this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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I was reading Bruce Sterling's book the hacker crackdown and it describes the same sense of cultural freedom and possibility, but for phones/computers in the 80s and 90s and of how the open/freewheeling hacker culture got eaten by people turning to moneymaking (crime) and by subsequent government crackdowns. He even explicitly mentions how the same thing happened to the bohemian drug underground of the 60s
So I suspect this cultural pattern is kind of a regular thing, maybe mirroring our economic boom/bust cycles. Iirc both the oughts and the 60s were "on" decades while the 70s and teens had big economic crises.
For me personally the saddest instance of this is the proliferation of cultural and social experimentation in the early Soviet Union followed by well, the rest of soviet history
That sounds like an interesting book. I really like cybercultural history like that. There's a book with an adjacent topic you might like, actually. It's called The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. He managed to start this massive investigation into a fairly prolific hacker who had infiltrated Berkeley computer systems in the late eighties and whose only "trail" he left behind was a few cents worth of network usage time. It's a true story. Anyway, just a heads up.