Trans folks may in general possess qualities that make them better hackers, but they certainly aren't the only ones, so I wouldn't call hacker culture inherently trans.
That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person's identity.
> Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian, therefore queer and leftist. If you have a problem with queer leftists in your hacker community, you are the problem and need to leave.
> Leadership in the hacker community doesn't look like RMS or ESR anymore. The culture is queer, trans, furry, neurodiverse.
> Hacker culture is queer, furry, neurodiverse. Deal with it.
> Hacker culture is queer now, and queer, kinky (but SSC) sex is an integral part of that.
> Hacker culture is trans/furry/otaku/plural/neuroqueer. Get used to it.
> The tech sector and hacker culture are increasingly queered.
> Times have changed. Social justice is now a core part of hacker ideals.
I don't recognize these claims either. The hackers I know are much more diverse in identity and belief than the narrow subculture described above.
Hacker culture has changed in the past ten years or so. The lodestar is no longer ESR's Jargon File, nor the GNU Manifesto, nor Steven Levy's Hackers. They're just ideals of what we think hacker culture should be, but that's not how hacker culture is actually practiced (if it ever was).
As more and more queer and trans people have gotten involved with hacker culture, they've brought queer and trans political and philosophical thinking with them and with it, a new orientation. They're sort of terraforming the hacker space to make it more comfortable and welcoming to people like them. I mean Mara Bos, a leading developer in the Rust ecosystem, states that her goal is to "make the Rust standard library more gay". Cishets are still welcome, of course, inasmuch as they give due respect to queer and other marginalized people in the community and do not express regressive opinions about the same.
The Q in LGBTQ can stand for Queer, or it can stand for Questioning; and maybe that's the basic mindset of queer theory that's applicable here: to question everything, especially your assumptions, and examine critically the social constructs that are intrinsic to the environment in which you live and work. Especially give thought to who is centered and who is marginalized by your efforts.
Allison Parrish does a great job of explaining this attitude in her talk "Programming is Forgetting: Towards a New Hacker Ethic":
She and Parrish are probably the most prominent exponents of what constitute the new norms of hacker culture. Oh, and uh, both are trans women.
That's the thing: Hacker culture never was as inclusive as people claimed it was. It was still oriented around the cishet white male nerd; inasmuch as others outside that template were allowed to participate, it was made more difficult for them because of the cishet-white-male-nerd-oriented assumptions and norms that were intrinsic to the community (as Parrish elucidates with her example about Margaret Hamilton being unable to assemble her programs on the surreptitiously modified PDP-1). That's what's changing.
Remember, traditional hacker culture could never exist without vast sums of DARPA money to supply funding for the equipment, resources, payroll, etc. It only came about because the military-industrial complex wanted the missile to know where it is as it hurtled through the sky on its way to blow up thousands or millions of Others. It is inadequate as a general framework that allows for talented people regardless of background to make a contribution. The queer hackers are attempting to modernize this framework to better meet the goal of welcoming valuable contributions regardless of the contributor's identity, using their experience as outcasts among outcasts.
We could argue about the history of hacker culture and its inclusivity, but it would most likely be just a series of proofless claims from both sides. I personally have never seen or heard of a person rejected from any hacker clique because of their sexual orientation. I've heard of a few having their contributions refused for trying to push political agenda [0], but then again it wasn't their identity that was refused, only the contributions related to advertising that identity.
I don't feel like the neo-queer-hacker culture you're discribing is particularly welcome to anyone who disagrees with them. I've heard of multiple instances of people calling for bans of people who said something they disagree with [2]. That is completely opposite of "inclusive". Inclusivity only matters when it includes people you disagree with.
> Coraline Ada Ehmke slew the meritocracy buddha in 2018
It doesn't surprise me that a person who hasn't shown much skill or merit is arguing against meritocracy. It is in her own interest to do so.
I'd say queer/trans subcultures are hacker/DIY friendly, but not necessarily the other way around.
I'd say hacker culture tends to be accepting of individualism and diversity, but the vast majority of people in hacker culture have no affiliation with, or knowledge of queer/trans subcultures.
Would like to see that explored more. I think I get where you're going, but which statement is more true: "hacker culture is inherently queer" or "hacker culture is inherently anti-authoritarian"?
Because I'm thinking it's maybe more like "Both queer culture and hacker culture are inherently anti-authoritarian, so they have many points of concordance".
But then I start thinking around the problem, and I think about the amount of privilege inherent in that white-boy-from-the-suburbs 80s/90s hacker thing ("fifty thou a year'll buy a lot of beer") and I start to wonder if the gulf is maybe a bit deeper than it first appears.
Where does the cyberpunk/libertarian stuff fit in with queer culture, which IME is a lot more communal?
I don't know. I think it's a really interesting line of inquiry.
(Edit: you've been flagged. What the actual fuck?)
Ironically, as a homosexual female, I consider modern queer culture authoritarian as hell. It's really big on there being one way to interpret the world, one way to build/structure your identity, one set of 'correct' opinions, trying to convince you to cut off people who aren't in the Good People Club(TM), etc. This is just enforced via panopticon/mob surveillance rather than a centralized authority.
If anything, I'd consider modern (post-Obergefell) queer culture to be pretty hostile to hacker culture since hackerdom is partially about understanding systems and working them to whatever purposes you decide, whereas modern queer culture seems to be about finding a system that works for you and pledging allegiance to it.
A lot of my distaste/lack of fitting with queer culture right now stems from the conflicts between the values instilled in me as the child of hackers and the values of queer environments.
They were flagged because the comment was deliberately inflammatory and lacked any nuance - there is no way to spring-board from that comment into any kind of continued discussion. It was a comment that was only meant to virtue signal/push an agenda, not to promote discussion. HN tends to frown on that outside of specific aspects of techno-politics.
Looking at the history of the account that someone else posted, I think their intention was to be quite narrow in their comparison. I imagined they were working with a much more liberal definition of queer, more a synonym of "countercultural". I'd still like to see them flesh out their thoughts.
Trans folks may in general possess qualities that make them better hackers, but they certainly aren't the only ones, so I wouldn't call hacker culture inherently trans.
That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person's identity.
Looking at this user's comment history, they've been beating this drum for a while: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian, therefore queer and leftist. If you have a problem with queer leftists in your hacker community, you are the problem and need to leave.
> Leadership in the hacker community doesn't look like RMS or ESR anymore. The culture is queer, trans, furry, neurodiverse.
> Hacker culture is queer, furry, neurodiverse. Deal with it.
> Hacker culture is queer now, and queer, kinky (but SSC) sex is an integral part of that.
> Hacker culture is trans/furry/otaku/plural/neuroqueer. Get used to it.
> The tech sector and hacker culture are increasingly queered.
> Times have changed. Social justice is now a core part of hacker ideals.
I don't recognize these claims either. The hackers I know are much more diverse in identity and belief than the narrow subculture described above.
Hacker culture has changed in the past ten years or so. The lodestar is no longer ESR's Jargon File, nor the GNU Manifesto, nor Steven Levy's Hackers. They're just ideals of what we think hacker culture should be, but that's not how hacker culture is actually practiced (if it ever was).
As more and more queer and trans people have gotten involved with hacker culture, they've brought queer and trans political and philosophical thinking with them and with it, a new orientation. They're sort of terraforming the hacker space to make it more comfortable and welcoming to people like them. I mean Mara Bos, a leading developer in the Rust ecosystem, states that her goal is to "make the Rust standard library more gay". Cishets are still welcome, of course, inasmuch as they give due respect to queer and other marginalized people in the community and do not express regressive opinions about the same.
The Q in LGBTQ can stand for Queer, or it can stand for Questioning; and maybe that's the basic mindset of queer theory that's applicable here: to question everything, especially your assumptions, and examine critically the social constructs that are intrinsic to the environment in which you live and work. Especially give thought to who is centered and who is marginalized by your efforts.
Allison Parrish does a great job of explaining this attitude in her talk "Programming is Forgetting: Towards a New Hacker Ethic":
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...
> which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill
Coraline Ada Ehmke slew the meritocracy buddha in 2018: https://where.coraline.codes/writing/meritocracy/
She and Parrish are probably the most prominent exponents of what constitute the new norms of hacker culture. Oh, and uh, both are trans women.
That's the thing: Hacker culture never was as inclusive as people claimed it was. It was still oriented around the cishet white male nerd; inasmuch as others outside that template were allowed to participate, it was made more difficult for them because of the cishet-white-male-nerd-oriented assumptions and norms that were intrinsic to the community (as Parrish elucidates with her example about Margaret Hamilton being unable to assemble her programs on the surreptitiously modified PDP-1). That's what's changing.
Remember, traditional hacker culture could never exist without vast sums of DARPA money to supply funding for the equipment, resources, payroll, etc. It only came about because the military-industrial complex wanted the missile to know where it is as it hurtled through the sky on its way to blow up thousands or millions of Others. It is inadequate as a general framework that allows for talented people regardless of background to make a contribution. The queer hackers are attempting to modernize this framework to better meet the goal of welcoming valuable contributions regardless of the contributor's identity, using their experience as outcasts among outcasts.
We could argue about the history of hacker culture and its inclusivity, but it would most likely be just a series of proofless claims from both sides. I personally have never seen or heard of a person rejected from any hacker clique because of their sexual orientation. I've heard of a few having their contributions refused for trying to push political agenda [0], but then again it wasn't their identity that was refused, only the contributions related to advertising that identity.
I don't feel like the neo-queer-hacker culture you're discribing is particularly welcome to anyone who disagrees with them. I've heard of multiple instances of people calling for bans of people who said something they disagree with [2]. That is completely opposite of "inclusive". Inclusivity only matters when it includes people you disagree with.
> Coraline Ada Ehmke slew the meritocracy buddha in 2018
It doesn't surprise me that a person who hasn't shown much skill or merit is arguing against meritocracy. It is in her own interest to do so.
[0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
I'd say queer/trans subcultures are hacker/DIY friendly, but not necessarily the other way around.
I'd say hacker culture tends to be accepting of individualism and diversity, but the vast majority of people in hacker culture have no affiliation with, or knowledge of queer/trans subcultures.
> Hacker culture is inherently queer/trans
Would like to see that explored more. I think I get where you're going, but which statement is more true: "hacker culture is inherently queer" or "hacker culture is inherently anti-authoritarian"?
Because I'm thinking it's maybe more like "Both queer culture and hacker culture are inherently anti-authoritarian, so they have many points of concordance".
But then I start thinking around the problem, and I think about the amount of privilege inherent in that white-boy-from-the-suburbs 80s/90s hacker thing ("fifty thou a year'll buy a lot of beer") and I start to wonder if the gulf is maybe a bit deeper than it first appears.
Where does the cyberpunk/libertarian stuff fit in with queer culture, which IME is a lot more communal?
I don't know. I think it's a really interesting line of inquiry.
(Edit: you've been flagged. What the actual fuck?)
Ironically, as a homosexual female, I consider modern queer culture authoritarian as hell. It's really big on there being one way to interpret the world, one way to build/structure your identity, one set of 'correct' opinions, trying to convince you to cut off people who aren't in the Good People Club(TM), etc. This is just enforced via panopticon/mob surveillance rather than a centralized authority.
If anything, I'd consider modern (post-Obergefell) queer culture to be pretty hostile to hacker culture since hackerdom is partially about understanding systems and working them to whatever purposes you decide, whereas modern queer culture seems to be about finding a system that works for you and pledging allegiance to it.
A lot of my distaste/lack of fitting with queer culture right now stems from the conflicts between the values instilled in me as the child of hackers and the values of queer environments.
They were flagged because the comment was deliberately inflammatory and lacked any nuance - there is no way to spring-board from that comment into any kind of continued discussion. It was a comment that was only meant to virtue signal/push an agenda, not to promote discussion. HN tends to frown on that outside of specific aspects of techno-politics.
Looking at the history of the account that someone else posted, I think their intention was to be quite narrow in their comparison. I imagined they were working with a much more liberal definition of queer, more a synonym of "countercultural". I'd still like to see them flesh out their thoughts.
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[flagged]
> so many transfems
Sounds interesting. How many? What proportion against the general population? Do you know?