I moved to central Silicon Valley where it all began hoping to have an endless supply of hackers building communities to hang out in. I can count on one hand the people that meet my definition of a hacker that do things for public good or personal curiosity rather than profit... in 10 years. It is a buy culture, not a build culture. "Engineers" who cannot install operating systems for themselves anymore and rely on a Genius Bar when they have a computer oopsie.

And Defcon... the average attendee is a corporate ghoul who only got into this for money, and has no care for anything they cannot readily leverage to further their careers. Even the privacy village has no idea how to use open source software let alone self host anything and just asks people to sign up to their slack, discord, and google groups. It is a disgrace.

But CCC really is the closest place I can go on the planet to hang out with tens of thousands of real hackers, most of which are not even employed in the industry, who just build incredible things with open source as a community because they can. Art everywhere, punk concerts in the bathrooms, their own phone networks built from scratch, underground bars built from scrap wood, no questions asked bring-your-own-server farms, and volunteer culture at its best.

Truly, going to CCC every year I can is how I get hope for the culture that might be possible in the valley again some day. I am going to do whatever it takes to bring that energy back to the valley to motivate all the smart minds here that their skills exist for more than creating shareholder value.