I started to agree with you, but only because my brain initially parsed your statement as, "you no longer have the right to write an article about what a hacker is". I would take anything ESR writes about hackers or "hacker culture" (whatever that is) with a grain of salt the size of my clearly-unreliable head.
There's a lot of interesting tidbits and trivia and observations in ESR's hacker dictionary and other writings, but it became really clear to me about 10 years ago that ESR has this reductive wish-fulfillment streak that pretty much invalidates his entire worldview. ESR really, really wants to believe that a hacker is something more than a really talented programmer. He really really wants to believe that hackers have a shared, unified culture that goes back to the dawn of computing, and that this culture agrees on pretty much everything that really matters to him, and that this culture is ultimately the only group that matters where philosophical issues surrounding computing are concerned.
If it wasn't obvious enough, he uses terms like "our tribe" to refer to the culture, and "the elders of our tribe" to refer to the supposed universally-agreed-upon elite of this imaginary meritocracy. Most importantly (and this is where the wish fulfillment part comes in), he really wants to believe that he is one of those elders. For all of his strengths (and he has many- he clearly has a really active intellect), he comes across to me as a really insecure yet conceited and arrogant guy (insecurity and arrogance frequently go together in my experience). He ultimately just wants to believe that there is some vast and old meritocratic subculture of intellectual elites, and that he is at or near the top of that meritocracy.
All you have to do is read through his version of the hacker's dictionary for any entries that attempt to define what a hacker is or what a hacker believes, as opposed to the entries that just document trivia, history, and slang. It's like reading Heinlein- every time he tries to define what an ideal hacker is like, he's obviously describing himself. This goes all the way down to political beliefs. At one time, there was a controversial entry that stated that most or all hackers were libertarians. Guess what ESR was? At some point in the 2000s, he changed it to read that most or all hackers were neoconservatives. This coincided with his own self-identification as a neoconservative. I don't know what it says now, I can't bring myself to look at it.
The "surprised by wealth" essay was what initially soured me on the guy. He was (briefly) very wealthy after VA Linux's IPO in 1999, and he felt compelled to write a big long essay about how rich he was and how it validated everything he'd been saying (http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-o...). This was followed by all sorts of lovely things, like his Bill Gates-as-Hitler artwork that I think is still on his site somewhere, and many many many blowhard outbursts and incidents over the years.
There's a lot of interesting tidbits and trivia and observations in ESR's hacker dictionary and other writings, but it became really clear to me about 10 years ago that ESR has this reductive wish-fulfillment streak that pretty much invalidates his entire worldview. ESR really, really wants to believe that a hacker is something more than a really talented programmer. He really really wants to believe that hackers have a shared, unified culture that goes back to the dawn of computing, and that this culture agrees on pretty much everything that really matters to him, and that this culture is ultimately the only group that matters where philosophical issues surrounding computing are concerned.
If it wasn't obvious enough, he uses terms like "our tribe" to refer to the culture, and "the elders of our tribe" to refer to the supposed universally-agreed-upon elite of this imaginary meritocracy. Most importantly (and this is where the wish fulfillment part comes in), he really wants to believe that he is one of those elders. For all of his strengths (and he has many- he clearly has a really active intellect), he comes across to me as a really insecure yet conceited and arrogant guy (insecurity and arrogance frequently go together in my experience). He ultimately just wants to believe that there is some vast and old meritocratic subculture of intellectual elites, and that he is at or near the top of that meritocracy.
All you have to do is read through his version of the hacker's dictionary for any entries that attempt to define what a hacker is or what a hacker believes, as opposed to the entries that just document trivia, history, and slang. It's like reading Heinlein- every time he tries to define what an ideal hacker is like, he's obviously describing himself. This goes all the way down to political beliefs. At one time, there was a controversial entry that stated that most or all hackers were libertarians. Guess what ESR was? At some point in the 2000s, he changed it to read that most or all hackers were neoconservatives. This coincided with his own self-identification as a neoconservative. I don't know what it says now, I can't bring myself to look at it.
The "surprised by wealth" essay was what initially soured me on the guy. He was (briefly) very wealthy after VA Linux's IPO in 1999, and he felt compelled to write a big long essay about how rich he was and how it validated everything he'd been saying (http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-o...). This was followed by all sorts of lovely things, like his Bill Gates-as-Hitler artwork that I think is still on his site somewhere, and many many many blowhard outbursts and incidents over the years.
EDIT: typos and a clarification