[lsiebert]

Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.

There has always been a strong anti-authoritarian ethos to hacker culture, one where personal privacy and bodily autonomy and the right to encryption were intrinsically at odds with corporate and government attempts to control and surveil, and I hope that doesn't go away.

[derefr]

> Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.

Well, yes, but usually from an aesthetic perspective, rather than a moralistic one. E.g. bad laws and cronyism being seen as ugly hacks and misfeatures on what could be a beautiful and elegant system of law; the cleverness of computer intrusion being more important than its consequences; the Internet (Tor, cryptocurrency, whatever) "routing around damage" — i.e. systems of law that seek to constrain behavior — and this being seen as "natural and inevitable" in the same way one might prescribe no moral agency to carnivorous animals killing their prey; etc.

Communities that start out full of hacker-aesthetes, seem to invariably shift to being full of engineer-moralists. HN wasn't purely a hacker-aesthete community when it started — it was tempered with a good number of other types of people — but they're certainly even more rare here now.

[lsiebert]

I mean there is and has been wide diversity in thought within the hacker community, so there's certainly people who view things only through asthetics.

But I don't think that erases the presence of explicitly moral/ethical thoughts within the hacker community. The philosophical and political manifest in the hacker community in many forms: anarchic, communal, utopian, anti authority, anti centralization, pro equality and merit, etc.

For example: From The Hacker Manifesto

"... You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals...."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Manifesto

also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

[neither_color]

It mostly has gone away. There is a certain type of corporation that we just have to trust now, since seemingly noone is qualified to judge the brilliant people who work there or the merits of their product. Some jurisdictions even require you to prove you use this product as a condition of employment or entry into business establishments.