I scanned this before coffee this morning and in short I'm not sure anyone else should read it in its present state.
Although the author poses some interesting ideas the piece feels long and muddled and I'm not at all sure who the audience is or what the call to action might be. Voice is unclear as some paragraphs are personal statements ("I") and others are observations about culture and economics.
It might be more powerful if it was drastically shorter and simpler ... or maybe if it was three times longer with more references and a stronger set of recommendations. I really can't say.
The last few paragraphs bring it home: hacking is being subverted as a tool of the establishment and no longer, in common use, means working against the establishment.
Here's the thing. Hacking in the sense of the word he wants it used didn't go away or get subverted. It just lost a label.
Words in the english language change all the time. Hacking in the sense of gaining a deep understanding of things by tinkering is alive and well and isn't going anywhere. So some one co-opted our label. So What? We can get a new label. It doesn't mean we somehow vanished or are dying out. We're still here. We still buy kits to get screw drivers that let us open that box and void the warranty. We still poke and prod at computer systems in ways they weren't designed to be poked and prodded. We still create things with materials no one else thought to create with. And in the sense of hacking he is referring to we still do it whether it has a label or not.
He even talks about hacking being something as old as the human race. And then he goes on to complain that this label got co-opted. Of course it did. Everyone is a hacker. Everyone is looking to game the system. Hackers don't have a monopoly on hacking. So the "yuppies" hacked our terminology. Good for them. Now we get to go hack some other terminology. Hack used to refer to a kludge. We co-opted the term to mean something else. Now it has been co-opted again.
The author is in many ways complaining about something that isn't a real problem. We were hacking before there was a label for it. We will still be hacking after the label is gone. Nothing has been lost here.
I think the new label he's looking for is "Maker". People who go to Maker/Hacker spaces or consider themselves part of the Maker movement are exactly what hackers used to be.
This is an over-simplification of the article which talks about much more than just labels. It talks about things like control of the internet, the destruction of the culture of Silicon Valley, and the people that co-opt hacker culture in an attempt to make money.
Control of the internet does not mean the hacker ethos is somehow polluted. It just means the hackers have a new target. Silicon Valley doesn't define hacker culture. I didn't grow up or go to school in Silicon Valley and I don't live there currently. Yet, I'm something of a hacker as the article defines it.
And how does one co-opt a culture? What does that even mean? I can see how one might destroy a culture, force a culture into hiding maybe, but co-opt it? That's a fancy way of saying they took our label. That's the thing about label's though. They change meanings over time.
I think the real reason the author and many others are upset is because they thought the "hacker ethos" was going to go mainstream. Then they looked around and realized that what went mainstream wasn't hacking as they saw it, and got upset.
Hackers have always been a minority. We were a minority during the internet revolution. We are minority now. We'll be a minority in the future. Expecting anything else will just result in dashed hopes.
I really don't like the link to "the profit fetish" in the last paragraph and the implicit undertone of profit being a bad thing.
In fact I completely disagree and would call hacking (in the sense it is used in the article) a very direct expression of profit seeking. You change one state to another one that you prefer. If the costs to achieve this are less than the added value that's (economic) profit.
The point of being a hacker (in the traditional sense) is that your utility function is completely wack. You prefer to make the lights on the screen (and by proxy, the state of the registers) the way you envision than to have free time for hobbies intrinsically inbued with external relevance.
The prevalence of computers in modern commerce makes this easy to overlook. Hacking isn't about building things the rest of the world appreciates and understands--it's about mastery and appreciation of abstract systems.
Edit: to make myself completely clear, profit is inherently evil, c.f. the notion of selflessness.
>The point of being a hacker (in the traditional sense) is that your utility function is completely wack. You prefer to make the lights on the screen (and by proxy, the state of the registers)
Acquiring money is not the only way to profit; it's whatever your "utility function" is. Money is just an easy one to quantify and analyze.
If you spend 10 hours on Saturday freelancing for $130/hr versus spending 10 hour working on OSS versus fucking around with code, you are still applying your capital (time, skills, hardware/software) to obtain a profit (money, fulfillment, enjoyment).
That's what's great about capitalism: you get to choose how to apply your capital to obtain the outcomes you want, even those outcomes are not monetary.
How is this intrinsic to capitalism, exactly? It's true for any society in general where people are relatively free of coercion so as to devote time to their self-interest. The fact that you're speaking of capitalism in a mixed market economy shows this.
There's nothing wrong with profit. What's wrong is monopoly and oligopoly. Defining an activity as only being up to your ideological standards if it is done for free means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor. Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
> I really don't like the link to "the profit fetish" in the last paragraph and the implicit undertone of profit being a bad thing
I'm on the other side of the fence, I have yet to find a good argument that defends profit when you weight it against all its fault. As far as I'm concerned the profit race is about the worst thing our specie ever came up with, it's directly responsible for destroying our planet, for the death of millions and as we speak for the lack of future for our specie.
According to whom? I have seen the hacker culture straddle the line of the traditional definition and a little bit of this newer corporate definition of which the author speaks. My experience is obviously anecdotal, but other than this article, I've never seen nor heard anyone say that hacker culture is being co-opted by corporate.
Although the author poses some interesting ideas the piece feels long and muddled and I'm not at all sure who the audience is or what the call to action might be. Voice is unclear as some paragraphs are personal statements ("I") and others are observations about culture and economics.
It might be more powerful if it was drastically shorter and simpler ... or maybe if it was three times longer with more references and a stronger set of recommendations. I really can't say.