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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

>Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while.

This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all. The broader question is is something like the original spirit of DefCon even still possible? The industry (and the stakes) are so much higher now that it seems impossible.

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You do 10 things at a small conference, everyone says "we need more of X{0}..X{9}", you have more things next year, more people, everyone wants more of whatever, more people, more problems with more people (security, cost, sponsors,..), more attention of mainstream media, more people next year, more push for politics, more people, more issues with more people, etc., and in the end, you get a boring business conference like many others.

I'm pretty sure that each of the niches could make their own conference now, at some small venue where a 100, 200, 500 people would come... SNES hacking and development? Sure, a small, really nice conference... but then someone would want NES too, and N64, and sega, and PS1, and corporate sponsors, and you end up with E3 instead of 50 retro developers and 150 curious people doing interesting stuff.

It is but you have to intentionally keep it small and limit tickets. I think one of the issues that Defcon has is that they just don't cap tickets; historically they could not, because you could only buy a badge with cash so there was no way of predicting how many people would show up.

I don't think it's really a matter of limited attendance. Smaller hacker conferences in the US are not much different in terms of baseline acceptance of government/defense presence. It's more of a cultural thing, and not a new one.

(That's not to say that there aren't conferences that are explicitly anti-MIC, because there are. But if you just sample by size, I suspect you'll find no correlation there.)

I've heard that toorcamp is the only US attempt to mirror a European hacker camp and that it doesn't work because the culture is just too different.

Speaking of culture, RIPE NCC allows individuals to have ASNs, with or without a case of Club Mate.

There are plenty of quieter, smaller conferences.

CCC might be able to survive because it’s European and multi lingual

CCC is not counterculture for ~10 years now. They have also become way too big and the vast majority of presentations are (extremely left-leaning) politics.

Hacker culture has always been left leaning, lol. Open source is a grand anarchist experiment.

You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"? Don't be daft.

We are on a message board run by a VC firm.

I've been in this scene 40+ years and for every Emmanuel Goldstein-type there's also a Dale Gribble.

At least dale never fucked kids.

> At least dale never fucked kids.

are you saying Corley did this? a work-safe search didn't turn anything up.

One of the benefits of modern sensibilities is that nyc2600 finally shook off all of its groomers. Of which there were many.

The other thing you have to realize is that in the infosec orbit, information is closely guarded currency.

When accusing someone of being a pedophile, it helps to have evidence, or else it's just illegal libel. Note that baselessly accusing someone of being a pedophile at CCC could get you prison time, since defamation is taken very seriously in that country.

> Hacker culture has always been left leaning

No it hasn't. It started as counterculture. 90's hacker ethos might as well make you a fascist these days.

Example please

I was using computers in the 80s, Usenet by the late 80s. The hacker ethos back then was about as far from fascism as one might imagine.

> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.

Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

> You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"?

You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.

When all you have left is petty political bitching, the conference has lost its meaning, it's just a Reddit meetup at that point.

I did notice that a bit with some old heroes like Phil Zimmermann. Very underwhelming. Many of them got absorbed by the corpo culture.

Personally I'm also working in a corp but I remain very leftist and activist. Luckily my employer also remains pretty progressive even with all the pressure from the US.

> You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.

But, are those people hackers anymore?

And, for what it's worth, how many of them have ever really been that?

There is another framing/view that the authoritarianism-anarchism axis is perpendicular to the left-right axis. Nobody's suggesting that fascism isn't fundamentally authoritarian, but "left leaning" is not mutually exclusive with "authoritarian", nor is it a synonym for "anarchist". See: East Germany, Soviet Union, China, North Korea.

Also, it's not kind to call someone 'daft' for expressing a political view you disagree with. Nobody's saying you should accept their perspective uncritically, but you don't need to be mean-spirited or engage in name-calling to critique their perspective. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

God this event still frustrates me two years later but sometimes they are left leaning to the point of ignoring reality. There was this talk about how corporations are not the solution to fixing climate change and the presenters wanted to push policy to mandate people use busses and public transportation(im summarizing).

I got up and pointed out that the first group that tries to push something like this will be the first group elected out of office in record time and companies like Tesla didn't form in a vacuum, they formed partially as a response to how ineffective government has been at moving the tech stack forward.

I also pointed out at how the talk was too Euro centric and that the presenters should visit the US or Canada and see why its so car centric. The presenters acknowledged that they haven't actually been to the US but pushed back with the NYC subway as an example of the US (which at the time was slowly collapsing).

The audience gave them a round of applause for that response. It really revealed to me how these guys act like they are so smart but they have this enormous blind spot because of the bubble they are in.

Funny enough after Trump got re-elected and all the right wing shifts started accelerating in Europe, they finally started to wake up in the "Illegal Instructions" theme of the subsequent conference.

> (extremely left-leaning) politics

This is like complaining about water being wet. Hacker culture has always been anti-right wing.

> This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all.

The CCC would never.

Europe, for all its authoritarianism and infringements of human rights (even in relatively liberal places like Germany) still seems to be trying to not backslide into full-on military-industrial complex like the US is/has.

If you honestly think that they're not either backsliding into the full-on military-industrial complex or benefiting from the American military-industrial complex, I have some nice ocean-front property in Kansas City to sell you.

EDIT:

If you don't believe me, ask the USMC about their nice new H&K service rifles. Did we need to do that? No, we could have thrown a nice piston upper on M16 lowers, but that doesn't keep the bier flowing in Oberndorf am Neckar. Or ask someone in the Pentagon about their partners at BAE.

Well yes we have military industry and back room deals but the industry here doesn't have the big lobby clout the MIC has in the US.

That's easy to do when you have the US on speed dial.

To do what? Blow up our pipelines? Use us as staging for bullshit invasions?

I mean, in the last 50 years, US called Italy, Germany more than the reverse. And if you don't count logistical units, US has France on speed dial, not the reverse. The one time France asked the US something military-wise, Obama refused.

France doesn't need to call anyone, they have spies everywhere. They're the world leader in industrial espionage with a few hundred-years head start over everyone else.

And also don't forget they're the second largest global arms exporter after the United States. Which is amazing when you realize they only have one manufacturer (Airbus) in the global top 15...

> The one time France asked the US something military-wise, Obama refused.

Ehh forget how Vietnam started?

Although yes that is a little longer than 50 years ago already. Crazy how fast these things go.

Maybe What Hackers Yearn or CCC?

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