Reading 02: 404 Hackers Not Found, or The Soul of a Hacker

I think it's fair to say that the hacker ethic is in many ways incompatible with modern society. While some aspects of the ethics live on in the form of the modern open source movement, and the culture of some companies, in many ways, the hacker ethic is well and truly dead. Today corporate American has steadily subsumed the hacker ethic until what is left can only be called an empty shell of its former glory. Nowhere is this more clear than in the business practices of Microsoft. Early on Bill Gates penned the now infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists" decrying the rate at which hobbyists were freely sharing copies of Microsoft software. From then on Microsoft would lead the charge in locking down software via proprietary methods and aggressively pursuing those it found to distribute their code without permission. Microsoft was not satisfied with just making sure people paid for their software, however. They wanted to ensure theirs was the only software people were using at all. And so they set about pursuing a new strategy. The Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy was responsible for snuffing out the likes of Netscape in the late 90s. By embracing open standards and making them ubiquitous, Microsoft could then extend them with proprietary add-ons, and then extinguish competition who could not or did not want to implement these new features. These days Google is carrying out many of these same hit and run tactics with its own platforms in an effort to ensure its own ubiquity.

Anyone who chooses to work in tech must accept that at the end of the day their contributions are going towards less than noble causes. If you really care about your standards, go work for a non-profit. The modern environment of technology mega-corporations is fundamentally incompatible with the hacker ethic as we have defined it here. There is no compromising. Hackers have lost the fight already, they just don't know how badly yet.

That is not to say that the hacker ethic is dying quietly. Throughout these mega corporations, employees are pushing back with what little leverage they still have to make their voices heard. Whether it be Googlers stopping the company's involvement with Project Maven, or outspoken workers at Amazon pushing back against creating facial recognition tools for the FBI and NSA, hackers everywhere are fighting for the very soul of the industry. Ultimately however, I fear it is a losing battle. Companies have every advantage given to them to edge competitors out of their chosen fields, and employees have little say in the means they chose to employ to do so. When the bottomline is the only figure that matters, things like principles and ethical standards are the first things to go. Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil", know it seems like "Don't seem evil" is a more accurate interpretation.