{"id":29814,"date":"2016-06-29T01:00:25","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T05:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29814"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:17:37","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:17:37","slug":"qotd-the-hacker-tribe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/06\/29\/qotd-the-hacker-tribe\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The hacker tribe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scratch the surface of \u201cSilicon Valley culture\u201d and you\u2019ll find dozens of subcultures beneath. One means of production unites many tribes, but that\u2019s about all that unites them. At a company the size of Google or even GitHub, you can expect to find as many varieties of cliques as you would in an equivalently sized high school, along with a \u201ccorporate culture\u201d that\u2019s as loudly promoted and roughly as genuine as the \u201cschool spirit\u201d on display at every pep rally you were ever forced to sit through. One of those groups will invariably be the weirdoes.<\/p>\n

Humans are social animals, and part of what makes a social species social is that its members place a high priority on signaling their commitment to other members of their species. Weirdoes\u2019 priorities are different; our primary commitment is to an idea or a project or a field of inquiry. Species-membership commitment doesn\u2019t just take a back seat, it\u2019s in the trunk with a bag over its head.<\/p>\n

Not only that, our primary commitments are so consuming that they leak over into everything we think, say, and do. This makes us stick out like the proverbial sore thumb: We\u2019re unable to hide<\/em> that our deepest loyalties aren\u2019t necessarily to the people immediately around us, even if they\u2019re around us every day. We have a name for people whose loyalties adhere to the field of technology\u200a\u2014\u200aand to the society of our fellow weirdoes who we meet and befriend in technology-mediated spaces\u200a\u2014\u200arather than to the hairless apes nearby. I prefer this term to \u201cweird nerds,\u201d and so I\u2019ll use it here: hackers.<\/p>\n

You might not consider hackers to be a tribe apart, but I guarantee you that many\u200a\u2014\u200aif not most\u200a\u2014\u200ahackers themselves do. Eric S. Raymond\u2019s \u201cA Brief History of Hackerdom<\/a>,\u201d whose first draft dates to 1992, contains a litany of descriptions that speak to this:<\/p>\n