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Comment by kylemaxwell | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the thesis here. As somebody whose day job involves tracking "hacker groups" in the adversarial sense and whose hobbies largely involve belonging to "hacker groups" in the doing-cool-shit sense, I feel like there's an assertion with precisely no evidence to support it.

Also, statements like "We live in days of limited creativity" strike me as extreme nostalgia and conservatism. We live in days of INCREDIBLE creativity, in my view.

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I think the point is that these days we live in an era of abstractions over abstractions which are all very well documented and ever-changing. There are not hundreds of them, but thousands. There's no way to actually push the boundaries here, and even if it is, nobody cares to do so. There's no "scene". You get a few +1's or Likes in social media and that's all. Fuck that. That's no collective.

If somebody's view of how to communicate and work with others is restricted to Google+ and FB and Twitter, then that's their own lack of creativity showing, I think.

What else have you got, really? Hackerspaces and Github don't count. IRC is dead for the most part. Some ezines seem to struggle along with a few mailing lists, but that's it. Most active members in these "underground" cultures(e.g. demoscene and vx scene) are old ones from the dawn of time, some newbies come and go but hardly any stick. These communities have been shrinking for the past 15 years or so.

Or am I really missing something? I really think there was so much more low-hanging fruit to grab back in late 80's and early 90's and the computing culture back then thrived around doing just that. Now the whole "computing culture" seems to be about node.js and MongoDB or what have you. That's a fucking disgrace.

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