
How yuppies hacked the original hacker ethos (2015) - daveloyall
https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos
======
ktRolster
I'm not sure the author understands the "hacker ethos." (ESR captures all the
aspects fairly well: [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-
ethic.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-ethic.html) )

The author makes a comparison between hackers and counter-culture movements,
but doesn't seem to understand that hacking (in all its aspects) is orthogonal
to "counter-culture." He also seems to be largely unaware of the ethical
hacking (MIT-style). He would do well to read through ESR's page for a while.

That is, you can be a CEO, an investor, and a hacker, if you want to make cool
things and give them away for free.

If you want to talk about illicit hacking....that's seen a decline because it
got harder. In the 90s, most hackers were kids (Legions of Doom, Control-c,
etc). Now most hackers are parts of professional criminal organizations or
governments.

~~~
Analemma_
> ESR captures all the aspects fairly well

I'm gonna stop you right there. The idea that ESR is the final authority on
what the "hacker ethos" is or should be is much more offensively wrong than
anything in this article.

~~~
jshevek
Taken as a whole, ESR is an embarrassment. But the parent didn't say that we
should consider ESR an authority, final or otherwise. They only expressed
their opinion that those words (penned by ESR) "captures all aspects fairly
well".

~~~
iamjeff
>ESR is an embarrassment I have actually read some of his material and found
your statement somewhat confusing. Is it that you dislike him as a person or
is there something that I missed completely? Is there any other material that
would give a clearer and perhaps more authentic explanation of these ethos
(cause, frankly, I though that ESR did a good job there)? *Pardon my grammar,
ESL bro.

~~~
jshevek
Please forive the lenthy disclaimer/preamble: I very strongly believe that
when we consider some subset of a person's words or their work - that we
should treat it _on its own merits_ , and not contaminated with tangential
arguments about the person themself or their other, unrelated words, claims,
works, etc.

So I mentioned my position (that he is an embarrassment) to make clear to the
parent poster that I wasn't defending ESR per se - before immediately
declaring that our shared distaste of ESR _is not relevant_ to the discussion.
I'm replying out of courtesy, since you asked, but I don't think discussing
negative aspects of ESR is relevant to the larger topics here.

> more authentic explanation of these ethos (cause, frankly, I though that ESR
> did a good job there)?

I think ESR's comments on the hacker ethos are just fine. His other positions
and writing in no way detracts from this. I think there are many places where
ESR did 'a good job'.

> is there something that I missed completely?

I don't have any fair or balanced sources to share with you, but if you'd like
to see links cherry picked by people who have a heavy anti-ESR bias, you can
check out the not-so-rational "rationalwiki". I don't endorse nor agree with
all that's said here, but it sheds light on why some people dislike ESR.

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Footnotes](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Footnotes)

Edit: A more concise summary is found in this person's views: [http://cal-
harding.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-i-hate-eric-raym...](http://cal-
harding.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-i-hate-eric-raymond.html)

Also, see daveloyall's comments on this page. I don't fully agree with him
either, but they are illuminating.

~~~
iamjeff
Thank you for taking the time out to reply. I won't press on this issue any
longer; I believe that the links that you have provided are adequate starting
points for understanding this issue a little better. Once again, thank you for
the reply. PS: Some of the comments that ESR has made over the years are
shocking; I was absolutely gutted to note as much after reading Harding's
blog.

------
WalterSear
What happened was that ultimately people make money from business models, not
technology. So, eventually, the cultural attention shifts from the the doers
to the sellers.

And every once in a while, we have a little shift in the technological
landscape, and for a second or two, a few hackers start making money and
getting cultural attention. And this attention society also brings attention
from sellers, who come over and make themselves at home.

~~~
kylec
Was making money part of the original hacker ethos?

~~~
WalterSear
No, but it makes things sustainable. For better or worse, it makes the world
go round.

~~~
personsunknown
That's a cop out. The scene "sustained" itself just fine. Now people working
at Facebook call themselves "hackers". It was as much about a philosophy as it
was about technology. When the industry moves on to the next buzzword, we'll
still be here.

~~~
WalterSear
It didn't, and doesn't, and this isn't about the names that gadflies choose
for themselves.

And I'm not arguing that the end of everything is to enrich oneselves (or
one's masters). I'm arguing that I've worked at far too many companies that
went bust, because their business model was broken, in order to fund my own
hacker activities outside of that.

There's just no avoiding the need to acquire resources, and
organizations/movements/individuals that can do it better have a obvious and
historically established survival advantage. The commoditization of technology
is no exception.

~~~
personsunknown
"I'm arguing that I've worked at far too many companies that went bust,
because their business model was broken, in order to fund my own hacker
activities outside of that."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you are saying that hackers can't
survive because the scene can't exist without the corporations funding it's
participants. This is contrary to history. In my generation the industry
considered us criminals even though most of us weren't. The hacker scene was
around long before the industry embraced it and will be around long after
whatever unicorn of the month loses it's horn. It's not going anywhere. It
constantly changes and every generation has added it's own chapter, but that's
what makes it what it is. So that leads me to my next question... What could
you have not done if you didn't have corporate funding from these several
failed companies you worked for? What prevented you from just doing it
anyways?

~~~
WalterSear
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you are saying that hackers can't
survive because the scene can't exist without the corporations funding it's
participants.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that hackers have to eat, and the amount
of hacking they get to do is proportional to the time they don't have to spend
finding food.

------
Animats
What he's missed is that hippies and yuppies were the _same people_. Same
self-indulgence combined with bogus philosophy to justify it. From granola to
granite countertops in a generation.

Suggested reading: Bobos in Paradise.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobos_in_Paradise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobos_in_Paradise)

~~~
superuser2
What, specifically, is the philosophy and/or self-indulgence of yuppies?

~~~
messick
"Fuck you, got mine." for the most part.

~~~
superuser2
I don't understand. Don't yuppies tend to skew left and towards support of
redistribution, more funding for social services, etc?

~~~
daveloyall
No? "Yuppies" throw out perfectly good food and clothing when they are full or
bored.

They are relatively affluent but have only new things in their homes. Their
art is exclusively abstract.

They smile too much.

Maybe the definition varies from region to region, or generation to
generation.

~~~
gleenn
"They smile too much."

Yeah, they should all burn in hell. Smilers...

------
1_2__3
I don't expect much traction with this opinion, but I'd say this change also
includes the slow takeover by "brogrammers". It was horrifying watching it
start, people who had no real intuitive understanding of technology or
interest in it who nonetheless learned enough of the vocation to be able to be
effective and get a job. No love for it, no yearn for it, no calling to it. I
remember talking to a Google intern who said, "I went into dance but I didn't
think it would make a good living so I switched to CS.".

On one hand, I don't want to discourage those people - some of them _will_
find it's their calling and they become passionate about it. Most of them
though just clutter up companies with people who can't think all that
creatively and are way more interested in their next game of Ultimate or the
new bar they're trying tonight than learning a new language or exploring
technology. There's no 'itch' when it comes to tech work, just money.

I also feel like it's infected the rest of programming culture in general.
Programmers have not traditionally been the sort of people who think you need
meetups, whatever-a-thons, code camps, and other social-events-masquerading-
as-hacking/tech. And if you apply occam's razor it's much less likely that
they've discovered a new, better way of being a hacker/programmer, and more
likely they were predisposed to backslapping, social drinking and partying
already, so of _course_ that's the kind of stuff they're going to try and
spread more of in the industry - just as if you had a more technically-minded
person in, say, Sales, who would have a hard time breaking their habits of
thinking of things in engineering terms.

It sucks. I thought hacker & nerd culture would grow up and mature, instead it
just got squashed out by the brogrammers.

~~~
zaidf
Your post is a little confusing because:

a) you complain of the brogrammers

b) you complain of the google intern that switched from dance to CS even
though one might argue we need many of more of them to respond to (a)

c) you complain of hackathons which have done much to make tech more inviting
precisely to people other than brogrammers

d) finally, your view that the person who switched from dance to CS for better
job prospects is mostly a menace...this _precisely_ is a bro-
perspective...that very thing you complain of!

I can't help but feel you just seem nostalgic of the _good old days_.

------
qwertyuiop924
This is pretty far wrong in many respects. The history is wrong: Calling John
Draper one of the first phone phreaks, and treating him as representitive of
the rest, or even claiming he made the discovery that gave him is nickname is
just flat out incorrect. Read "Exploding the Phone," by Phil Lapsley, for a
more accurate take on phreaking. Secondly, IMHO, those "sillicon valley
types," people begging for capital to build new things, aren't dissimilar to
the kind of academic environment the word hacker originated in: clever
programmers, working on projects, and trying to get grants or investment. But
that's not important.

Most importantly, the definition of hacker is off. Considering how utterly
impossible it is to give a good definition - ask 50 hackers what a hacker is,
you'll get 50 answers - you can feel free to argue this. But I believe, as, it
seems, do many of you, that being a hacker isn't about power, or
counterculture, or anything like that. It's about creativity, ingenuity,
intelligent problem solving, and it has an element of playfullness about it,
and a certain pride, to say that you built it, that you know that it works,
that you can trust it, and a determinedness to make that true, to fix it if
it's broken, and improve it if it isn't.

To quote Cliff Stoll's exellent book, "The Cuckoo's Egg": "The people I knew
who called themselves hackers were software wizards who managed to creatively
program their way out of tight corners. They knew all the nooks and crannies
of the operating system. Not dull software engineers who put in forty hours a
week, but creative programmers who can't leave the computer until the
machine's satisfied. A hacker identifies with the computer, knowing it like a
friend."

Many will disagree. Feel free to write up or link your favorite definition.

------
mwfunk
I gotta say, the only thing worse than implicit tribalism is explicit
tribalism. I can only imagine what they think about the preps and the
cheerleaders.

------
grillvogel
just take a walk through downtown seattle to see this first hand. all sorts of
corporate drones and middle managers with their official "im a hacker" wear
with logos for the multinational corporation they work at.

~~~
gersh
I'm sick of the conformist 'hacker'-wear in the tech industry. You gotta wear
designer clothes to rebel against the techy t-shirt, hoody uniform.

~~~
personsunknown
Exactly. hipster != hacker

------
fhood
If you are willing to co-opt the word "gentrification" so aggressively than it
seems hypocritical to complain about "the man" co-opting the word hacker.
Sure, hacker means something different than it used to, but language evolves.
I'm sorry that you no longer have a special word that you can use to
distinguish yourself from those who are inferior.

------
ChrisArchitect
Old
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033969)

------
andyidsinga
the author is heaping a lot of meaning on the hacker ethos/culture, and is
probably right about how society and the media view "the hacker".

seems to me that for folks who participate in one element or another of this
giant range of stuff .. the label is rather annoying.

------
madelinecameron
Calm down with the $5 words.

It isn't that I am stupid but it makes for a really annoying read when I am
having to think more about the words than the meaning.

I shouldn't have to re-read this article like it is a research paper just so I
can absorb what you are saying.

~~~
jshevek
Which words? I would agree the author seems pretentious in tone, but I didn't
notice any $5 words, nor even words whose specific meaning was misapplied.
Seems to me like the author just wanted to say what he meant.

~~~
madelinecameron
A lot of them. It came across more like the author was trying to show off
their vocab than explain a point.

For example:

>Any large and alienating infrastructure controlled by a technocratic elite is
bound to provoke. In particular, it will nettle those who want to know how it
works, those who like the thrill of transgressing, and those who value the
principle of open access.

Okay, it makes sense what they are saying but does that not seem a little
clunky to you?

Why not just say like:

> As the world has progressively become more entwined with technology, those
> providing these services have become more protective of the technology. As a
> result of this protectiveness, less people are able to fully study and
> understand how this infrastructure works.

disclaimer: not an English major ;)

~~~
jshevek
Thank you for responding and clarifying. I thought you took issue (and maybe
you do...) with a dozen other terms used in the text - terms which some
readers might need to look up, but which have a specific, nuanced meaning that
is lost if a more common word is used. I'm biased in the authors favor because
I've been accused of trying to show off my vocab (such as it is, lol) when all
I'm trying to do is say what I really mean.

As for that first sentence, I agree that your version is more clear, more
accessible, but I also think that there is meaning lost. The author seems to
want to draw attention to the clash of cultural values. This isn't conveyed so
well in this more accessible version.

On another axis, his version evokes more powerful imagery and feelings. These
words: 'alienating infrastrcuture, controlled, provoked, nettle, thrill,
transgressing. 'value the principle' all have much larger emotional, visual,
even tactile impact on me than the most emotional words in the other version.

I'm not saying this is right or wrong, only that this may have been the
authors goal (more so than showing off their vocab). The author may also
consciously value (a) emotional/visual impact on those who bother to read over
(b) making the work easy for a larger body of people to read.

------
kelvin0
TL;DR: Capitalism > Hacker Ethos

