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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:43AM (#221175)

    while wanna-bees and whipersnappers wrap them selves in the flag and pretend. The originals move on, the vacuum is filled by lesser enthusiasts. But is isn't appropriation, or even usurpation, because the originals just wandered off

    What an unintentionally revealing post. The underlying assumption there is that only the originals can care about hacking, that the ideals that the originals had are so empty and meaningless that they can't even survive past a single generation.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:53AM (#221218)

    I want to repeatedly poke your raw anus until absolutely nothing is left of it.