Re:The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land
by michaelt on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @06:12PM
(#21875565)
Personally I would say HN never had the anti-authoritarian/punk/anarchist ethos of 1990s cypherpunks, rather than having had it once and lost it.
HN culture has always seen multinational companies like Amazon as something to aspire to become, billionaire investors as heroic risk-taker allies, and lauded small companies that get brought out and shut down for achieving an exit.
There's nothing wrong with that, HN's culture is still perfectly valid. But HN hasn't lost an anti-authority ethos, it never had one, from the moment the URL ended with ycombinator.com
Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.
http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
This sort of attitude is definitely not the one held by most coders at BigStartupCo today.