Rattle wrote:
] Maybe this is the year we rollerblade around the con. I mean,
] all hackers can rollerblade after all. From the title, I'm
] thinking Skate or Die reference. Looking at it, I'm thinking
] Tony Hawk PS2 games. None of which has anything to do with
] hacking, and only the most vague connection to the
] techno-apocalypse. Obviously you were never a skater. Skateboarding is not at all anything like roller blading. Roller Blading is an extension of roller skating, which is something that 12 year old girls do at birthday parties. It started as a way to practice hockey in the summer time, which is about as mainstream as you can get. Skateboarding is a subculture that, like graffiti, seeks to repurpose the utilitarian urban landscape for a creative, artistic endeavor. Hacking is very similar is its purpose. In fact, Goldstein once wrote that he figured out that hacking was cool when he realized how similar it was to skateboarding.
Skateboarding and hacking both fit into a zone of moral ambiguity. They are neither "good" nor are they clearly "evil." Baby Boomers, on the whole, are very abstract in their thinking and they like moral absolutes. They like things to be either right or wrong. ("With us or against us.") Our generation latched onto things like skateboarding and hacking when we where going though our rebellious stage of personality development because they put us in places that adults had difficultly fitting into their world view. These are subcultures that perfectly exploit a weakness in the dominant Baby Boomer conceptions of how things work. They couldn't support skateboarding, but clearly it was wrong to oppose it as well. Moral ambiguity is not something that Baby Boomers can parse. I refer you to one of the best links that has ever been posted to this site: http://www.urbanstructure.com/urbanaction/ps.html
http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid4869/ ] Has the Nashville scene gone skater chick? I kinda think it
] would be cool if it did, but otherwise this does not really
] say "hacker con" in any way. Its subtle. You missed it. She is rail sliding down a phone cable over a barbed wire fence. ] The main reason the old ones worked was due to the fact they
] featured babes with data ports, buttons, wires coming out of
] them, and even the occasional alcoholic beverage. Those big breasted, scantily clad (if at all), totally objectified "cyberbabes" that have adorned various forms of hacker art including our conference are a big turn off for most of the women that are in our scene. If you're at a party with 50 guys and 3 girls, the fastest way to get the 3 girls to leave is to tack up a Playboy centerfold. The women in the hacker scene are intelligent and they want to be thought of as contributing to the culture, not as sexual objects. They are (in general) just as uncomfortable hanging out at a screening of "HaXXXor" as you and I would be hanging out at a screening of various films from gaymagix.com... RE: PhreakNIC Pictures :: PN8 :: hack_or_die_final | 
