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Comment by bones6 | Hacker News Reader

Your comment had just resurfaced in my brain and I saw this new headline and came here and was pleasantly surprised to find exactly what I was looking for.

The original tribal shaman(plural) who used sleight of hand or small chemical reactions cultivated society and truly invented ritual and religion, creating a separation of power. Fear of the unknown and fear of power is precisely what our culture is based on.

It underpins our entire society and government. Ritualistic religion goes hand in hand with our culture, even if some of us are not part of it directly.

We can't escape it, and hacker culture will always be counterculture until some great cataclysmic event occurs in our society. Those in power fear the hacker, and the hacker (as we have tragically seen) fears those in power.

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I've run into this, to great frustration in nearly every aspect of life. There's little room for evidence in the face of countless religions.

For a singular example, my clients and colleagues are more likely to practice their own arcane rituals that they've gleaned from legends of SEO or UX sooth-sayers than to let me implement systems like split testing or - gods forbid - an actual user study. The truth is more difficult and less comfortable than their personal mythos. In the case that they do employ a "science" it's misapplied not unlike the pseudoscientific Witch test from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, making changes based on a single study with a tiny set of users and without even testing the proposed changes.

Sociologically, I would agree that religion is powerful stuff. I don't think it is the basis for all culture, if by culture you mean the sum total of experience one is capable of experiencing with minimal effort.

However, just like one can experience religion without knowing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, one can experience technology without understanding even the most basic layer below the UX level. In both cases, the uncurious have a world-view unfettered by the constrictions of cause and effect; so technology can seem like magic, and those outside the officially sanctioned boundaries are both wise and "unsanctioned", and thus witches.

I've long come to the conclusion that religion is a bootstrapping mechanism: it was something we needed in the past in order to jump over a threshold, and for the last thousand years or two, it's been obsolete and holding us back instead.

This is what I am trying to say, but a good point to the parent commenter. To clarify I would say that I was referring to how we got to where we are today. The current power structure of our society. As I said even without direct participation in religion there is a power structure evident in society vis a vis a teacher and a pupil, a slave and a master, a husband and a wife, to name a few controversial examples.

Not all of these are bad inherently, but some things about the world are changing. A hacker wields mystical power of mythical proportions that literally(don't we hate that word) scares the bejeesus out of the Power Elite. They respond with prejudice and who can blame them. Those in power will never willingly give it up.

Ethical or white hat hacking is just a foreign concept. They only see potential abuses, and threats to their power.

> As I said even without direct participation in religion there is a power structure evident in society vis a vis a teacher and a pupil, a slave and a master, a husband and a wife, to name a few controversial examples.

Don't forget white man and black man, cisgendered and trans, hetero and homosexual, sexual and asexual. I'm guessing you stand on the side of the powerful in at least one of these.

Reminds me of the start of True Names by Vernor Vinge.

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