[Fnoord]

Communities are like ecosystems; they evolve. They are dead when they stop evolving. It might be dead for you if you dislike the way a community is evolving but that is your subjective perception which is _objectively_ inaccurate.

There's an ample amount of hacking (orig. meaning) related content out there, right now. For example, 35c3 was a little less than a month ago and I still watch a talk roughly daily. Centralized way points which attract the normal, average people will evolve eventually in the wrong way and it is RIP TAZ.

And all those who always claim X gets too political: it always was political, everything is. The word you perhaps sought is political polarized (ie. help! my important political view is or has become a minority in this subculture). Looking back at the phreaking culture and telephone history (to give an older example) , politics were involved with Ma Bell right from the get go. After all, they were installed as a monopoly and kept that way _by_ the government.