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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

And then decades later, those hackers built the infrastructure for systems of surveillance and control that would have just been a wet dream for those "1950's technobrains," and modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them, and complain that the internet liberating humanity from the shackles of corporate information and communication control has just caused the normies to ruin its quirky charm.

Who will save the revolution from the rot of its own success?

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I'd agree that the hacker counter-culture that saw technology as a door to Freedom has largely fizzled out and been replaced by hackers who see technology as a path to money. But I cant think of any of the people who were pushing it and are still around today who sold out. Stallman is still a firebrand. I've been reading 2600 again and Emanuel Goldstein hasn't sold out.

Who are you thinking of?

I guess @krapp is thinking about the *chan crowd and their echo chambers where white supremacism goes back and forth in a positive feedback loop that, from time to time, gives birth to a violent threat against society.

Stallman is a perfect example. He's one of the most obnoxious and disrespectful people on earth, not to mention a rape apologist, of course he should be expelled from society! And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly despicable were the same things that allowed him to accomplish what he did in the first place.

I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.

>And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly despicable were the same things that allowed him to accomplish what he did in the first place.

And yet those personality flaws wound up being the reason he is no longer president of the FSF or on the MIT board of directors.

Being obnoxious, disrespectful and a rape apologist didn't help him accomplish anything in regards to free software. He succeeded despite those personality flaws, because the community around him enabled him, and many would (and have) argued that he has held the progress of the movement back.

>I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.

Being an asshole doesn't make you a good leader or effective communicator. I feel like this is some weird cargo-cult belief that's entered the community because of people like Stallman, Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs. We don't have to give scum like him power, we choose to, because for some reason we consider giving in to empathy and tolerance to be a form of weakness.

And then decades later, those hackers built the infrastructure for systems of surveillance and control that would have just been a wet dream for those "1950's technobrains,"

Yeah. I'd like to think that at least some of that was just over-optimism and not realizing the negative ends that all of this technology could/would be put to. But I'm sure some of the old-skool hackers "sold out" and figured "hey, just give me the money". The need to pay rent, buy food, etc. is a pretty strong compulsion. That said, I'd like to think that at least some of this crowd have made conscious decisions over the years to not work on certain projects / technologies / whatever, out of the ethical considerations.

modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them

It raises the issue of who gets to decide what terms mean, and the spectre of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but one might argue that those "modern hackers" you refer to aren't actually hackers as a result of their embracing those things.

> one might argue that those "modern hackers" you refer to aren't actually hackers as a result of their embracing those things.

That's one way to look at it, and judging from the downvotes my comment has been getting, the way a lot of people here see it.

But to me, hackers aren't as immune to political or cultural influence as perhaps they'd like to believe, and it's inevitable that the web and its culture (and the general rightward shift that culture seems to be undergoing) will have transformed hackers as it has everything else.

>modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them

Pardon my ignorance, but can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

There are only two endgames for a subculture. Either it goes mainstream and loses everything that ever made it special, or it walls itself off from the mainstream and goes mad, like how the Students for a Democratic Society turned into the Weather Underground.

Hacker culture, and the internet in general, fragmented into two pieces, one that went each way. The distributed panopticon finds all signs of life and stifles it into generic corporatized beigeness. The only places outside its reach are full of fascists and other subhuman vermin.

I just feel like we've lost something we can never get back.

They were not same hackers and likely not even spiritual followers.

Maybe modern underground hackers are embracing racism and extremism. But think about the disconnect between the media's reporting of hackers and what hackers actually were even twenty years ago. A hacker is, according to the news, whatever makes society hate them more. I doubt anybody smart enough to break something miles away with just a keyboard is stupid enough to believe one race is more or less than another.

Disclaimer: I'm not a hacker.

> I doubt anybody smart enough to break something miles away with just a keyboard is stupid enough to believe one race is more or less than another.

Unfortunately there's a lot of evidence showing the contrary.

Since I'm not understanding the down votes, just to be clear: I'm talking that unfortunately, there seems to be people that are smart and yet still believe one race is more or less than another.

> there seems to be people that are smart and yet still believe one race is more or less than another

then they aren't.

I would disagree that modern hackers embrace racism and bigotry. I feel like that's more of the "unwashed masses" on the Internet.

I take it you're not familiar with GNAA... hackers are just people like everybody else, nothing about them is inherently anti-racist.

I'm not sure the GNAA trolls on /. really qualify as "hackers", although this - again - takes us back into "no true scotsman" territory. The thing is, since most of those posts were Anonymous Cowards, it's hard to know how much actual racist intent was associated with any of it, and how much of it was just trolling / memes and "for the lulz".

Does the last bit matter? Being racist for ‘fun’ is still racism it’s just the poster in question doesn’t want to take responsibility for their comfort with it.

The revolution never had much success?

What do you think is the hacker culture? Everything you hate about tech is post hacker culture. Also its purely about the hack value, making computers do what everyone thought was impossible before, and sharing it with those who appreciate it. That attitude surely have fizzled down. And that is simply the heart of hacker culture.

Being good person or bad person is totally tangential. You can be a good hacker, but maybe not the best person, or you can be a good hacker and absolutely nice.

EDIT: The scene is not actually dead. People are still doing magic with 8 bit computers and Amigas. The sky is the limit inside the box!

Who would imagine we would become the Krell so soon...

I guess that, while trying to connect ourselves so all of us could have a voice, we just invented the machines that brought into reality the worst demons in us.

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