Fravia. When I remember those days, he more than anybody captured the philosophy I wanted to subscribe to. These days it sounds pretty scary. Back then you could get in trouble for phreaking some phone calls and end up with a stern talking to from the telco. Now you aim a webcrawler at the wrong service and they lock you up.
It also seems like blackhats now have a much more mature ecosystem and financial motives. Right around Defcon6 I think it was, hacker groups started building commercial product and people landed on episodes of MTV True Life. I think that was a pretty important shift.
tl;dr more fun, way less scary?
Edit: If you're talking about programming in general and the dot-com bubble, that's a different story. I may have missed the point.
One thing has changed: nowadays you can be even more reclusive and asocial than in the early, diskette-swapping, meatspace-meeting days.
Hacking will always be the same activity despite having more code at your disposal. Keep on hacking relentlessly and one day you'll make a sweet hack. Only then you truly understand what it is to be a hacker.
...or in the even earlier days when all the hackers hung out together in a terminal room. I learned a lot about Unix in the early '80s by sitting side by side with some accomplished Unix hackers, to the point where the powers that be gave me the root password on the system (a PDP 11/45 running Seventh Edition Unix).