The Fall of Hacking
Please first excuse my liberal arts sensibilities in a technical forum; but I figure out there might be some like-minded people out there who feel the same way I do ... that the hacker culture is dying out.

Before anyone jumps in to say that I've jumped the shark, let me quickly jump to elaborate:

The ideal of the hacker a la early 90's, Ghost in the Shell, Hacker and Cyberpunk; a cowboy on the electronic frontier typing silently the night away to a CRT monitor but the internals (of man and machine) is intense full of drama. Better yet, a reclusive vampire in the cyberworld, dialing up the BBS where people went by handles and the text file on packet sniffing taught me the hacking techniques and text file called "subverting American lower-education" taught me the hacking ethos and attitude. Hacking was punk-rock (a la the Ramones, pre-Blink182 and Sum41): marginal and subversive, exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities on remote servers, warez, BIOS viruses, and automatic credit card number generators in Visual Basic 3.0 to get free Internet access via AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, pirated Turbo C++ with DJGPP writing a 2D DOS sidescroller. But I do not really do justice to the description of hacker, pre the dot-com boom - but I think you know what I mean.

Fast forward to the 2009, a hacker has become the anti-thesis to the hacker of early 90's. The new "hacker" go to websites such as YCombinator and have snazzy wordpress blogs with rounded corner designers with full names and locations and snazzy job titles, and geek-chic photo of the said hacker in yuppie dress-shirts smiling, "Software Visionaire/Ruby Ninja; come hit me up on Facebook, let's meet up and talk about business ideas!" The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essentially, is a repository for pictures of inebriated hot chicks. Apparently, the new new thing is now this CRUD forum database application that has a character-limit of 120 words per post, but get this, it's written in a really cool language called Ruby on Rails, a la AutoTune in Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak.

Everywhere in the IT/engineering department, no one gets to write anything from scratch but have to write plugins/patches for a legacy platform, uses third party libraries that have ten plus layers abstraction between the meta-code and the actual code. Does anyone really understand the internal's of Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel or know what YCombinator mean? The worst insult to an engineer is to tell her that she isn't technical enough. But in the designation of "frontend engineer," "backend enginner," "overseas team," I feel more like working on an Henry Ford's assembly-line, efficient and cheap, an assembly-line worker bolting nuts not an craftsman working on the engine, the suspension, the dashboard, the big picture.

Like hip hop/punk rock/grunge, hacking has been overran by marketing guru's (Seth Godin), overzealous self-promoters (Timonthy Ferris), business executives driven by the bottom line (Steve Ballmer/Carol Bartz) and its own narcissism (TechCrunch). It has devolved to become a caricature of its former self. Worst of it all, it has become mainstream - it's no longer subversive.