Finally, news about a hacker on Hacker News!
If you are a hacker, you:
- Mistrust authority
- Promote decentralization
- Share knowledge
- Write open-source software
- Maintain the infrastructure
- Serve humanity
- Are curious
If you are a hacker, you:
- Mistrust authority
- Promote decentralization
- Share knowledge
- Write open-source software
- Maintain the infrastructure
- Serve humanity
- Are curious
That document is not meant for you; it's meant to give prospective hackers an overview of the field. With respect to politics, the document explicitly says:
> The hacker community has some specific, primarily defensive political interests — two of them are defending free-speech rights and fending off "intellectual-property" power grabs that would make open source illegal. Some of those long-term projects are civil-liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the outward attitude properly includes support of them. But beyond that, most hackers view attempts to systematize the hacker attitude into an explicit political program with suspicion; we've learned, the hard way, that these attempts are divisive and distracting. If someone tries to recruit you to march on your capitol in the name of the hacker attitude, they've missed the point. The right response is probably “Shut up and show them the code.”
(emphasis has been added for ease of reference)
1) That was written before he got quite as alt-right-radicalised as he is now; and
2) It is not all by himself but mostly crowd-sourced.
Interesting to observe how it overlaps with this conception of the hacker spirit.
If only the world had many more Alexandra Elbakyans, and fewer Elseviers. Humanity as a whole would be a lot better off without the capitalists ruining everything with their insatiable greed.
/s
They did indeed fund a highly successful research centre, but - importantly to its success - one that wasn't run with the same ideals as its parent. It wasn't Bell Labs itself that endeavoured to monopolise an entire industry to the point where the government had to intervene.
/s
There is quite a difference between giving voluntarily and being expropriated.
> would be a lot better off without the capitalists
That's less capitalism, but rather monopolism and nepotism (actually a "government failure" in the view of public economics). If there were real competition, these publishers could not afford to charge such margins.