How yuppies hacked the original hacker ethos | Aeon Essays.

…the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets. The hacker impulse should not just be about redesigning products, or creating ‘solutions’. A hack stripped of anti-conventional intent is not a hack at all. It’s just a piece of business innovation.

The un-gentrified spirit of hacking should be a commons accessible to all. This spirit can be seen in the marginal cracks all around us. It’s in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of ‘open’ scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around 3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of manufacture. In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit.

Go home, yuppies.

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OK, this article is making the rounds and one thing that’s a little annoying lately is when companies “celebrate” hacks, hackers, hack-days and more and when given the opportunity to really demonstrate they’re trying to do something different than a pre-established business landscape, they do not. One specific and recent example is Facebook’s “HACKER CULTURE” here’s a link to it on their newsroom page – ok, cool, hacks and hackers “continuous improvement and iteration” – however, last week we found out the Facebook does not allow streaming video to any other service like Twitch and YouTube with Facebook live, they change the terms of service after launch. We’re heading toward a landscape of ABC, CBS and NBC again, this is not hackery at all. Facebook should be championing an “open internet with access to information” not a walled garden or ever-changing terms of service to limit information.

You can see Facebook’s changes here and here is the current “rules”.

Any way, we’ll be talking about hacker businesses at HOPE this weekend and will post a video, depending on who lets us 🙂