Comment by aleph_minus_one
2 days ago
> Whereas pretty much everything hacking-related is already a felony thanks to DMCA and other similar laws, so they don't have much to lose.
Hackers were much more rebellious in former days before such laws were past. My opinion the reason why hackers got more "civilized" is that you could earn quite a lot of money by getting (and staying in) a job in big tech.
Hacking was mostly about gaining access before AOL and there was absolutely a "let's give this kid a summer job" attitude floating around after War Games came out.
The chain of resource acquisition and information gathering necessary to arrive at a point where you need to make a long-distance phone call you could never afford was impressive in itself. Calling card fraud by a bright minor for educational purposes against a corporate entity absolutely loathed by every adult at the time just wasn't that big of a deal.
From my perspective the point of being a hacker is individual but follows observable desire paths. A lot of those have been filled in now.
Probably the biggest reason "hackers" got civilized is just a regression to the mean effect. When you have something extremely difficult to get into, there is going to be some strong selection effect that is going to accidentally select for some other correlated traits. As the barriers to entry dropped, more people get in, so the selection gate drops as well and you get something closer to the average human. You can see this in all sorts of niches over time. For instance, while little music niches will often blame their unique culture getting diluted on "selling out" I think it is often the case just that they attracted more people and got regressed to the mean.
If there were no such laws, then what were they rebellious against?
Social norms and “the man”
Maybe I'm biased by my young age and lack of knowledge but aren't modern day hackers way more anti-social-norms (piracy, crypto, doxxing) and against "the man" (directly antagonizing big tech, E2EE proselytizing, fighting against electronic surveillance, circumventing online ID requirements) than they were back in the 70s-80s? I always imagined pre-internet hackers to be spending their nights messing around with university computers, not undermining business models of leading IT companies, but maybe I'm wrong.
Cold war had a bunch of quiet, and likely extra-legal restrictions that could and would be applied if you stood too far out.
For example if you started broadcasting high powered signals it wouldn't be surprising if you got checked into for being a communist/soviet.
I meant hackers, not ham operators.