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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: 3, Touché) by morgauxo on Tuesday August 11 2015, @06:41PM
Why would a real hacker care about someone ursurping the meaning of a word? They should be too busy exploring some corner of the technological world to give a shit about petty semantics. Days are short and you only get so many!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @12:54AM
This is true.
It reminds me of the breaking a "hat" into obedience post that someone made.
A hacker has to be broken into it, and in the process, the hat is crushed or otherwise no longer the hat it was.
Otherwise, without that breaking/conditioning, the hacker/hat is too busy learning something new, in the flow of something they know, or finding out what they aren't supposed to be knowing and getting better at it as they do it.
whether its computers, networks, phones, or atari game programming... they aren't caring about the politics, which is often a problem because they become criminal for doing what used to be free. (maybe not the atari games, but think of how they had to get their names in the games on the sly because they were forbidden from doing so normally--they had to break the rules even though they had done nothing wrong.)