I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.
My take is a bit worse than the GP: Theres people interested in that but nowadays they sell their skills for money. That's why you see lots of ransomware, darkweb sells and whatnot.
Even the torrent-ing has shown the change of culture: back in the Napster, kazaa, imem days, people (layman) shared just because. Now theres not that much interesting material, and a lot of it is behind private trackers that make you jump through hoops to get in the club.
He had some _awesome_ stuff! :-D
There are plenty of hacker culture areas, they just aren't the same as the 90's and 00's. Neither were the 90's the same as the 80's. In fact, I'd argue the 00's were nothing like the 90's either.
The spaces are there. You'll need to abandon the thing you know. (And for many of us, that's hard, because the thing we know is also feeding us - but that, too, was always true)
When computers were small, dumb, and did very little on their own, creative integration of heterogeneous pieces was rewarded and rewarding. Computers are now large, complicated, distributed, and part of a whole ecosystem. The kind of "hacker-shaped" grit that makes someone do something neat gluing a telephone receiver to a TV tuner? Well that's a fun Adafruit demo, but you could have done it easier and faster on a Raspberry Pi, and hell, there's already the scragglypete/tv-phoner repo that you really should have used (if you'd done a bit of research before you whipped out the glue gun, you'd have found the StackOverflow post from three months ago where someone went "Hey, I want to glue my telephone receiver to my TV tuner" and they were directed to that project). And while we're on the subject, that's not nearly as useful as the telephone-receiver-glued-to-a-tv-tuner emulator in this Docker container, because it does exactly what your workbench solution does but you can deploy eighty of them in one minute with a few shell commands and some money thrown at AWS...
Hacking is less cowboy-shaped for the same reason there are fewer cowboys... Eventually, the pioneer towns give way to the skyscrapers and city streets because once the wilderness is tamed, the city is way more powerful, comfortable, and productive than the cowboy life.