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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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.

> (extremely left-leaning) politics

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

> 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)

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.

Example please

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

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.

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