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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

What happened to all the hackers fighting for personal freedom and privacy? Meta paycheck too tasty?

We’re still fighting the fight. Turns out shifty assholes also figured out how to write code and get hired.

Thank you for your service!

In the early days of the information revolution, when computers were new and being nerdy was still seen (almost universally) as a bad thing, a very high proportion of computer enthusiasts were people already on the fringes of society, for one reason or another. For a large number of them, hacking was a way to express their preexisting antiestablishment tendencies. For a lot of them, they were also your basic angsty adolescents and young adults rebelling against The Man as soon as they found any way to do so.

As time went on, computers became more mainstream, and lots more people started using them as part of daily life. This didn't mean that the number of antiestablishment computer users or hackers went down—just that they were no longer nearly so high a percentage of the total number of computer users.

So the answer to "what happened to all the hackers fighting for personal freedom and privacy?" is kinda threefold:

1) They never went away. They're still here, at places like the EFF, fighting for our personal freedom and privacy. They're just much less noticeable in a world where everyone uses computers...and where many more of the prominent institutions actually know how to secure their networks.

2) They grew up. Captain Crunch, the famous phreaker, is 82 this year. Steve Wozniak is 74. And while, sure, some people reach that age and still maintain not merely a philosophy, but a practice, of activism, it's much harder to keep up, and even many of those whose principles do not change will shift to methods that stay more within the system (eg, supporting privacy legislation, or even running for office themselves).

3) They went to jail, were "scared straight", or died. The most prominent example of this group is, of course, Aaron Swartz, but many hacktivists will have had run-ins with the law, and of those many of them will have turned their back on the lifestyle to save themselves (even Captain Crunch was arrested and cooperated with the FBI).

Thanks for your thoughts! How can we create more hackers? I think the fear of punishment has really put a damper on things but not sure how that can be avoided.

Well, note that my conclusion is largely that we have not, in fact, decreased the number of hackers, nor their proportion within the general population—just their proportion within the computer-using population, and that only by adding a large number of non-hackers to that population. I'm skeptical that we can ever increase the proportion of the population that has the hacker mindset much higher than it is without some kind of overall cultural shift (something that's beyond our power to affect).

But it's also unquestionably true that it's much easier to be a "hacker", in the sense we think of from the 1960s-80s, in a time and field where the hardware and software is simpler, more open, and less obfuscated. As such, I think it's probably not helpful to long for those bygone days—especially the "simpler" part—which we are clearly never getting back until and unless we make a breakthrough that is just as revolutionary as the transistor and the microchip were (and I'm skeptical as to whether that's possible, both in terms of what physics allow ever, and in terms of the shape of the corporate landscape now and for the foreseeable future). Honestly, a lot of the things that were possible back then, a lot of the incentive to get into hacking, was stuff that's actually hugely dangerous or invasive. Instead, I think it's better to focus on what we can do to improve the latter two parts of that equation: more open, less obfuscated.

Personally, I would say that the way toward that is pushing for, creating, and working on more open protocols and open standards, and insisting that those be used to enable more interoperability in place of proprietary formats and integration only with other software and hardware from the same company.

Hacking isn't about crime. It's about exploration. There are lots of people showing "the youths" how interesting it is to break a lock or go around it. Basically, any time you can make a system do something fun, helpful, or interesting that it wasn't intended to do, that's hacking. You can be 100% law abiding with no fear of punishment and still get the full experience.

Who do you think found the issue?

Touché

at some point yah reach a cross road. either sellout and join big brother or join the wandering homeless hordes on the streets.

Eh. You can have a very comfortable career doing work that still lets you look at yourself in the mirror. You don’t have to choose to burn the world to pay the rent.

I agree with you but I also don’t. It’s a privilege to have the ability to choose which job you work.

Not in this case. If you’re qualified to get a job at a company who will pay you to sell out your neighbor, you’re qualified to get a job with a decent boss who’ll never ask you do to do this kind of thing, pays 90% as much, and is still many times the national average salary.

The alternatives are not doing evil vs starving. They’re getting paid well for doing evil, or getting paid well for doing good or at least neutral.

Ok you’ve convinced me!

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