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Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

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The corruption of the tech/'hacker' subculture has been so disheartening to watch. Is this the subculture that was obsessed with cyberpunk? It took so little, too: good (but not great) salaries, mediocre tech, and a small amount of fearmongering. And suddenly we're here, convinced that corporations must be unconstrained no matter the societal effects. It's as if the cyberpunk dystopias are now seen as aspirational. Absurd and deeply sad.

I've become deeply disillusioned with tech. Most folks here are actively building a corporate dystopia, and like you said, it didn't even take that much for them to sell out.

The hacker spirit is dead, it's been replaced by capitalist greed :(

To quote rms:

Join us now and share the software;

You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.

Hoarders can get piles of money,

That is true, hackers, that is true.

But they cannot help their neighbors;

That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

Comments like yours are very refreshing, thank you.

> It took so little, too: good (but not great) salaries, mediocre tech, and a small amount of fearmongering.

IDK, I think a major motivator was the "American dream", stories of the few who though talent, hard work, being at the right place and the right time, and a lot of sheer dumb luck, got immensely rich.

"the hackers see themselves not as exploited office workers but as temporarily embarrassed billionaire start-up founders." to paraphrase Steinbeck.

I'm not sure what your point is there. The corporations were manufacturing Zyklon B as a delousing agent. It only became notorious because a government with a mandate to improve the lives of Germans took charge and turned out to be ideologically unsound.

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