Admittedly I used the label “hacker culture” without giving a definition, I definitely meant culture along the lines that @self mentioned. To reiterate, imo what’s more important is defining the vision, which this comment thread has begun the process of.

that’s fair. I think mentally I’ve decoupled corporate and most online hacker culture from hackerspaces (and the friendlier online spaces); even though they share a name and theoretically a basic set of values, there’s such a wide gulf between the kind of hacker culture you’ll see on the orange site or the elitist bullshit you’ll run into if you try and contribute code to the Linux kernel (for example), vs the communal workshop and mentorship environment of a good hackerspace.

one thing I want to emphasize though is that you don’t need to be a hacker to make good and worthwhile contributions. as I talked about elsewhere in this thread, open source has a dire need for designers and other folks doing jobs that aren’t traditionally considered to be a part of hacker culture. also, I feel like modification should be normalized as something everyone does, even for things like operating systems and drivers. the lisp machines that the orange site fetishizes without knowing why got this right: computing environments should do everything they can to make the process of making improvements easy, whether that’s through accessible and complete documentation, better languages, or tooling that lets the user fuck around and find out