[eli_awry]

I'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and I've hiked hundreds and hundreds of miles on the Appalachian Trail. I've been in jail and won the prize for Best Undergraduate Research at my university.

I fell out of touch with the anarchopunkier half of my friends when I got serious about artificial intelligence and computer science - I love these things and they're very important to me, and in the coffeeshops we always talked about how to get rid of tyrants and inequality. I have always believed in technology. OLPC, Ubuntu, Khan Academy, Coursera, solar panels, cell networks - the list goes on.

Startup folks and street punks have a lot of similar ideas about what we want, but really different aesthetics. The punks I've known are much more well-read and just as bright as the grad students I spend time with now. On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Both groups have a lot to learn from each other, if only they can look over the other's smarminess/smelliness.

[moxie]

Radical punk rock literally saved my life. As someone who's been a part of both of these worlds off and on for 16 years, I couldn't disagree with you more.

I see the aesthetics of the hacker and punk scenes as being extremely similar, where as the underlying motives are currently lightyears apart.

For instance, "hacker houses" and "collective houses" have a similar aesthetic. Both are about people living together, and sometimes the actual form even looks the same. But "hacker houses" fundamentally seem to be about "networking" and "making connections" to other entrepreneurs. Collective houses, on the other hand, are about building relationships -- precisely because it's so difficult to find meaningful connection in a world based on exchange. These two things look similar, but (having experienced both) I believe are radically different.

Another clear example is "hacker spaces" vs "social spaces." Again, the aesthetic is similar -- both are supposed to be "creative" spaces that have a similar logistical form. But what actually happens in both places is radically different. Anarchist "social spaces" are built on a social narrative for what people do there, where as "hacker space" activity (in the US, at least) is largely absent any kind of narrative. "Maker culture" in the US is based mostly on doing things that are "neat," and that's really the end of it. There are obvious exceptions, and the EU hacker culture has more of a narrative to it, but this is has been my experience on the whole.

[eli_awry]

I haven't had exposure to the hacker houses on the West Coast, so I can't really speak to that.

The motives of hackers I've known usually have to do with impacting the world and making it better for more people. I've been in punk houses with hackers, but we mostly had parties with art people, and collaborated with anarchists. I'm not talking about the Silicon Valley startup scene, which I know nothing about. I'm moving to MV in a month (to intern with an educational nonprofit), so I guess I'll find out.

I think I was probably wrong when I said 'startup folks', and I meant some other demographic - but it's a demographic of hackers that I've actually met in various places - Baltimore, Seattle, rural Washington state and Austin. And I (perhaps naively) thought that my various and scattered friends with a common ideological thread were representative of the makers of interesting things.

[angersock]

Best parties I've been to were a healthy blend of web folks, hippies, anarchists, engineers, and discordians.

I did observe that despite having fairly good classical training and historical knowledge--more than I had, certainly!--there did not seem to be a lot of self-educated people who knew physics and hard-sciences beyond a somewhat populist level. I suggest that this may be due theoretical physics and whatnot requiring a sounder grounding in mathematics than is easy to pick up on your own.

[il]

How did you connect with that crowd? I've noticed a very high overlap between techies and hippies, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to stumble into a group of discordians short of randomly wandering the streets shouting "hail eris!".

[eli_awry]

I agree - I think it's somewhat cultural. That community has a lot of good ideas, but few fleshed-out solutions, which are harder and require more technical/modeling skills. It's hardly unique to them - education researchers (for instance, as I've been noticing recently) and many administrators are equally quantitatively lacking. Part of it may also be that doing novel critical analysis requires few resources, but doing most novel science is a high-capital endeavor.

[peterwwillis]

But be honest: part of the reason you lived that lifestyle was how romantic it is. If there were a more sexy way to convince young people that you don't have to sleep in a dank moldy shell of a building and eat out of dumpsters to have a positive effect on the world, there'd be less of this type of living-off-the-land. I'm glad you bought into capitalism, too :)

[eli_awry]

It was totally sexy. I think the answer is free copies of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon in every soup kitchen ;)

[md224]

> On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism.

Could you expand on the flaws in their disdain of capitalism? Or, if that's too broad a question, perhaps direct us to some reading material on the subject?

I don't mean this in a snarky or side-taking manner... in fact I'm struggling with my own views on capitalism and would love to expand my knowledge on the issue.

[eli_awry]

So part of the problem is their alternatives to capitalism. Which are mostly primitivist (as in, destroy infrastructure) communist (in the central planning, grey way depicted in i.e. The Dispossessed) or just kinda goofy. As a lifestyle choice, living off the refuse of a bloated and exorbitant society is actually quite sustainable until you need serious healthcare. As something for everybody to do, a new way of governing, it fails because there will be no society from which to absorb the waste. I think efforts to establish autonomous, non-hierarchal, consensus-based organizations or communities within capitalism is awesome. But ultimately, seven billion people are never going to form some totally sweet Zapatista-style worldwide commune. At that scale, the markets are going to be at work. Capitalism is inevitable.

My perspective is that appropriate solutions to this problem involve taxing externalities (pollution, murderous working conditions that cost society), and reducing the cronyism and corruption that breaks capitalism. Also deciding as a society that we are better off if people are not involuntarily homeless or hungry or dying and agreeing on a social contract to provide welfare.

I want to make the world a better place, so I choose to work on making more, better, cheaper, smarter education available to everyone everywhere. And from society's perspective, this is actually a good investment because it increases human capital and also reduces future costs (as educated folks have fewer kids).

I love communist farms and kibbutzim and I can absolutely imagine living on one and participating in one of those societies. And if you hate capitalism, that's a good way to protect yourself from it. But the farms and kibbutzim themselves are still participants in a larger capitalist system.

[steveklabnik]

Here's the basics, from an anarchist/communist perspective: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-03-31-anti-capitalis...