I think you'll find hackers were never trying to change the world. Therein lies the charge of activists and idealists. The original set of hackers, on the other

I think you'll find hackers were never trying to change the world. Therein lies the charge of activists and idealists. The original set of hackers, on the other hand, were merely captivated by the ability to explore the realm of computation--or more broadly by exploration and play in general. Hackers as a group have never had the charisma or social commitment necessary to really want to change the world for everyone. Traditional hacker culture is pretty self-centered and dismissive of the needs of the masses--comparative ignorance and disinterest will likely always be the norm, even as standards (e.g. literacy, or code-literacy, or so on) rise. Even if most people can read and code, mostly they'll read restaurant menus or light fiction and code to bring home a paycheck. That's fine. Not everyone should be a hacker; hackers are imbalanced. As nice as it would be, "encourage play" is not an effective political praxis. The environments that fostered early hackers no longer exist, and outside of rough approximations in occasional backwaters nothing of the sort exists today. Lone hackers do exist, writing code that does things most people would balk at attempting, and their meager Web presence osculates the HN sphere (sometimes people post technical, novel things on HN). But there are no hacker communities... the demoscene is maybe the last bastion of that sort of cult to the technical, and their irrelevance even to the larger programming community is clear. Look at the kind of comments demoscene posts on HN get: adulation, but distant--"I could never do that!" or "It's amazing what ..." dominate over discussion of the technical attributes, the actual hacks, being displayed. Yuppies (big business, middle-aged slashdotters, startup capitalists, bros, anime communists, whoever) own HN and programming at large, but hacking (or anything so self-centric, e.g. radical libertarianism) is inherently anti-establishment and can't be truly co-opted. Its terminology has been subverted, but the core activity has merely been extinguished rather than harnessed to the establishment buggy. Hacking (and libertarianism) isn't good politics, but casting hackers as a social class is no longer coherent, even if one could claim it ever was (in the '80s?). The real problems are either political ones (for the vast majority of the world, as continued mechanization increasingly removes accountability and autonomy from people's daily lives) or social/lifestyle ones (for those who wish to be hackers).