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Go home, yuppies. 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

Go home, yuppies. 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.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
noxToken 11y ago
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.
zaphar 11y ago
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.
- rndmind 11y ago
  hope you don't mind -- I've shared this quote publically on my diaspora page. I can link you if you would like.
  - zaphar 11y ago
    Help yourself. My ideas are free for the taking no charge :-)
- aidenn0 11y ago
  A shifting label can be a problem, when it attracts tinkerer's to the SV tech scene, instead of places where they could find more joy.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  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.
- detrino 11y ago
  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.
  - zaphar 11y ago
    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.
kriro 11y ago
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.
- gue5t 11y ago
  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.
  - woah 11y ago
    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.
    - qu4z-2 11y ago
      > means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor. But it is fun!
  - mason240 11y ago
    >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.

Go home, yuppies. 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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

noxToken 11y ago

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.

zaphar 11y ago

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.

rndmind 11y ago
hope you don't mind -- I've shared this quote publically on my diaspora page. I can link you if you would like.
- zaphar 11y ago
  Help yourself. My ideas are free for the taking no charge :-)
aidenn0 11y ago
A shifting label can be a problem, when it attracts tinkerer's to the SV tech scene, instead of places where they could find more joy.
merpnderp 11y ago
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.
detrino 11y ago
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.
- zaphar 11y ago
  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.

kriro 11y ago

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.

gue5t 11y ago
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.
- woah 11y ago
  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.
  - qu4z-2 11y ago
    > means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor. But it is fun!
- mason240 11y ago
  >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.