What Happened to the Hackers?
From Digital Revolution to Corporate Domestication
Talofa reader,
Up until my final year, I was on my way to joining the airforce after high school when one thing happened that changed it all in one night.
My Croatian friend and I were chatting on ICQ when he asked me if I wanted "to see something cool?"
Yes. Of course I did.
Then he "hacked" my Dad's computer that I was using.
I had one of those movie-moment revelations - you know the ones where the protagonist's eyes are suddenly opened to the real world and they transcend their mere mortal experience into god-mode. Maybe not quite that dramatic, but this was the beginning of an unstoppable journey into a world that would completely revolutionise how I saw and understood everything.
I discovered the world of the hacker.
These uniquely smart, unapologetically irreverent, super creative and stubbornly anti-establishment minds who stood for more than just breaking into computers.
In my eyes, they represented freedom of information, freedom of expression, and true intellectual meritocracy - it didn't matter your age, gender, race, or background. If you loved computers, loved learning, and believed in a free and fair society, you were in.
These were the people willing to risk it all to give big corps and suits the middle finger.
And I was here for all of it.
Now it's 2024. The world is full of more injustice than ever, all the things hackers stood against are thriving, but that hacker world I came to idolise?
I can't find it anywhere.
What happened?
The Background
To understand what we've lost, you need to understand what the hacker culture of the 90s and early 2000s was, at least to me.
It wasn't just about breaking into systems - it was a ethos, a way of life, a revolution in thinking.
My education didn't come from university lectures (I flunked out of my Bachelor of Computer Science). It came from downloading DOD "Rainbow Books" and Unix System V manuals, printing them out secretly at work. It came from late nights reading Phrack magazine, 2600, and even, The Anarchist Cookbook (controversial for some, sure) while trying to learn Linux on a cheap acer laptop.
I read stories about the Legion of Doom, watched "Hackers," "Sneakers," and "Takedown" on repeat.
The hacker ethos was about hands-on learning and questioning everything. We compiled our own kernels, learned to apply patches, debug kernel panics, and disassemble core dumps. Not because it would earn us certificates we could use for job interviews, but because we just needed to know how things worked.
The system wasn't just computers - it was society itself, how the world really worked, away from the mainstream media propaganda and Hollywood depictions of western civilisation verses the rest of the world..
We had real heroes too.
Kevin Mitnick wasn't just a guy who social engineered his way into systems - he exposed how vulnerable our trust in authority was. People only know about "wikileaks" Julian Assange, but "mendax" was hacking the Pentagon and government systems, from Melbourne Australia, to challenge authority and expose corruption and government wrongdoing. Aaron Swartz fought for open access to academic knowledge until the system literally destroyed him.
These were people who were like "fuck it", and used this skill, and knowledge of technology to make an impact, make a difference.
And here's the thing: What does a teenage Samoan boy, growing up in New Zealand in the late 90s, have in common with these hackers?
Well, when you grow up on the margins of society, seeing the flaws in the system is usually what comes to you, and not you to it- what I found in hackers, and the hacker culture, other than an insatiable curiosity, was a drive to understand how things really were, and not just drinking whatever kool aid was convenient.
So, when they could see the inequity, the unfairness and bias of the system- they could see me.
The hacker ethos wasn't about chaos - it was about exposing truth and fighting for genuine fairness in an unfair world.
Death By A Thousand Cuts
The following analysis isn't something I've pored over for days and weeks, but it literally a perplexity.ai driven "research" night I spent exploring what the fuck happened to the scene and the movement, that I saw in my youth.
Something fundamental has shifted in our relationship with technology and power. From all accounts, and book references from people who would know, the rebellious spirit of hacking hasn't died - it's been commodified and de-fanged under the guise of "innovation."
The Corporate Capture of Hacker Culture
Remember when "hacker" meant someone who understood systems deeply enough to bend them to their will? Someone who'd spend countless hours understanding protocols, memory management, and system calls just to prove it could be done?
Like, just for the lulz and then moved on to something else?
Now we have "growth hackers" optimising click-through rates, "life hackers" selling productivity porn, and corporate "hackathons" where the biggest act of rebellion is staying up late to build another CRUD app to "help our customer solve problems"- just call it what it is, “help us help the customer, pay us more money.”
The same corporations hackers once targeted now brand themselves as hacker havens.
Facebook's "hack" culture appropriated the language1 while building the very walled gardens and surveillance systems we fought against. Google went from "don't be evil" to being the largest data harvester in human history. Even Microsoft, once the ultimate symbol of closed-source oppression and "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics, now "loves" open source - while making sure they own the platforms it runs on.
From Revolution to Resume Padding
Today's "ethical hackers" aren't picking locks, phreaking phones, or breaking into systems to expose corruption - they're getting CEH certifications and doing bug bounties for the same companies collecting and selling our data.
The tools that once symbolised digital freedom - like encryption and anonymity - are now just bullet points on corporate security frameworks.
Privacy is dead, amirite? smh.
What's the most confronting part of all this?
I look at my own journey - from printing out Unix manuals and learning assembly to understand buffer overflows, to becoming a Solutions Architect at AWS. I'm literally helping build the cloud infrastructure that's centralising the internet into the hands of a few mega-corps.
The irony isn't lost on me.
We've become the very thing we swore to disrupt, just with better hoodies and more stock options.
FML2.
The Death of Digital Liberation
The early hacker movement believed technology could democratise power.
We thought the internet would break down barriers and create a more equitable world. BBS systems and IRC channels were our autonomous zones, free from corporate and government control3.
Instead, we've built systems of control more effective than anything before. The same encryption that was supposed to protect individual privacy now locks users into Apple's ecosystem. The open source movement that was meant to free software from corporate control is now primarily maintained by Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
Even Linux, our symbol of freedom, is now mostly developed by corporate employees, and RedHat 5.2 was my very first Linux Distro.
The Pasifika Perspective
For me, as a Pasifika person, this hits different.
The hacker ethos appealed to me because it promised a way to challenge power structures from the outside. It wasn't about asking for permission or waiting for handouts - it was about taking control of technology and using it to gain knowledge, to empower us and give us the tools to control our own destiny.
But look at our digital world now - the same colonial patterns repeating themselves in new forms.
Big Tech's "solutions" for the Pacific often feel like digital colonialism: cloud services that make us dependent on foreign infrastructure, AI systems trained on our data but controlled by others, and "innovation hubs" that teach our people to be good corporate developers instead of digital revolutionaries.
The skills that once let us challenge power have become tools for maintaining it.
The hackers haven't disappeared - we've just been domesticated by the very systems we once sought to disrupt.
Not Dead, Evolved?
Now, some will say hacker culture isn't dead - it's just evolved. They'll point to CTF competitions, the infosec community on Twitter/X/whatever the fuck Elmo calls it, and the occasional headline-grabbing hack. They'll talk about how "hacktivists" like Anonymous are still fighting the good fight.
But if we're honest, most CTFs have become recruiting grounds for three-letter agencies and tech giants. The same agencies and companies the original hackers were fighting against have turned hacking into a career path. Complete with certifications, HR-approved job descriptions, and corporate policies.
Others might argue that the corporatisation of hacking is a good thing - it's "maturity" of the field. That working within the system is more effective than fighting it.
That we can "change things from the inside".
Get the actual, fuck out of here…
I mean, “I don't believe that's possible.”
I've been on the inside for a while now, and I'm not seeing much change.
Why would I?
When the most profitable thing comes from merely appearing to do good for humanity rather than actually doing it, you can bet your bottom dollar that the vast majority of companies will choose the lower-cost "good optics" every time.
If anything, we're helping build better cages, just with nicer views—and we have to be honest with ourselves about that.
Conclusion
So what happened to the hackers?
We grew up.
Got mortgages. Had kids. Started worrying about savings and retirement plans.
I’d like to think that the system didn't beat us - it absorbed us.
But that would be a lie.
I think it did beat us—into submission and into the suburbs, with our normalised lives inside the nice, beautiful cages we find ourselves in today.
But this can’t be the end of it: the conditions that created hacker culture haven't gone away. If anything, they've gotten worse. The concentration of power, the abuse of technology, the need for genuine digital liberation - it's all still there.
Maybe what we need isn't to resurrect the old hacker culture, but to ignite something new. Something that takes the original spirit - the curiosity, the rebelliousness, the dedication to freedom and truth - and adapts it for today's fights.
Because while our generation is all comfortable in our tech jobs, building cloud infrastructure and training AI models, the next generation is facing challenges we quite literally only imagined.
Digital surveillance is normalised. AI is concentrating power even further into corporate hands. And the promise of technology as a liberating force feels further away than ever.
The real question isn't "what happened to the hackers?" It's "who will be the hackers we need now?"
Maybe it's time for some of us old heads to remember what drew us to hacking in the first place.
Not the technical challenges, though those were fun.
But the belief that technology should serve freedom, not control. That knowledge shouldn't be locked behind paywalls.
That systems are meant to be understood, questioned, and when necessary, disrupted or destroyed.
Or maybe I'm just getting nostalgic in my old age.
Either way, I miss the hackers we used to be.
Thanks for reading,
Ron.
Facebook plastered 'hack' on everything - their motto was 'Move Fast and Break Things', they called their headquarters '1 Hacker Way', they even named their programming challenges 'Hackercup'.
I get it, we all have to grow up sometimes… but do we? really? or is that just the excuse we tell ourselves cos we failed the young idealistic hacker that we once were?
How true this was in reality, I can’t say, but what we felt and drew us to these things, was exactly that- the freedom from surveillance and “authority”.