Ask HN: Hacker culture becomes mainstream. What's next?

8 points·ignifero··7 comments

Hacking, the culture of building things, ignoring conventions, moving quickly and breaking things has infiltrated biology, chemistry, electronics, software, space travel, politics etc. , it's becoming a mainstream mode of thinking and acting.

So, what's next?

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Ignoring conventions cannot be mainstream by design.

Of course what can happen (and has been going on for some time already) is that people will want to feel that they are. A lot of people do things that are very common and conventional but give them a feeling of being a rebel.

"Hackers" fall for that too. They can be waking up everyday with the feeling that they're right on their path to building an amazing thing when in fact they're doing nothing innovative. Just because people will have read essays by PG etc. will not make people suddenly building useful things and ignoring conventions. We'll just see (and are seeing) the convention shift.

The so called hacker community seems to have as many taboos as other communities.

What will happen next, I presume, is that absurd patent and copyright laws will start catching up to reality. Hopefully.

Well, I don't think that hacker culture is particularly anything new. Using your definition, almost every revolutionary figure since the dawn of time was a "hacker," which obviously isn't true, in the literal sense.

So, if anything, it would be like past revolutionary periods in history.

Solving real problems?

It infiltrates healthcare and education (hopefully).

Celebrate?

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