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Comment by esseph | Hacker News Reader

Hacker culture is and has always been anti-fascist and anti-capitalist by nature, at least the version that grew in the west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew in the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with open source in the early to mid 90s.

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I think anti Fascist is way too narrow, it's anti establishment, any establishment period. Anything anyone with power does is bad, that's the mentality for 50 years.

You know what, the more I think about this, I think you're onto something.

Thanks for another stark reminder of how comments here are disconnected from reality. Most IRL are tired of people who call everything fascist and froth at the mouth about “anti-fascism.”

Let me assure you that the population that you will find at Congress is rather anti-fascist. And so is the constitution of country where the event happens. As far as I remember from a few side-notes in my history classes, there are a few historic reasons for that. One may go so far as to call those reasons pretty stark reminders of why anti-fascism is a good thing...

Yeah this is exactly the sort of anti-historical menacing puffery I was talking about. The vast majority of polled WW2 GIs were against racial integration and homosexuality and in favor of white supremacy by the way. Somehow I don’t think they’d fit your idea of “anti-fascist.” Neither them nor the literal fasces on the wall in the US Senate.

This very much mirrors the scenes I grew up with in the late 80s and through the 90s, early 2000s.

I just checked and there's still an old .gif image in the center of one of the websites with an upraised red fist.

A lot of those folks are security researchers, CISOs, network engineers, and software devs now.

Yes, it is often missed but hippies are at hacker cultures core, in terms of the root file directory. John Perry Barlow’s resume shows it all.

Exactly: we live in a capitalist society which has been in decline into fascism for generations which makes the counter culture the opposite of those things.

I get the sense that because people can think of a few examples of mercenary security people or a few white supremacist groups that "hack" that this is somehow a refutation. It's not. You know about these people because 1) they usually are mean and suck and 2) they are outliers.

As you say: the phreaking / hacking / hobbist subcultures have always been collectivist by nature and the product of those subcultures will always chafe at the profit motive.

The considerable number of libertarians and anarchists among the old-school hackers would probably be rather surprised to hear themselves described as collectivist.

anarchism as a philosophy is obsessed with non-hierarchical collectivism. same with libertarianism, at least by the common definition of the term outside the united states (it often carries a leftist sentiment in other places).

Not sure you know very many anarchists.

Hacker culture is and has always been anti-Marxist and anti-Communist by nature, at least the version that grew in the west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew in the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with libertarian open source in the early to mid 90s.

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