In order to be entryism, the speaker would have to be an outsider, right? But that's not the case here. It's a member of the community speaking up about the values they care about.
Presumably, that care is genuine, right? Or do you have some reason to suspect the speaker is being disingenuous?
> In order to be entryism, the speaker would have to be an outsider, right? It's a member of the community speaking up about the values they care about.
Hmm, what are the author's membership credentials besides being in awe of the great hackers of bygone era? I mean, this is the kind of impression I got from reading TFA.
> What are any of our membership credentials aside from being people who program?
Haha, nice provocation. I'll try though: some people will say it's pwning boxes, others will say it's writing open source software (others still - free software ;)). Many will agree it's about finding novel and unintended uses of technology, for good or for bad. TFA itself mentions distrust of authority, meritocracy, seeking beauty in technology being quoted as part of the Hacker Ethic™.
And I think most people who call themselves hackers would agree it's not about having a boring job as a Java developer churning out repetitive proprietary code for some bank 20 months past deadline, so your definition is probably out ;)
Also, "hardware hacking" seems to be a thing and it need not involve programming. Some will accept social engineering too - maybe the closest to what the author seems to be doing ;)
You're suggesting a different use of "hacker" than the speaker was there, which will be apparent if you look at the whole quote:
> It’s a privilege to be able to be called a hacker, and it’s reserved for the highest few. And to be honest, I personally could take or leave the term. I’m not claiming to be a hacker or to speak on behalf of hackers. But what I want to do is I want to foster a technology culture in which a high value is placed on understanding and being explicit about your biases about what you’re leaving out, so that computers are used to bring out the richness of the world instead of forcibly overwriting it.
That is, the speaker isn't claiming to be a member of the "highest few". But as a member of the community to which "hacker" is ever applied – programmers – it's legitimate to address what qualifies someone for the honor.
No, the speaker seems to be confusing those things. But if that's the way the speaker is using terminology, it doesn't make sense to base our criticisms on an entirely different linguistic platform.
Entryism is the practice of infiltrating an organisation/group to gain trust then using a variety of tactics to try and subvert the politics/ideological premise of the group. Also misdirecting resources to support the subversive ideology and efforts. And ultimately trying to destroy the group and capture the membership into the subversive organisation that was behind the entryism in the first place.
What I gather from the piece and the reactions here point to a fairly clear example of entryism.
What evidence do you have of infiltration beyond the fact that you don't like what the speaker said?
It's a pretty extraordinary charge that someone would become a computer programmer and become a teacher of programming purely in order to give a conference talk that seems to suggest, at root, that we consider how our programs treat people. What a revolutionary!
The author is trying to replace one system of thought with another, that's a fact. I think it's baseless to assume if the intention of the author was to originally pursue this motive or to suggest improvements after being apart of the community for a period of time.
It's hard to reconcile lines like "was born in 1981, and as a young computer enthusiast I quickly became aware of my unfortunate place in the history of computing. I thought I was born in the wrong time. I would think to myself I was born long after the glory days of hacking and the computer revolution." with entryism.
I was born in the 70s and when I was a young computer enthusiast my reading experience is similar: there was a glory era of hacking and experimentation and lisp machines and fun but now it was over and we had to live in this era of professionalism and msdos and you couldn't phreak a phone anymore.
Then I got to college and discovered the internet just as the web was getting started and I started to realize that even though that old era was gone forever, here's a thing that's new and exciting and at least as world-changing.
I still see that 'wow those old timey hackers were really something, and we'll never have the like again' mindset floating around the internet, even here on HN. (For example, people talking about how great lisp machines were or how great smalltalk environments were and how it's such a tragedy that we'll never see their like again).
There is a similar dynamic with first wave Linux people who love the decentralized community oriented 1990's and 2000's that have been reshaped by the 2010's which have been highly centralizing and corporate driven with systemd, containerization etc.
Are the 2010's going to be looked back at in 30 yeas as a horrible decade that destroyed the ambitions of thousands of 12 year old female SysVinit scripting wizkids? Its possible but it seems highly pedantic and silly to think so.
Projecting our current arguments onto history usually ends up as colorful revisionism that is historically inaccurate and politicized. I think people are quite rightly skeptical of such attempts. The tactic is used endlessly in politics, which is certainly not the bastion of accurate factual argument and reasoned discourse.
