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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 11 2015, @03:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the as-we-have-said-for-years dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:16AM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:16AM (#221164)

    News just in... meanings of words can change.

    If the meanings of words can change, then you can also attempt to educate people about why they shouldn't use a certain word in a certain way. They can change in positive ways too.

    News just in: You don't have to mindlessly accept people using a word in a way that you don't like. You can, in fact, criticize the use.

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