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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

While it was a interesting read and definitely had several good points, I don't agree this is a "new" hacker ethic.

It bears no semblance to the original, and is of a fundamentally different nature.

The original is a short and simple declarative list of principles towards a goal.

This is a looooong list of ambiguous wishy washy questions whose intent is unclear and with little relation to the original.

Trying to brand this as a "new" hacker ethos is just abusing the recognition of the original to push your own (completely different) ideas and agenda.

I'm not going to call it entirely disingenuous, but it does come off with a bad smell of politics.

Count me out.

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  Trying to brand this as a "new" hacker ethos is just abusing the recognition of the original to push your own (completely different) ideas and agenda.
  I'm not going to call it entirely disingenuous, but it does come off with a bad smell of politics.

You didn't say this (and I'm not asserting that you believe it), but it's easy to read this statement and have the feeling that the original "hacker ethos" was devoid of politics or trying to push an agenda. But it was totally politics and it was totally trying to push an agenda.

One may prefer the original to this new ethos, but anyone claiming to speak for a large group of people is engaging in politics. To borrow an idea from the essay, you are forgetting the diversity of that group's opinions when you claim it can be boiled down into short pithy statements.

It's a speaker talking about the ethos they'd like to see the hacker community adopt. If you want to call that "pushing an agenda" or "disingenuous" then it would help if you'd clarify what you thought the speaker said they were going to do. They were up front about the fact that they were discussing the values they think are important to adopt – that's exactly what the talk is about!

The talk is a direct response to the "old" hacker ethos. Each point addresses the same topic as the original, so there's a pretty strong relation. It's hard to "abuse the recognition of the original" when you're making a point by point response.

And, those values and approaches the speaker describes in that response are different from the ones in the original. So in comparison to that old version, this is new.

In short, it's completely unclear to me where your criticisms are coming from.

A new version of something existing should show clearly where it came from it. It should represent an iteration.

The original represented a celebration of technology and it's possibilities in competent and eager hands, when unconstrained. The new version is all about compromise and politics. It's political first, and only incidentally technological.

The original was short and concrete. This spans 20 pages and makes zero concrete principles.

The author misrepresents the simplicity of the original Hacker ethos as an absolutism, then moves on to show how absolutism has flaws. Shocking, eh?

I could go on, but I think my stance should be fairly obvious by now.

The original was a book! Yes, there was a nice concise list in that book, but this article is a response to more than just that list.

You seem to be thinking that "hacker ethos" means "Hacker Ethos™ by Levy" when the speaker is using it as... the word "ethos". There's no need for a response to be an iteration when there's just a fundamental disagreement about what ethics we should pursue.

> It's political first, and only incidentally technological.

"Information should be free" and "mistrust authority" are both obviously political statements, and most of the others are at least somewhat political in nature. That you don't see them as political is a reflection of you, not of some timeless pure technological nature inherent in them.

The original is a short and simple declarative list of principles towards a goal.

What was that goal? Could it be ascertained from the "short and simple list" alone, or is it only evident in conjunction with a collection of cultural assumptions?

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