| Hacker culture is dangerous. We are living in a technological Cambrian explosion, and it is certainly very exciting to see the many types of hardware, software, and techniques that have emerged in a few short years. The power that can be wielded by tying together a few components is enormous. Unfortunately the 'Hacker Way' is to glue components together and declare success if the whole thing 'works'. The glue is normally a scripting language of some sort, and the pieces can be enormously powerful, such as an EC2 cluster or an IP messaging framework. There was a study a while back called 'The Cloud Begins With Coal'. While some may dispute the specifics, the main point is this- computation requires energy. When you integrate components without regard for how much energy is required to exercise them, you can end up with an enormous and inefficient or dangerous system. Consider Facebook, a case study of the dangerous effects of a hacker system coupled with large amounts of money. They have built an enormous computational infrastructure to automate the task of sharing pictures over a network. Thousands of engineers and large amounts of electricity are being consumed to execute a process that has no clear social benefit, and for which few of the 'customers' would be willing to pay, other than the surveillance agencies. Why is that? I propose it is due to non-systems thinking, nobody sat down at the beginning to engineer the end-to-end process (much less the business model). A properly engineered system would require a central piece of telecom equipment, say a typical Ericsson switch, and a git-like protocol that stored content on the client side. Boom, no data center required. Somebody a few days ago demonstrated the ability to delete arbitrary content from the Facebook data center using a Raspberry Pi. Hacker vs. Hacker. Another example of hacker culture is the NSA - nobody there thought of the world as a complete system, they just hacked together a whole slew of tools to accomplish one part of their mission (SIGINT) without regard for their ultimate customer, the American people. We need to declare hacker culture a clear and present danger to society. |
On the one hand, I agree with the energy-efficiency issues, and the amounts of waste in current products annoy me. It got so bad that people honestly think routing data around the world to do something that should be done via a local network is a good idea. I wouldn't pick on Facebook that much though, it has a clear social benefit - they hit a sweet spot in terms of interpersonal communication, as witnessed by the adoption it has. I know I derive tons of value from Facebook and can hardly imagine switching to something else now.
On the other hand, the thing I disagree with is calling it the hacker culture. Let's be clear about what group of people you're complaining about - it's not the culture of skilled, playful people - it's the hipster/startup variant of "hacker culture", taking a bunch of APIs for cat pictures, gluing them together with the most trendy JS framework that happens to be totally overcomplicated for the task at hand, and calling yourself the master of the world. The guy with Raspberry Pi is probably the only actual hacker in your entire comment.
Also remember that programming went mainstream some time ago, and most of the programmers that are employed are not hackers.
Hacker culture is fine. Hipster culture is dangerous.