The hacker ethos didn't change. The software developer gold rush happened, bringing in an influx of people who are only coding for the big paycheck corporations provide, and that watered down who was considered a "hacker". There's no interest among them in exploring what one can do with computers, no interest in code elegance (the hallmark of the old-school hackers), and certainly no interest in any ethos other than "Greed is good".

This is 100% exactly what happened. Being a hacker was the un-sexy thing, done out of passion. Then people realized it paid a ton of money and now we have... whatever mess it is we have today.

It's the same thing as Eternal September, and complaining about cultural dilution by a mass of developer immigrants will do as much good.

What is productive is being a respectful evangelist for the ethos you want to inculcate in the next generation.

What's forgotten about enculturation of newcomers is that most of them have no strongly held beliefs about the new domain.

Which is an opportunity for education and pursuasion, with a little elbow grease and diplomatic effort.

It's very plain in the progression of BTC to me...

Invention: Fuck the gov't, have fun buying all the drugs on earth!

Mass-adoption: We can lock JPEGS in a box you have to pay to unlock!

>no interest in code elegance (the hallmark of the old-school hackers.

We know different old school hackers.

Right - just like the common attitude towards things like the FSF has changed, generally the hacker ethos' Overton Window has shifted. People don't value the same things anymore and you often see older people's incredulity at things like people using macOS and not really caring about whether it's open source or not.

Doesn't this happen in every movement? The movement shifts things far enough that people don't see the movement any more since they're more comfortable.

I dunno if that's the 'hacker' ethos or the 'Silicon Valley startup developer' ethos, basically saying companies should do whatever they want to make money but nobody should stand in the way of making that money.

I mean I'm generalizing as much as you are here; "most people" and "most hackers" are weasel words (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weasel_word).

The golden age of hacker ethos is at whatever time one was teenager, assumed everybody shares his friends group opinions and discovered tech politics for the first time.

I was mainly the large influx of opportunists that called themselves hackers. Same with internet users in general that have overridden it by sheer numbers. Not that such a ethos was something that was ever absolute.

funny how we all changed our minds when our time and money was on the line