I appreciate your thoughtful reply! Honestly when I replied I didn't realize you were a mod. At any rate though I think there's some interesting meat to this di

I appreciate your thoughtful reply! Honestly when I replied I didn't realize you were a mod. At any rate though I think there's some interesting meat to this discussion, though I will try to be more attuned to what could be seen as snarky in future comments here. I assure you though that snark was not my intent. Like if you'll humor me to continue down the path of anthropomorphization, I can elaborate a little bit on what I meant in my original post. Like my theory is that a lot of the community has grown older, likely gotten more stable jobs, and as it goes, probably also gained a more careful and conservative attitude towards risky and rebellious acts. Simultaneously though, they remember and continue to admire their hacker heroes of yesteryear (like Kevin Mitnick, Aaron Swartz, and Edward Snowden). I think it'd be reductive to boil the dissonance between shifting risk profiles and idealism to just hypocrisy, since I think that sort of conflict manifests within different parts of everybody. I think you can hold both and be valid, just as you can be tired and hungry at the same time, but you wouldn't be a hypocrite for eating instead of sleeping. The conflict is deeper in more interesting than that, and I think it can be productive and interesting to inspect that conflict.