Hackers are tinkerers and inventors and trouble-shooters, and nothing thrills them more than producing an elegant solution to a frustrating problem. Right Thing is minor implementation details - discrete problems to be solved, one at a time, for however long it takes. If changing a single line of code can stop a computer from crashing, then maybe opening a single club can begin the resurrection of a city's nightlife. The DNA Lounge is intended as a real business, of course, and Zawinski realizes he must make a profit, but it's also an effort to restore a part of San Francisco that he once loved. I see a lack, I see a problem that needs to be fixed.
Someone needs to fix it.
And it might as well be me. Fast cars, big houses, yachts, planes - for a group of people who are supposed to be so abstracted from the material world that small matters like personal hygiene can slip by unnoticed, most of the wealth generated by the Internet bubble has gone to the same old same old, what the rich have been buying with their cash for generations. That will change. The most dramatic period of capital creation in the history of the world has left the country's urban centers awash with people who are young, smart, non-traditional and very well off. The geeks, long buried in the basement, are slowly emerging into the sunlight, and they're fully vested.