Brent Scott has a piece on Aeon about the transformation of the traditional "hacker ethic" as described by Steven Levy and Pekka Himanen into a means of enterprise modeling "doublethink".
We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones.
Scott goes on to suggest that the hacker ethic has become a "hollowed out" form of "solutionism" as suggested by Evengy Morozov, meaning that "...the tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for (profitable) solutions."
This process of gentrification becomes a war over language. If enough newcomers with media clout use the hollowed-out version of the term, its edge grows dull. You end up with a mere affectation, failing to challenge otherwise conventional aspirations. And before you know it, an earnest Stanford grad is handing me a business card that says, without irony: 'Founder. Investor. Hacker.'
The piece ends with Scott calling for a reclaiming of the hacker ethic
I'm going to stake a claim on the word though, and state that the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets. The hacker impulse should not just be about redesigning products, or creating 'solutions'. A hack stripped of anti-conventional intent is not a hack at all. It's just a piece of business innovation.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 11 2015, @05:14AM
My new antiseizure medicine at first made me quite nauseous. I took Maalox with limited success. Eventually I suggested to the med nurse that the Maalox would work better were I to take it with my Trileptol rather than waiting until I was praying to the porcelain god.
That worked real well; had my secret plan not worked my prescriber would have given me the same antinausea medicine - Fenergine? - as used by chemotherapy patients.
I discussed this with my friend. "Did you write it down?"
"Write down what?"
"That Maalox works if you take it with your Trileptol rather than waiting until you wanna puke."
"No. Why?"
"Because hackers only solve profitable problems."
Countless suicides were completed between the late 1940s discovery of Lithium's effectiveness and its 1970 FDA approval.
See, Lithium is cheap as dirt because it is found in dirt.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @05:19AM
For a fun suicide, swallow a block of lithium metal and drink a glass of water.