Fight the man hard enough and you win. Now you're the man.

It wasn't colonization that yuppified hackerdom. It was evolution. Most of the old school hackers became yuppies when they found out they could make lots of money off this stuff. New school hackers are entering the scene now and this is all they know.

The same thing happened to old school counterculture hippies who found out their ideas and their styles sell. Hippies founded loads of clothing brands, trendy shops, 'new urbanism', and the whole organic food movement, all of which are now massively profitable. Whole Foods Market (Nasdaq: WFM, an S&P500 component) is a direct evolutionary descendant of the dirt-worshipping weirdos that spurned 1950s white bread culture and danced in the streets on acid.

Nothing really goes extinct. The dinosaurs are still here. In America we have a custom of roasting one on Thanksgiving.

I grew up with the old school 90s cyberculture, and I miss it dearly. I remember downloading text files on phone phreaking from H/P/V/A BBSes, hacking PBXes to dial demo scene boards in Europe, and watching Second Reality (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA) for the first time on my 80386 with 4mb RAM.

I keep a few museum pieces of stuff I made back then here: http://adam.ierymenko.name/ye_olde_source_code.html

Today I am doing this: https://www.zerotier.com/

In its original form this old hacker culture is mostly dead. Its successor in an evolutionary sense is the startup scene.

If you doubt this thesis consider that you're hanging out at Hacker News, which is run by a billion dollar VC firm. I rest my case.

Yesterday we had Future Crew and L0PHT Heavy Industries. Today we have Y-Combinator and Andressen Horowitz. Today's hacker groups have cap tables.

By saying this I am not claiming that this was an entirely positive change. Evolution is not a progressive march 'upward'. The word evolution just means 'change over time.' Some features are gained, others are lost.

In evolving along these lines the hacker scene gained a lot but it also lost a lot. It lost the creative ethos of play and experimentation, replacing it with an engineering culture ruled by the hidebound plodding competence exported by top-ten universities and their engineering programs -- excellence at doing things we already know how to do. It also lost its countercultural and social ethos, replacing it with a yuppie get-rich mentality. But it gained the ability to act on the world stage. I would argue that hackerdom evolved into a global economic superpower with the capacity to influence not only global geopolitics but the future of human evolution.

You'll say it lost its soul and I won't argue with you. It certainly lost the things that made it great in its time and its place.

But that's the thing. Dinosaurs became birds because the dinosaur thing was played out. 90s hacker culture was great in its time and place. I wonder how relevant it would be today. This is not the 1980s or the 1990s. Everything has changed.

I think the question we need to be asking is what now? Where can we go from here? What might we evolve into that is perhaps more interesting than what we are today and how do we get there? The answer (IMHO) is never going back to the way things were. It's always the forward escape.

Edit: another useful question to ask is: what was it about old school hacker culture that predisposed it to evolve into this? It's particularly interesting to ask this about aspects of today's startup scene and Silicon Valley culture that you don't like. For example: I find the fratty 'brogrammer' thing irritating, but I can see its ancestry in the overwhelmingly male and somewhat sexist hacker culture of yore. It's just that minus the counterculture trappings.