What Happened to Hacker Culture After 1970?

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Putting aside the danger for this to turn into "it was better in my day" rants, Hacker Culture is alive and well and thriving. It just doesn't look like it did in the 70s.

First, I'm going to make a modification to your definition. You define Hacker Culture as "being really good at something for its own sake" which was never really true. You could be good at it for practical reasons, for bragging rights, for personal satisfaction... a hacker could be defined as a person who is good at something because they want to be good at it not because they need to or are told to be. It's not their job or their training. They didn't learn it in school. It's not their parent's job. Hackers are almost compelled to hack. Hackers are self-motivated to learn about their field.

Furthermore, Hackers are not just good at something, they tend to dive deep into their craft to pull it apart and reassemble it in interesting ways. Hackers won't accept conventional wisdom about how it's supposed to be done, they will explore the space themselves. Musicians who play their instrument in a novel way I would consider Hackers.

What has Hacker culture become? The DIY movement and the DIY Ethic. Maker spaces, Open Source programming, craft brewing, urban farming, home cooking, bike repair, self-publishing, blogging, knitting... these are all movements which rely on individual's compulsion to take a personal interest of the objects (physical or virtual) which make up their daily lives. To learn how to make, use, repair and improve on all the stuff which would normally be purchased.

The big shift in Hacker Culture has been an increased freedom of information brought on by ubiquitous Internet access. Until the late 90s, you either had to figure it out on your own, know someone who knew how to Hack, or be lucky enough to stumble on a zine or small press book. Hacking worked much like a medieval guild. Hacking knowledge was handed down and passed around. It was arcane, jargon laden, and often wrong. The notion of Hackers as "Wizards" conveys the value and power of knowledge in pre-Internet Hacker culture, but it also conveys the secrecy.

Ubiquitous and easy Internet access means now anyone can have access to the same information if they want it. It can be discussed, trialed, debunked, confirmed... all in publicly available archives. The rise of video blogging means information and tutorials are even more accessible. In the last ten years there has been a concerted effort to de-jargonize hacking, to remove the barriers to entry by making it easier to learn without dumbing down the actual information. Sites such as Instructables exemplify this exchange of information.

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Hacker culture didn't exist in the 1970s: a variety of hacker cultures existed: see the Jargon file's regional specific entries. Since the 1970s hacker culture unified, generated its imaginary other (suits), and produced a number of definitive central texts: jargon, bofh, etc.

As a workplace culture it tends to exist closer to the tools. The size of the labour force, and the changed methods of labour extraction, have fragmented the culture since USENET mattered and unix was expensive. This is more than a "never ending September" effect: it involves new subcultures based on the ubiquity of backyard coding and the reduced emphasis on core infrastructure hacks (ie backbone networks, kernels & drivers).

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