Why the elite hacker scene has pretty much disappeared is something I have thought about over the past decade as well. I know many people from the groups he mentioned in the beginning - mostly the American ones, but also some European, Australian etc. ones as well.

Ultimately success is what killed it off I'd say. I recognize some HN names as people who were actively, or at least peripherally involved in the scene, hanging out on EFnet's +hack and then #hack etc. Many of these people went into dot-coms and startups from the mid-1990s on. Some sold their companies for billions of dollars, many got tens of millions of VC dollars, or stock options, or buyout dollars, or whatnot. As someone mentioned in the thread for this post, Mudge became a program manager at DARPA - some people went into the security field, and thrived.

Aside from the financial/career success of the dot-com boom, the growth of the Internet helped kill it off as well. Prior to the Internet, a very technical working class kid would take his Commodore 64 hooked up to the family TV, plug it into his POTS phone line with his 300 (then 1200, then 2400...) baud modem, and call a Bulletin Board Service, which inevitably was a Commodore 64 or Apple ][ belonging to another technical teenager, whose class background might be slightly tonier as he often had a dedicated phone line in his room.

So what kind of social structures evolve when the kind of kids who gather on 4chan today get together on this network of Commodore 64's that are fairly independent of everyone else? One thing is for sure, to take a page from this fellow's essay, all of the rules and structures that make up American society with its class structures and relations, large international military and police force and so forth go out the window. If the kids want access to a Cray, they're going to get access to a Cray. They don't care if it's used for some secret DoD research project, or some Goldman Sachs number crunching. These were the days when your local Bell switch might be on a dialup, when a tone-generating blue box could seize hold of the telephone company's in-band signalling.

So some of this fits into what the essay writer says. We had our own communication network, a kind of 4chan'ish network of Commodores and Apple ]['s in teenage boys bedrooms across America. We controlled it. When the Internet came, we shifted to that, but our communication network became controlled by DARPA, then the NSF, then a variety of corporations, which were then whittled down to a handful - AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink, Sprint, Comcast, Time-Warner and several more. The network became corporatized, firewalled, censored, monitored, spammed and spam-resisted etc. Under the threat of spam, attorney generals and corporate control tightening, Usenet effectively disappeared. The disappearance of Usenet is tied to the disappearance of the hacker scene. The same forces which killed Usenet are the forces which killed the scene. Understand why Usenet died and you understand why the scene died.

The carrot is what killed it, not the stick. In 1990 Operation Sundevil happened, the MoD guys were arrested etc. Repression didn't really kill things, it just made people a little more careful. Maybe the arrested guys would quit, but everyone else just started buying early cell phones and such to hack outside their house.

The Internet killed it. It swallowed up the need for a network of BBS's in boy's bedrooms. It swallowed its own Usenet via monopolization, shady corporations doing spam, attorney generals and such. It also started a dot-com boom and then social boom and now mobile/cloud boom. A teenage boy can publish a traction-getting app or website for next to nothing in a way that could never have happened back then. Some of the scene people from the 1980s and 1990s are very, very wealthy Tesla-owning retired founder dudes nowadays.