Reclaiming the hacker culture

I read the headline and thought excitedly that somebody was proposing reclaiming the term "hacker" from the startup industry who has co-opted and defined it as something involving venture capital and minimum viable products. Maybe I'll have to write that article.

Great article!

It is sad how this culture of discovery and hacking is being killed by a stupid "human beings factory" mentality.

These days I was chatting with a friend and suddenly she stared blankly at the crowd and said "look, everyone dresses the same, everyone looks the same".

It's amazing how you turn on the TV and girls in the USA dress just like those in Brazil.

Aldous Huxley predicted we wouldn't be alienated by state oppression or censorship. He predicted we'd have so many artificial distractions, that folks would just alienate themselves.

Nobody wants to take electronics apart anymore, nobody fixes their own automobiles anymore, nobody even dresses differently! We don't question official stories, we believe unbelievable things because the TV told us so. Where are all the inquiring minds? Why is it that when someone is curious and questions things they are called conspiracy nuts? When did the inquiring mind die and become an outcast, a danger for society?

Humanity is becoming dull, self-censored, machinelike. I believe it was either Picasso or Einstein which once said computers were stupid, because they only provided answers. Humans are becoming just like that! Nobody asks questions anymore, everyone just wants to have answers, as if we're stupid robots made to behave according to a standard.

Where's the life! The creativity! The will to take the thing apart and discover!?

Just look at the WWW today. All the websites look the same, have you noticed?

In the early WWW there were terrible spinning things in GIF's, animated banners, horrible neon color pages that hurt the eye, blinking tags(yuck). People just published whatever on the WWW. But it was true, honest, it was legit stuff that folks just wanted to publish. Look at what we have today.

Nowadays every new web site seems to be a marketing project that read some search engine's manuals before publishing.

Look guys I made this thing called Shit-a-gram! It mashes up all sorts of shit from Facebook, and if you name it gram you go virally floated to targetted audiences with immense purchasing power!

Where's the Geocities of today, where everyone did something different and the WWW was truly free? Even if those sites where dead ugly, they were true, they were original, they were the fruit of the hacking mentality, to do something different, freely.

This article got me thinking how much of that we've lost to a stupid culture of control.

Webmasters these days ask search engines for permission to link to some place, to write certain contents which might not meet certain "quality guidelines"(read: what makes the search engines a profit).

How did we reach this point? Where's the freedom? Where's the creativity?