13 ms·
The Fall of Hacking
Please first excuse my liberal arts sensibilities in a technical forum; but I figure out there might be some like-minded people out there who feel the same way I do ... that the hacker culture is dying out.
Before anyone jumps in to say that I've jumped the shark, let me quickly jump to elaborate:
The ideal of the hacker a la early 90's, Ghost in the Shell, Hacker and Cyberpunk; a cowboy on the electronic frontier typing silently the night away to a CRT monitor but the internals (of man and machine) is intense full of drama. Better yet, a reclusive vampire in the cyberworld, dialing up the BBS where people went by handles and the text file on packet sniffing taught me the hacking techniques and text file called "subverting American lower-education" taught me the hacking ethos and attitude. Hacking was punk-rock (a la the Ramones, pre-Blink182 and Sum41): marginal and subversive, exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities on remote servers, warez, BIOS viruses, and automatic credit card number generators in Visual Basic 3.0 to get free Internet access via AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, pirated Turbo C++ with DJGPP writing a 2D DOS sidescroller. But I do not really do justice to the description of hacker, pre the dot-com boom - but I think you know what I mean.
Fast forward to the 2009, a hacker has become the anti-thesis to the hacker of early 90's. The new "hacker" go to websites such as YCombinator and have snazzy wordpress blogs with rounded corner designers with full names and locations and snazzy job titles, and geek-chic photo of the said hacker in yuppie dress-shirts smiling, "Software Visionaire/Ruby Ninja; come hit me up on Facebook, let's meet up and talk about business ideas!" The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essentially, is a repository for pictures of inebriated hot chicks. Apparently, the new new thing is now this CRUD forum database application that has a character-limit of 120 words per post, but get this, it's written in a really cool language called Ruby on Rails, a la AutoTune in Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak.
Everywhere in the IT/engineering department, no one gets to write anything from scratch but have to write plugins/patches for a legacy platform, uses third party libraries that have ten plus layers abstraction between the meta-code and the actual code. Does anyone really understand the internal's of Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel or know what YCombinator mean? The worst insult to an engineer is to tell her that she isn't technical enough. But in the designation of "frontend engineer," "backend enginner," "overseas team," I feel more like working on an Henry Ford's assembly-line, efficient and cheap, an assembly-line worker bolting nuts not an craftsman working on the engine, the suspension, the dashboard, the big picture.
Like hip hop/punk rock/grunge, hacking has been overran by marketing guru's (Seth Godin), overzealous self-promoters (Timonthy Ferris), business executives driven by the bottom line (Steve Ballmer/Carol Bartz) and its own narcissism (TechCrunch). It has devolved to become a caricature of its former self. Worst of it all, it has become mainstream - it's no longer subversive.
- chrischen 17y agoI wouldn't call myself a hacker simply because I don't like being labeled. I like being different, for better or for worse.
- wmf 17y agoThose people are still out there; you just don't hear as much about Real Hacking as about more accessible, mainstream stuff. Also, get a blog.
- pj 17y agoI actually have a lot more respect for people who come here and type their heart out in the open for no other reason than bringing in content and sharing their ideas. Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following. On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest and straight forward with an opinion -- a valid opinion and an astute observation of a topic that the real hackers are feeling inside. Hacking is dying. It has taken an outsider, a liberal artsie fartsie to tell us the truth about it. To point out the absurdity. I went to sxsw interactive this year and was appalled at what I saw. There were few hackers there. Most of them were socialites running around promoting their word press blog or django customization. These people didn't know anything about hacking. Perhaps it was the wrong venue, but the art and the culture and the expertise of real hacking is probably already dead. It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers. It's kind of sad.
- BrentRitterbeck 17y agoI've heard this line hundreds of times before. Hacking is not dead. Something can't be killed if you have the ability to turn on your computer and start doing right away. If you are concerned about whether hacking is alive or dead, perhaps you should fire up your computer and bring it back to life. It's that simple.