How yuppies hacked the original hacker ethos (2015)
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The author makes a comparison between hackers and counter-culture movements, but doesn't seem to understand that hacking (in all its aspects) is orthogonal to "counter-culture." He also seems to be largely unaware of the ethical hacking (MIT-style). He would do well to read through ESR's page for a while.
That is, you can be a CEO, an investor, and a hacker, if you want to make cool things and give them away for free.
If you want to talk about illicit hacking....that's seen a decline because it got harder. In the 90s, most hackers were kids (Legions of Doom, Control-c, etc). Now most hackers are parts of professional criminal organizations or governments.
In the last decade or so, we've seen the rise of groups like Anonymous, who are hacktivists....meaning they kind of do have a goal of actually subverting things.
You can't really know how something works without also being able to make it do something that wasn't intended.
I feel counter-culture and a little bit punk every time I fix something instead of buying a new one.
I feel a little MORE CC and punk if I do it with bailing wire and pliers from my back pocket, on the spot, in front of people.
Hacking is counter-culture because culture is lame and hacking is awesome. You can't --and I mean, logically-- you can't be good at things without finding yourself going against the flow. Because being independently strong is just not where the flow is pointed.
I'm gonna stop you right there. The idea that ESR is the final authority on what the "hacker ethos" is or should be is much more offensively wrong than anything in this article.
Thank you. I had wrote something about that in a comment I was working on minute ago, but it didn't make the final cut. I'll attempt to reproduce it:
ESR is so broken that he thinks being peerless is a good thing. The only time in my life when any of his writing made any sense to me was when I was myself so desperately alone that I didn't even realize what I was missing. I have considered reaching out to him, offering him a lifeline... But after reading his blog, I am sorry to predict that he would interpret any interaction with another human that results in his experience of an actual feeling to be an assault on his person, and that he is likely to respond in kind.
So I mentioned my position (that he is an embarrassment) to make clear to the parent poster that I wasn't defending ESR per se - before immediately declaring that our shared distaste of ESR is not relevant to the discussion. I'm replying out of courtesy, since you asked, but I don't think discussing negative aspects of ESR is relevant to the larger topics here.
> more authentic explanation of these ethos (cause, frankly, I though that ESR did a good job there)?
I think ESR's comments on the hacker ethos are just fine. His other positions and writing in no way detracts from this. I think there are many places where ESR did 'a good job'.
> is there something that I missed completely?
I don't have any fair or balanced sources to share with you, but if you'd like to see links cherry picked by people who have a heavy anti-ESR bias, you can check out the not-so-rational "rationalwiki". I don't endorse nor agree with all that's said here, but it sheds light on why some people dislike ESR.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Footnotes
Edit: A more concise summary is found in this person's views: http://cal-harding.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-i-hate-eric-raym...
Also, see daveloyall's comments on this page. I don't fully agree with him either, but they are illuminating.
Edit: never mind, just checked jargon-1 and the ethos entry either came from ESR or Guy Steele (both contributed to the rewrite afaik).
No one is suggesting he is a neutral source, nor an authority, only that his definition may be useful
I saw nothing to contradict my observation when I visited MIT. (Granted, class was not in session and I was obviously part of the FSF conference, so I'm sure I encountered a very much non-random sampling of MIT folk...)
What do they say over beer?
All the real elite programmers are wobblies
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold
Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the Union makes us strongThere's politics and there's science/engineering - just about a different kind of law? Perhaps the important distinction is between rebelling for a better king versus rebelling for another king. Though maybe a lot of hacking is for its own sake, not a means to an end... rebelling without a cause.
Poor esr, once he became an authority with CatB, he lost the antiauthoritarians.
In a way, the jargon file's definition reflects an early step on the deductive/prescriptive path that led to exactly what the author is lamenting.
It would be interesting to see your explanation of what the article's "hacker spirit" though.
The previous entry ("hacker") gets a bit more general, but is still quite computer-centric. It references non-computer activities to show that there is more to it, but does not really attempt to capture how these aspects fit together.
Specific quotes that I liked from the article:
>> Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things.
> the archetype of ‘the hacker’ is essentially that of an individual attempting to live an empowered and unalienated life. It is outsider in spirit, seeking empowerment outside the terms set by the mainstream establishment.
> unlike the straightforward activist who defines himself in direct opposition to existing systems, hackers work obliquely. The hacker is ambiguous, specialising in deviance from established boundaries, including ideological battle lines. It’s a trickster spirit, subversive and hard to pin down. And, arguably, rather than aiming towards some specific reformist end, the hacker spirit is a ‘way of being’, an attitude towards the world.
Now gosh maybe this is really just overgeneralizing "hacker" into a fancy word for critical thinking by someone who sees through groupthink and happens to be at the right place at the right time to do something clever. But if there's an aspect to "hacker" that means something beyond just someone who plays with computers, I'd say the article did a pretty good job trying to describe that general concept.
[EDIT] Wikipedia suggests it is Eric S. Raymond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond I still don't know why people hate him.
As in:
"Oh, that thing he said, it must have been an
accident that it sounded kinda (sexist|racist|
conceited|sociopathic|selfish|ignorant)."
I think Brett Scott pretty clearly defined what he meant when he said "hacker", so there's not much point in arguing about what the word "hacker" means. You know what he means at least enough to disagree with his definition. Semantics just aren't that interesting.
Scott's bigger point is that there existed a culture of hackers which has largely been whitewashed, watered down, and appropriated by business interests. Your own post is an example of this gentrification: you've adopted a definition where "hacker" is just "nerd" with a cooler connotation, where "free" means "gratis" and counter-culture is orthogonal. But people in the culture Scott is describing, nerds are boring, "free" means "libre" and counter-culture is inherently integral to what a hacker is. You can disagree that the word means that, but you can't deny that that ethos exists, or that it is being subsumed by a Web 2.0 version of itself.
The author is insulting people who use the word "hacker" in ways he doesn't like. If the author is going to do that, he should at least use the common definition of the word....
And I think that if you took a step back from your semantic argument, you'd realize that it would be impossible for Scott to talk about the social phenomenon he's describing while using your version of the word "hacker". That's the definition of newspeak: you're insisting on a definition of the word such that Scott's idea cannot be expressed.
Personally, I value communication over the specific words used. I think it's clear to everyone what Scott means when he says "hacker", so he communicated effectively.
I've never heard the word hacker used the way Scott describes it. If you have references, that would be interesting.
If you want to claim that a hacker counter-culture didn't exist and wasn't replaced by an insipid version of itself, I'll be happy to engage you on that topic. Otherwise, this will be my last post in this conversation.
And every once in a while, we have a little shift in the technological landscape, and for a second or two, a few hackers start making money and getting cultural attention. And this attention society also brings attention from sellers, who come over and make themselves at home.
Just a shift in attention would lead to the de-emphasis of the hacker (at least outside of infosec companies). The interesting point that you don't address is why the "hacker" moniker is bigger than ever. It wasn't a foregone conclusion. Professional software and hardware companies existed before "hacker" was thrust into the public consciousness as anything other then baddies on the news. It's not like there weren't hackers back then. Something changed, that something was branding.
There is cultural cachet to be had in the "hacker" brand. And anyone that fancies themselves more hip than what they envision programming to be like at IBM or a government contractor wants in. At least until everyone figures out hacker is a meaningless term, then it's onto the next scam.
For a take on how these things happen that I find much more interesting than this article: http://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/134371738229/on-the-or...
And I'm not arguing that the end of everything is to enrich oneselves (or one's masters). I'm arguing that I've worked at far too many companies that went bust, because their business model was broken, in order to fund my own hacker activities outside of that.
There's just no avoiding the need to acquire resources, and organizations/movements/individuals that can do it better have a obvious and historically established survival advantage. The commoditization of technology is no exception.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you are saying that hackers can't survive because the scene can't exist without the corporations funding it's participants. This is contrary to history. In my generation the industry considered us criminals even though most of us weren't. The hacker scene was around long before the industry embraced it and will be around long after whatever unicorn of the month loses it's horn. It's not going anywhere. It constantly changes and every generation has added it's own chapter, but that's what makes it what it is. So that leads me to my next question... What could you have not done if you didn't have corporate funding from these several failed companies you worked for? What prevented you from just doing it anyways?
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that hackers have to eat, and the amount of hacking they get to do is proportional to the time they don't have to spend finding food.
That said, it is ridiculous for an employee of facebook to refer to themselves as a hacker. They're a corporate shill, and nothing more.
Suggested reading: Bobos in Paradise.[1]
They are relatively affluent but have only new things in their homes. Their art is exclusively abstract.
They smile too much.
Maybe the definition varies from region to region, or generation to generation.
Yeah, they should all burn in hell. Smilers...
"Yuppies" and "Hippies" cover swaths so wide that they contain different people.
The "income redistribution" yuppies are at the bottom, instagramming yoga.
The "fuck you, got mine" yuppies are higher up the wealth curve, on wall street.
It's also possible for someone to be both a yuppie and a hippie. Find these people in whole foods and wearing Michael Kors at a farmers market.
It's not just Baby Boomer hippies; you've also got Gen-X slackers doing the same thing, and you're starting to see it with the older Millennial hipsters as well.
Young people say they hate mainstream society and want nothing to do with it, and as they grow up they change their minds. It's a universal constant. On top of that, a lot of them were never sincere when they were part of the counterculture; a lot of Baby Boomers became hippies just because their friends were hippies or they thought becoming a hippie would get them laid. When being a hippie stopped being cool, they stopped being hippies. No different than any other generation chasing a trend for coolness points.
And then there's the fact that while the hippies were loud and got a lot of attention, they were still a minority of their generation. Not every yuppie was once a hippie, even though the hippies and yuppies were born in the same years. Remember that the Religious Right was founded by people of the same generation as the hippies.
On one hand, I don't want to discourage those people - some of them will find it's their calling and they become passionate about it. Most of them though just clutter up companies with people who can't think all that creatively and are way more interested in their next game of Ultimate or the new bar they're trying tonight than learning a new language or exploring technology. There's no 'itch' when it comes to tech work, just money.
I also feel like it's infected the rest of programming culture in general. Programmers have not traditionally been the sort of people who think you need meetups, whatever-a-thons, code camps, and other social-events-masquerading-as-hacking/tech. And if you apply occam's razor it's much less likely that they've discovered a new, better way of being a hacker/programmer, and more likely they were predisposed to backslapping, social drinking and partying already, so of course that's the kind of stuff they're going to try and spread more of in the industry - just as if you had a more technically-minded person in, say, Sales, who would have a hard time breaking their habits of thinking of things in engineering terms.
It sucks. I thought hacker & nerd culture would grow up and mature, instead it just got squashed out by the brogrammers.
Welcome to being just like every other profession out there. Most people don't like talking about work when they're not on the job. Honestly, the "you can't have a life outside work" attitude is far more toxic to our profession than any kind of "brogrammers".
I remember someone on HN saying they like living in SV because they can go to a bar and end up talking about JavaScript frameworks with some random stranger there. That just horrifies me--the last thing I want to do when I'm relaxing after work is to talk shop! (and, to be fair, there were a number of comments replying to them expressing the same sentiment)
a) you complain of the brogrammers
b) you complain of the google intern that switched from dance to CS even though one might argue we need many of more of them to respond to (a)
c) you complain of hackathons which have done much to make tech more inviting precisely to people other than brogrammers
d) finally, your view that the person who switched from dance to CS for better job prospects is mostly a menace...this precisely is a bro-perspective...that very thing you complain of!
I can't help but feel you just seem nostalgic of the good old days.
Writing code is a skill, and it's as much writing as code. Different life experiences give you different advantages in applying a particular skill to a particular problem, and the inability to recognize that is your shortcoming.
> I thought hacker & nerd culture would grow up and mature, instead it just got squashed out by the brogrammers.
It got squashed by both ends. A friend of mine in school wrote an op/ed in the newspaper on how "Geek culture" and "Greek culture" were two sides of the same coin, and I can't help but notice how this repeats itself constantly.
Frankly, nerd and hacker culture is growing the same as always, it's just that programming isn't exclusive to us anymore. We haven't gotten smaller, the playground's gotten bigger. So for god's sake show some of the smaller kids how the zipline works before they fall off and break their arm.
Most importantly, the definition of hacker is off. Considering how utterly impossible it is to give a good definition - ask 50 hackers what a hacker is, you'll get 50 answers - you can feel free to argue this. But I believe, as, it seems, do many of you, that being a hacker isn't about power, or counterculture, or anything like that. It's about creativity, ingenuity, intelligent problem solving, and it has an element of playfullness about it, and a certain pride, to say that you built it, that you know that it works, that you can trust it, and a determinedness to make that true, to fix it if it's broken, and improve it if it isn't.
To quote Cliff Stoll's exellent book, "The Cuckoo's Egg": "The people I knew who called themselves hackers were software wizards who managed to creatively program their way out of tight corners. They knew all the nooks and crannies of the operating system. Not dull software engineers who put in forty hours a week, but creative programmers who can't leave the computer until the machine's satisfied. A hacker identifies with the computer, knowing it like a friend."
Many will disagree. Feel free to write up or link your favorite definition.
People come to Seattle to work for Big Companies, not to start.
seems to me that for folks who participate in one element or another of this giant range of stuff .. the label is rather annoying.
It isn't that I am stupid but it makes for a really annoying read when I am having to think more about the words than the meaning.
I shouldn't have to re-read this article like it is a research paper just so I can absorb what you are saying.
For example:
>Any large and alienating infrastructure controlled by a technocratic elite is bound to provoke. In particular, it will nettle those who want to know how it works, those who like the thrill of transgressing, and those who value the principle of open access.
Okay, it makes sense what they are saying but does that not seem a little clunky to you?
Why not just say like:
> As the world has progressively become more entwined with technology, those providing these services have become more protective of the technology. As a result of this protectiveness, less people are able to fully study and understand how this infrastructure works.
disclaimer: not an English major ;)
As for that first sentence, I agree that your version is more clear, more accessible, but I also think that there is meaning lost. The author seems to want to draw attention to the clash of cultural values. This isn't conveyed so well in this more accessible version.
On another axis, his version evokes more powerful imagery and feelings. These words: 'alienating infrastrcuture, controlled, provoked, nettle, thrill, transgressing. 'value the principle' all have much larger emotional, visual, even tactile impact on me than the most emotional words in the other version.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, only that this may have been the authors goal (more so than showing off their vocab). The author may also consciously value (a) emotional/visual impact on those who bother to read over (b) making the work easy for a larger body of people to read.
By example, you seem to claim that "Any large and alienating infrastructure" is roughly equivalent to "[A world] ... more entwined with technology". Assuming "infrastructure" == "technology", the "entwined" part kind of fits the "large" part - which is value neutral -, but completely leaves aside the "alienating" part - which is not. I have (mostly) no problem with a world getting "entwined" with technology; the problem is the subset of that technology that ignores or betrays the needs and expectations of the people it claims to serve.
I could keep going and going: "has progressively become" != NULL, "those providing these services" != "technocratic elite", "... have become more protective" != "controlled by ...", "is bound to provoke" != "As a result of this protectiveness", etc.
At the end of day you are entitled to your own opinion, but please own up to it and present it as your own!!! Do not try to pass your own ideas as a simplified version of the original article. It is not.
May I ask how old you are, what part of the world or country you are from, how many zeros are in your net worth, and what your political preferences are (one or two words, please).
I'm not trying to violate your privacy, I'm just always a little curious about the landscape of ideas.