Post 9hbn6VZIf7bP8rPIIK by mossbriar@sunbeam.city
(DIR) More posts by mossbriar@sunbeam.city
(DIR) Post #9hbn6VZIf7bP8rPIIK by mossbriar@sunbeam.city
2019-04-08T16:02:13Z
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Listened to Brett Scott's essay "The hacker hacked: how yuppies gentrified the original hacker ethos" and then read a comment claiming he and the mainstream media fundamentally misunderstood hacker culture and it's *actually* about two fundamental beliefs: 1) efficiency is god and 2) knowledge is powerI had to take out a pen and paper and start trying to analyze all the vaguely right libertarian underpinnings/implications of his definition because I've definitely heard it before from e.g. ESR
(DIR) Post #9hbn6Vm3tfoJmRNUBc by mossbriar@sunbeam.city
2019-04-08T17:46:25Z
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According to this definition of hacker culture, things like tolerating minorities and different sexual orientations ("as long as you have the necessary skills") and freedom of information are valuable not for their own sake but because they allow hackers to be more efficient. Efficient at what? Making cool things. Hackers being as unrestricted as possible means they make cool things that out to be useful and help society as a whole, the theory goes. Hence complaints that debates about social issues like harrassment and gender/racial inequality are just preventing people from getting actual work done.The question of what work is getting done and why and who benefits from it isn't directly addressed, but the assumption seems to be that there's some general emergent phenomenon of "technological progress" that results from individual acts of invention and benefits humanity as a whole. It feels like faith in the "invisible hand" of the unrestricted free market restated in new language.
(DIR) Post #9hbn6VuZO2cGCpMHRo by smokeythecat@sunbeam.city
2019-04-08T17:54:25Z
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@mossbriar and being oppressed prevents people from getting stuff done anyway
(DIR) Post #9hbn6W2Mv2r2b10VbU by mossbriar@sunbeam.city
2019-04-08T18:04:37Z
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@smokeythecat Exactly. But the unstated assumption is that there are always going to be the genius heroes and the people at the bottom, and if some people haven't made their way up the hierarchy by shutting up and working harder to prove themselves then *those people don't matter*.The more I think about this the more I see a parallel to the way we're conditioned to think about wealth and entrepreneurs.
(DIR) Post #9hbn6WDiErvdACJZHk by mossbriar@sunbeam.city
2019-04-08T18:25:12Z
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"Knowledge is power" translates into "individual knowledge can be turned into personal power", i.e., skill with technology is yet another purported path up a hierarchy that is assumed and unquestioned. People who "know how to use technology" (I assume that means knowing how to use computers, whatever *that* means) are superior than those who don't and thus they deserve to earn more money and wear casual clothes/eat in the workplace unlike the ignorant masses working in a traditional environment.
(DIR) Post #9hbn6WMvgbIjcmcveS by mossbriar@sunbeam.city
2019-04-08T18:36:01Z
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The argument "hackers are people with special knowledge that makes them powerful, and they are superior to and deserve more than ordinary people because they use their power to make society more efficient" doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. Plumbers and electricians and road construction crews have special knowledge and do the same thing. Technology != computers.