For the past couple of years I've been carrying a feeling I couldn't name. It wasn't burnout or disillusionment, something probably closer to disorientation. A feeling like my people packed up and moved somewhere I haven't found yet, all quietly in the middle of the night. When I was breaking into the scene in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the hacker ethos was alive and thriving in the culture.
Code was art. It still is, to me. That's never changed.
For a while, something like a truce existed between the hackers and companies around them. Companies needed us, which meant we got to be in the driving seat. In exchange we got to play with expensive toys, and occasionally that play produced something genuinely new, which turned out to be enormously profitable for everyone involved. The loud, divisive voices. The strong opinions. The people who were infuriating precisely because they cared so much. They were the ones setting the direction.
Then the marketing people arrived. Jobs knew exactly what he was describing when he talked about the Pepsi era at Apple. It wasn't suits taking over broadly, it was a specific kind of person gaining control. People who are very good at packaging and distributing a thing, but have no instinct for what makes it worth packaging in the first place. They don't ruin things through malice. They ruin them because they genuinely can't see what made the thing good, so they optimize for what they can measure instead. They see lightning, they are amazed and they walk around with bottles trying to capture it, it's brightness and power, but they have total distaste for the storm, the rain, the cold and the wind.
That's what happened to software. The people who rose to the top stopped being the ones who understood why the craft mattered and started being the ones who could explain its value to a boardroom. And once that shift happens, the things that can't be justified in those terms get quietly de-prioritised. The artistry. The obsession. The arguing loudly about the right way to do something because the right way actually matters to you. What was pitched as optimization actually suffocated innovation, but we didn't notice for a while. The plane still flies without a pilot, atleast for a little while anyway.
And that mindset didn't stay in the boardroom. It seeped into the culture itself. You can still find the communities if you look. The forums, the meetups, the spaces that used to crackle with argument and obsession. But the engagement has changed. Everyone is performing. I did this talk because I want that promotion. I built this thing because it photographs well. The appearance of passion, carefully managed for maximum return. What made those voices worth listening to was that the passion wasn't performed, it leaked out whether they wanted it to or not. The arguments were invitations: come fight me on this, tell me I'm wrong, let's work it out together. Now everyone is transmitting and nobody is receiving. The communities are still there. The spirit that made them isn't.
I'm not sure yet what AI does to this. It might accelerate the productivity of companies who always quietly resented that their best engineers behaved like uncontrollable artists. Or it might be the thing that finally kills the artistry in the code itself. I don't trust my own read on it yet.
What I do know is that the loud voices went quiet. The people who cared loudly, divisively, sometimes infuriatingly they're gone. And I don't know where they went. That's not a rhetorical question. I've looked. Radio. Electronics. DIY spaces. I've looked seriously, not just browsed. I haven't found them.
Maybe they're still out there in communities I haven't discovered. Maybe they aged out and got quiet. Maybe the platforms that amplified them collapsed. IRC, early forums, early Twitter, and the signal disappeared even if the people didn't. Maybe some of them made peace with the marketing era and joined it.
Honestly, I think it could be all of those things. And that's the part that's hardest to sit with. There was no moment where it ended. No announcement, no dissolution. It just went quiet, gradually, and by the time I noticed it was already gone. Grief with a clear cause has somewhere to point. This doesn't.
I still half expect to find them somewhere, maybe that's the most honest thing I can say. All I know is that I'm going to keep searching.
