The Fall of Hacking
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.
114 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadAlso, get a blog.
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.
I think you went to the wrong place.
1) Growing Complexity of Software Projects: in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is now a team effort, and not a single team effort but more like a company-with-frontend-backend-QA-teams effort. Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS, with thoughts and stressing even over the monster's sprites and midi soundtrack. Nowadays, an EA game is more like Wikipedia, with many contributors working without being conscious of others. And while Wikipedia is good by itself, but tell me, could Wikipedia contributors by their collective consciousness write War and Peace or Catcher in the Rye? Likewise, Emacs, Linux and Ruby were progenated by single individuals with their respective unfettered individual vision.
2) Compromising Hacking for Hacking's Purpose. Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce; see RMS as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Programming, in its current state, is funny enough the only art form where its leading vanguards and self-processed practitioners openly condone "selling out." I feel that programmers funny enough aren't complete sell-out's but are stuck in the middle ground, the worst of all places. We are told by Paul Graham & Company, that great hackers should be motivated by their craft intrinsically, but should either keep one's day job or start up our own company with an viable business strategy to save up for "fuck you money" (pardon my french). But in reality, having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers whom increasingly treat programmers as commodities/assembly-line workers to deliver business requirements. Tell me, did Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath do focus group/market research so that they could decide which colors and content category would be most pleasing to their audience before they set out to compose their painting/poetry? Similarly I'd argue either did Linus/RMS/Wozniak when they set out to hack. Art exists for itself, it serves no purpose. If it does find audience, the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience.
3) Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo; I guess that this point is related to my previous point - but I feel the ethos/outlook's of the early 90's at the dawn of personal computing was that anything was possible, whereas today is optimizing on status quo. A survey of new YC startup's include rehashes of social networks/blogs/online music. While occasionally Hacker News feature posts on AI, Bioinformatics, green technology and Arduino. Why is everybody crowded in the web space? Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas? Ray Kurzweil talks about the coming of Singularity, for instance. I'd argue it is because people are so fixated on monetizing that they no longer push envelope.
I just realized that in my zeal, my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy. Like how Bob Dylan would respond to some heckler at some festival he played at some years back, the heckler said "hey, Bob Dylan your new songs are no longer as relevant as your old songs," to which Dylan responded, "well, I'm at least out here writing songs, what are you doing?" So I'm going to stop now and take OP's advice go hack now.
Lua. ColorForth. STEPS.
> Writing software is now a team effort
There have always been software teams of many different sizes. But most projects on Sourceforge (or Github, or Freshmeat) are one-person projects.
> Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS
It was more common for a group of two to five people to do it, you know, than for one person to do it. And there are any number of popular games these days built by small teams: World of Goo, Mafia Wars, Super Monkey Ball.
> as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance.
Lots of people still do.
> today is optimizing on status quo
Most people are always trying to improve the status quo incrementally, except when that's obviously suicidal (e.g. the Ghost Dancers). In the early 90s "everyone" seemed to be working on graphics cards, database software, spreadsheets, word processors, and video games with themes licensed from movies or sports. The internet doesn't even appear in The Road Ahead. But some of us were doing other stuff... we just weren't visible until there was Wired.
Working on something new is never a popular activity because most new ideas are worthless. It's a generalization of the thing about 90% of startups failing: the other 10% mostly don't fail because they let their ideas fail and switched to something else.
> the only art form where its leading ... practitioners openly condone "selling out."
Massage, graphic design, architecture, cooking, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, warfare?
There's a lot of stuff going on.
Complexity of enterprise software engineering has grown, but you're making the wrong comparison as the hackers of the 1990s or 80s didn't work on anything remotely enterprisy. The effect you can have today as an individual hacker is greater than in the 80s or 90s, not smaller, simply because there are more programmable things in the world.
You're complaining about commercialization and you're making the assumption that artists and other people driven only by intrinsic values never wasted a thought on how to sell things. Historically, I think, that's not true, but I do get your point that commercial interests were certainly not the primary motivator. I think that still holds for most hackers today. Just look at all those "my 10 biggest startup mistakes" lists. Many of those mistakes stem from following technical interests instead of commercial logic.
I agree with your third point. There is a huge stinking excuse for hackers working on trivial boring things like Facebook or Twitter. That excuse is scalability. Yes scalability causes complex problems and solving them is difficult. BUT solving interesting problems comes with even greater scalability issues. Solving a difficult problem AND making it scale is worth much more in a technical as well as in a commercial sense.
I'm not saying Facebook or Twitter are useless. Apparently many people have fun using them. But making something like that is not hacking. Just look at the technologies and approaches they used in the beginning and you know that solving interesting technology problems surely was not the original motivation.
There's nothing to prevent you from becoming the Van Gogh of programming, so there's no need to bemoan the mundanity of corporate coding either. It's obviously not your cup of tea, so do something wonderful instead.
If you want to do something amazing, just pick an amazing project and go crazy.
Maybe you'll start the next Google, or maybe you'll struggle to get by for 35 years in a row. Life is a series of compromises, disappointments, challenges, and all kinds of weird and wonderful things sprinkled in between. Pick your poison.
If you have to be encouraged to buck the status quo, you're not really bucking the status quo. You cannot be invited to be an iconoclast.
You're setting up an impossibly strict definition of a word whose definition is not widely agreed upon ("hacker"/"hacking"), then listing things that don't fall under the definition. Good for you. Bad for argument.
> Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce
How far do you want to trace it back? 60's, 40's? How about a few hundred BC? Doing more with less, finding one's ways around limits has always been around and will always continue to be around.
Dipshit posers wiping their buddies hard drives will always be around, too. Does this make you happy? Is this what you want to be a part of? Would the world be a better place if we were all doing this?
> Writing software is now a team effort
WTF? Lots of stuff is a team effort. Lots of stuff is not a team effort. Don't join a team if you think it'll hold you back. What's your point?
Newton, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." He was just some dilettante using the knowledge discovered and shared by the folks who came before him in a new and interesting way, I guess. Not much effort, there, just a bunch of cut-and-paste of existing code (ideas).
> having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers
And turning your computer on makes you beholden to Apple (or Lenovo, or Dell, or ...) and your power and data providers. It's turtles all the way down.
> van Gogh
Are you serious? Yes he did seek commercial approval of his art (Nuenen (1883–1885)) and yes he did choose colors based on what was popular and appearing in the museums of his time (Antwerp (1885–1886)). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh
> the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience
[citation needed]. "Art" is a lot bigger than you're allowing for. Define it however you like. Put that definition in your wallet and show it to people at parties, but please don't assume your definition is bigger, better, or more perfect than everyone else's (says the little postmodernist living in my brain).
> Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo
Now you're taking the thing that defines the status quo--"Community"--and then complaining that it wants to follow what it defines? By definition, that's what the community does. Or do you mean that someone whom you believe should be encouraging you to do interesting things is not doing so? What, precisely, is it that "the community" owes you?
> early 90's at the dawn of personal computing
You mean almost 20 years after the introduction of the Apple II (in 1977)? Was that just pre-dawn? Early 90's already had Microsoft running more PCs than any other OS on the planet. That was pretty awesome for innovation and "anything's possible", huh?
> While occasionally Hacker News feature posts
Now you're just whining. If you want the HN scene to be more awesome for you then hang out, post more, and make it awesome. Otherwise, go back to your "real hacking is dead" sub-reddit and mope around there. This is what it is. Hacking is what it is. If your blinders prevent you from seeing awesome, take them off. You are info-rich and thought-poor, you are not entitled to have others filter the world in whatever way you want. If the community you find here isn't the community you want to be a part of, then run away like you're on fire.
> Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas?
"Where's my flying car?" amiright? Implementations of "the next generation of ideas" are constantly fomenting. Many try, many fail. You've been reading too much futurist sci-fi.
> my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy
More "trolly" than liberal arts, I'd say.
What did you expect to find on the web if not the web itself?
People in hordes flock to latest web 2.0 place for another doze of ferret shock. That alas is just a nature.
The thing is, most of the hackers that lament a bygone era have simply had the tasks they knew well made obsolete. They are upset because they learned tasks and not skills. Nobody cares today if you can roll a kick-ass DOS boot disk unless you were skilled enough to translate that knowledge into, say, fitting OS X Leopard onto a 1 GB USB memory stick.
We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.
January, 1990---Operation Sun Devil goes down, where the Secret Service arrest a bunch of teenagers who have illegally accessed computers and charged with disseminating internal AT&T documents describing how 911 works. The era of the 80s "hackers" ended.
March 2000---the tech stock market crases. The Internet craze pretty much tanked at this point.
None of this is anything I consider "arcane inside references" but hey, I'm into computer history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
This isn't a big date technologically speaking, but as far as the social history of the internet goes, it was huge. I suspect it's one of the big reasons AOL was so demonized. (There are obviously many others.)
All it takes is for all the herd to realize that there's not money in it, not the way they think, and the social currency you get by being in that crowd will disappear.
But this is what we've worked for all along. The inevitable result of "Don't Repeat Yourself" and open source. Isn't this what we wanted, to get to a point where programming is easy?
http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/mailing-lists.html
edit: oops, I thought you were responding to Kragen's comment. Read his 'blog' anyways, it's awesome :)
I don't know that I agree with you. I think the term "hacker" is being mis-applied to a large group that sort-of, but not quite, embodies that which is "hacker".
Much like rap/hip-hop was once underground but is now mainstream. The mainstream stuff that you see out in the open everyday is a non-authentic watered down version of that which is real, and which still lurks in the underbelly clubs of the cities.
The hackers of the early 90's learned computers somewhere in mid to late adolescence. The hackers today grew up with computers, but they are not the same thing.
Interesting and well thought out post, but I don't think it really stands up to scrutiny, except to expose the fact that the definition of hacker has warped and changed over time.
But there are still real hackers out there; like people that sell 0days just to eat and buy new fancy toys and such.
If you still through and design something you're programming - putting a fair amount of thought and structure in it before you hit the editor. Just coding and coding is probably closer to hacking to me - it's a messy art but capable of brilliance.
On the security side of things there seems to be a split between 'white hat' security professionals which includes a few blowhards by all accounts, and 'black hats' who have changed from just mischief to working for nefarious types for money. Supposedly there are still quite a few 'grey hats' who are just about playing around and finding out interesting new things while ignoring the black and white side of things.
You missed it, but no harm done - it was not very interesting to begin with.
... which is a little bit ironic, in its own way.
There's still however systems programming going on, but in the area of client-server communications (RPC/serialization frameworks), distributed computing, storage systems. There's also great deal of algorithm development going on in the areas of machine learning and information retrieval. Just these challenges don't always occur in early-stage companies.
On the other hand, people are also doing a lot more than the early 90s/late 80s hackers couldn't on personal PCs: domain specific languages, functional programming.
It's even more portable than Java (runs on ARM-based platforms).
Python very much promotes a certain style of programming (object oriented, with some functional elements). I.e. I can write Basic in PHP (especially after the decision to add goto) but not in Python (which is a benefit; also important to me is the fact I can't write Perl in Python).
Most every managed web hosting provider has PHP integration enabled in their product. If a kid is building a website for their boy scout troop which needs an email feedback or guest book form, they will use PHP.
What's also fascinating is relational databases are a part of the "make a simple web application" stack as well. So you have people with very little exposure to computing using very complex environments with very strong abstraction layers. There's many many years of hard-core hacking that enabled that to happen.
EDIT: That sounds more dismissive than I meant. The post is a great read, I miss the old days too.
In my experience, hackers have always been the quiet type. Now some loud ones have changed what it means to be a hacker through popularity.
Thus, their volume has contributed some social capital to us.
This really strikes home for me. Hacking used to be very intellectual, especially in the open source world. Robert Morris created the first worm as a test to see how large the Internet was. RMS hacked out Emacs (mostly) on his own to build a Lisp interpreter/text editor. Linus made Linux so he could experiment with Unix for free.
Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore.
That said, I do think that it is really more of an evolution instead of a redefinition. I'm not sure that it's all bad and in some cases it's good; many startups have a really clever idea about software or technology behind them. Maybe it's that hacking is now about finding new and clever ways to integrate technology and computing into our lives instead of finding clever things in technology. In essence, maybe it's about writing for the world instead of writing for the programmer.
I'm not sure this is correct, but thoughts/comments are welcome (even from me, I might come back and edit this later as I think about it more).
There are almost certainly more hackers pursuing intellectual challenges than there have ever been before. What has happened is that the entire rest of the world has arrived on the web, so the intellectuals don't stand out as much.
It used to be that more than half the people on the web were pursuing Ph.D-level projects in computer science. But that was because there were only twelve people on the web, and all of them were MIT students or BBN employees.
Yours is a very common complaint. You hear it all the time in the sciences: Where (people ask) are the contemporary physicists who would rank with Einstein or Fermi? The answer is that there are more people who understand quantum mechanics and general relativity today than there ever were before, and they have a much better understanding than Einstein or Fermi ever did. But they also aren't famous, because it's a lot more boring to be one of several thousand experts on general relativity than it is to be the very first one.
Similarly, I've heard it said that the all-time golden age of mathematics may be... today. There are a lot of mathematicians around. There's more funding than ever before in history.
World population for the last several centuries has exploded. Suppose 500 million people lived in Plato's time and there were 50 "natural geniuses". That means 1 per 10 million. Even disregarding technological or social progress and assuming linear scaling, that implies at least 650 "natural geniuses" today. Where are they? Who are they? The sheer number of most-capable individuals has grown enormously.
I feel like the term hacker has finally been rehabilitated after being co-opted by cyberpunk bullshit. I like that hacking now days means building something useful with amazingly cool open source tools. The sense of entitlement and angst that went with the cyberpunk movement makes me glad its long gone.
This "evolution" doesn't just apply to criminals. in the scholar community, there are plenty of security researchers writing all sorts of papers on the most obscure aspects of computing, and even outside that, there are still those hobbyists who passionately like to explore the limits of our systems, even if only on their spare time. The magnitude and scope of our systems may have become more accomodating to the mainstream culture, but the hacker culture continues to live just as strong, as you put it, "typing silently the night away".
I mean, I almost feel bad obviating your entire post, but you're just playing games with the semantics of the word "hacker", not observing useful phenomena. I even think that part of the semantic drift is quite possibly just reflecting a drift in the places you hang out, rather than fundamental changes in the real world.
If you want to go find those hackers, I'm sure you can still find them. I'm not very interested, myself, but I'm pretty sure they're still out there. Not so much on web forums, though.
In the meantime, if you want to do "hackery" things by pretty much any definition, you can find people to do it with online. The existence of "posers" doesn't make the real people go away.
Then those hackers grew up, got jobs, and started making real social connections. They learned that it's much more fun when people get to know the real you, when you can cooperate on projects with other brilliant minds instead of competing in secret, and that the UI (or even marketing) of something can affect its contextual "meaning" just as much as its technical design does (e.g. text messages and IM conversations are basically the same thing—but you use them for different things, at different times. This is, oddly, a sort of postmodernism.)
Inspired by their newly discovered social reality, and the suddenly-available power of the Internet to achieve it, the focus of hacking turned from "technical hacks", (which stood on their own and, as much as they positively benefitted you, never benefitted anyone else, and possibly harmed them) to "social hacks", which revealed that it was possible to have a non-zero-sum game, a program that benefits both you, and other people, because of the new interactions conceivable through it.
This is just my definition but I will admit I missed the 80's and most of the 90's.
The former has definitely been diluted. But the latter is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof (apologies to Alan Moore).
If you want to know the internals of a project/framework, other people's perceptions of what 'hacking' means doesn't stop you from looking at the code (assuming foss).
You say "Does anyone really understand the internals of Ruby on Rails". Well, go look at it and understand it. Then look at the MRI and JVM implementations of Ruby -- and understand those. You can keep drilling all the way down until you're generating assembly.
The majority of your complaints is that the industry has moved in the direction of the assembly line. That may be the natural gravitation, and you may just be filling in a spot at work. But no one can stop you from learning the lower level details on your own time.
Read the linux and bsd kernel mailing lists. Find some irc channels for embedded systems. Check out what people are doing with CUDA. By definition, the mainstream will always bubble up on social aggregators. If you look elsewhere, you'll find the hacker culture is alive and well.
You're just mad because those damn kids stole your cool.
"I was really into Nirvana but then MTV came along and made it mainstream so I stopped listening to them. Sellouts!"
People keep a low profile and things are more implicitly communicated when out in the open. A good hacker is creative, so a creative individual can just as easily imagine the "alternate" possibilities of a particular technology.
Are you interested in Setec Astronomy? :D
I know hackers is basically a bad movie, but it does have a special place in my heart. I'm not exactly sure why....
Thing is, cyberpunk is not hacking. Buffer overflows are not hacking. It never was, actually. Hacking is about building and learning, not about showing off your skills (which in most cases aren't really there).
Now I've gone 'corporate' and my job entails a lot of what you've described aptly as the new new thing. For me hacking has always been about putting the many pieces together. The challenges, more than ever, are still there - it's the nature of them that have changed. Because of the many levels of abstraction, as you've noted, today's hacker needs a broader view and wider skill-set to find those big, big challenges. That's why I still love what I do.
Honestly, for me, increasing the number of Americans (and people elsewhere too) who can think more intelligently would be the holy grail of hacking problems. Can we create more hackers from modern society?
They still aren't. A ton of fantastic hackers just do what they love: hack. They don't write about it or have a blog. I know a bunch of hackers, and none of them flaunt it.
The real hackers are still out there and because of the prevalence of the tools of the trade and the complexity of systems compared to 20 years ago, there are 10 times as many of them. Unless you travel to their places and learn their language you won't know they're there. They (generally) don't have blogs.