I see what you're getting at, and I agree. But at the same time, reading this again also made me a bit nostalgic for at least some parts of 1990s hacker cultur

I see what you're getting at, and I agree. But at the same time, reading this again also made me a bit nostalgic for at least some parts of 1990s hacker culture. (I'm a bit too young to have experienced the 80s.) There's an irreverence that seems to have been lost. The culture was full of cringey gatekeeping behavior and that wasn't even the worst of it. And the purity test did revel in that a little bit. But it also represents nerd culture taking the piss out of itself in the same breath. The BOFH files also come to mind as an example of this. It seems like a lot of modern nerd culture isn't quite so able to do that. Gamer culture, for example, is also rife with gatekeeping behavior. And there's also a lot of humor, but what I don't see quite so much is gamer nerds taking a good hard look at themselves, and laughing at what they see.