Author of the essay here. I did a double take at seeing it posted here because I thought it was completely forgotten, nearly including by myself. I think the actual date of this essay is 2007 or maybe 2006, because I remember writing it from my university computer lab and I was class of '07. Anyway, there's certainly a lot of water under the bridge since then and the political composition of hackerdom today looks nothing like it did 15 years ago. With the growth of the FAANGs there are far more hackers today than there were then, and the younger ones are a lot more likely to be leftists than libertarians. Still, though, when I travel in libertarian circles it's pretty clear to me that hackers are overrepresented there, so I think the reverse remains true as well, even though it's not as dramatic or obvious as it was in the '00s.
If you read this and want more like it, the author of the article (Gabriella Coleman) wrote an excellent ethnography on the culture around hackers and free software, which is also available through her site: http://gabriellacoleman.org/Coleman-Coding-Freedom.pdf
The timing might be a little confusing; my understanding is that the book was born out of her dissertation written before 2010, predating the article in the Atlantic, but this book was published after the Atlantic article came out (so it may be even more refined than the article, and certainly more in-depth).
It's longer (on the order of ~250 pages), but it's really great, and one of my favorite examples of Anthropology investigating and thinking about technology and the people that live and breathe it.
> The thing I don't get was that in the late 80s and 90s activism and tech/hacking oriented people were pretty much one and the same, namely Cypherpunks. Specifically in the Valley!
Alot of those folks were co-opted… at least according to folks like Bill Blunden (belowgotham.com) and John Young (cryptome.org)
Hi. Author of the piece here. Thought this might be of interest to the Hacker News audience. I'm interested in hearing people's feedback and reactions to the piece.
Would you mind expanding upon this a little? I feel like there's a wonderful nugget of history here just waiting to be rediscovered by the broader hacker news community. Sounds like it could make a good story?
Interesting article, I think it represents the trials and tribulations of underground adolescent hacking cultures quite well. For people who currently find themselves in similar situations I'm sure it's inspiring and very confronting.
It doesn't offer anything new but it does offer an opportunity to reflect. This story has been around a long while (this dates from '99 but I suspect it's older) and I think comes from a time when hackers had a whole lot less options. Seems to me it's a pretty good time to be a hacker right now.
Jesus and the Mary Chain, the Mentor himself in the flesh.
When I was a senior in college studying Anthropology and subcultures (specifically hacker culture), several of my roommates who were engineers and CS majors told me I absolutely needed to read your essay.
To this day, it's still one of the most influential essays I read about the culture and understanding the ethos of an ethical hacker. After getting involved in the scene in the late 90's, I found out reading your essay was almost a rite of passage.
It's an amazing work that is timeless and still resonates to this day.
Reading this made me feel good. I feel like not enough hackers in my generation appreciate some of the history surrounding hacker culture. I read Levy's books a million times as an adolescent, and am currently going through "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff. A dream of mine has been to write a follow-up to Hackers someday. A book of the same style picking up where Hackers left off in the mid-1980s. It could cover NeXT, GNU/Linux, Netscape/Mosaic, Valve, Google, Facebook, up to modern hacking on the frontier of biology, education, and the rebirth of hardware hacking. I feel like every generation should have a volume similar to Hackers.
Face facts, you're never gonna live this one down. :) The document is emblematic of what social butterflies call the zeitgeist of an era. What was really more or less a bunch of kids messing around, they see as a revolution, akin to punk rock. "Conscience of a Hacker" seemed to validate their mythology of the 80s hacker as a cyberpunk revolutionary, so it will be preserved and repeated as part of the mythohistory of computing.
Plus it was quoted in Hackers and will be immortal on the strength of that alone.
The article was written by Professor Biella Coleman, an anthropologist and professor at NYU who studies hacker culture. She's written a lot about Anonymous, 4chan and /b/ and teaches a class on the anthropology of hackers at NYU.
I enjoyed "The Fall of Hacker Groups". Clearly there is some deep nostalgia for the 2600 days out there ;)
"The only attitude consonant to our search for a comfortable, safe life is to constrain ourselves to our
own limitations, ignore the intelligent life out there, and surrender to the mediocracy that our society has condemned our leisure time to."
reply