Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

When the Bubble burst the social network of hackers I knew dithered. Once well paid and happily employed doing tech stuff and fighting for freedom most of us held on to what we could, some - including myself - started focusing on school, getting degrees and careers. It wasn’t anywhere near as heroic as it had been back before 9/11, in fact, in general, the entire 9/11 thing fucked the hacker culture right up the ass in a far more profound way than it did most other cultures, and that’s saying a lot.

Back when that happened I was working at the Icelandic National Archives and had recently returned from the HAL2001 conference in Enschede (.nl). It was in a number of ways the highlight of the first iteration of my life as a freedom activist. I’d never been the best coder in the world, my thing was always something else entirely, but I did a lot of coding back then. Nowadays I rarely write code and when I do it’s just a few lines of Python or something to solve a quick problem.

Anyway, since the Bubble burst it’s like a lot of great minds have been in hiding… doing their own thing… and slowly it’s like the entire hacker spirit has been rejuvenated. But what’s becoming apparent now is that since the Bubble burst we’ve been really, positively, insanely busy. Building empires, subverting everything that once was. Firefox and Wikipedia are two examples. And now it’s like hacker culture is coming out of hiding and saying, “okay, look, this is what we did while you guys were cowering away, being worried about the next terrorist attack.”

Perhaps hacker culture never waned. Maybe it was just me. If it was, then it was my greatest error to date. But from where I’m sitting it appears that the Cyberpunks are back. And now we’ve got far more troops and the ideological equivalents of nukes.