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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Just look at this thread of “hackers” saying “well the law is the law.”

It’s an embarrassment the degree to which smart educated leading edge communities have totally and utterly forfeited their own power for the security blanket of these domination based systems.

Actually it’s worse, the official ethos of success in America is now some cynical mix of “If you’re not scamming someone you’re not trying” and “Altruism is for suckers”

It’s like we’ve gotten to the point where even the people who disagree with Ayn Rand Objectvism have given up and just decided to play the same game just with different set of moral criteria

Or maybe this is a venture capitalist forum and of course it’s going to be overrun by people who believe in some version of domination as the right moral philosophy.

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Slashdot was a hacker forum, initially (prior to 1999). This has been a forum seen as an adjacency to a seed/VC incubator from the get-go.

People keeping to their roots and not going for the money like Richard Stallman are mocked. Steven Levy glorifies him in Hackers, then takes a break from books glorifying the Google corporation, and when Stallman is down delivers a coup de grace to Stallman in Wired, for soi disant very progressive reasons.

Of course Wired was founded by Rossetto as a continuation of the "New Right" project he was talking about in the New York Times in 1971.

I myself am not surprised that people wander out of their prep schools and universities into these corporations and hold these views. People's hegemonic ideas are borne from the material conditions and class relations they are in.

I was prepping to reply and you hit my point in your last paragraph. Through my youth I always assumed that people either saw through the corruption or had the wool pulled over their eyes, but the after working at a couple companies with several ex military contractor types and some some new inlaws, I've realized that for some people, tribe is above all. They are patriotic and loyal to the US system, which can do no wrong, and any perceived security or survival needs will always trump law and morals. These are the same thought processes that fuel the rise of fascism.

They are biological instincts, it's normal. What you can do is choosing your tribe as something other than the default one.

>Actually it’s worse, the official ethos of success in America is now some cynical mix of “If you’re not scamming someone you’re not trying” and “Altruism is for suckers”

And you're so certain that all of these people on this site saying "well the law is the law" are Americans? No perfectly obedient, money-loving Europeans among them? Absurd.

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