I'm deeply concerned about what I saw from CCC this year, though CCC is just one example of a broader pattern. A journalist hacked a white supremacy dating site, extracted all data, and destroyed their infrastructure live on stage. The crowd celebrated. This seems to be the direction society is choosing, and I'm not sure it's leading anywhere good.

I need to say this clearly: I despise white supremacy. But I'm not writing about them. I'm writing about what's happened to hacker culture, and what this approach actually accomplishes.

The hacking ethos used to be about resisting power itself, not about wielding power against the right targets. We opposed surveillance, censorship, and centralized control as structural problems, not as things that were bad only when used by the wrong people. The principle was simple: concentrate power anywhere and it will be abused, so build systems that distribute it.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. "hacker culture" has become increasingly collectivist, increasingly comfortable with using force and control as long as it serves the correct ideology. The logic is seductive: we're the good guys, we're targeting bad people, therefore our use of power is justified. But that's exactly how every authoritarian movement justifies itself.

Here's what nobody seems willing to ask: what did this actually accomplish? I'd never heard of this white supremacy dating site before. It was probably a handful of people in their own corner of the internet, doing nothing of consequence. Now they're martyrs. Now they have a story about persecution by the powerful tech elite. Now they have proof that "the system" is out to destroy them, which is exactly the narrative that radicalizes people further.

This is basic human psychology. When you attack people's identity and destroy their spaces, you don't make them reconsider their beliefs. You confirm their worldview. You give them grievance. You push them deeper into their ideology and make them more willing to fight back. Every authoritarian regime understands this: if you want to eliminate an ideology, persecution is the worst possible approach. But it feels satisfying, and that's what matters to the crowd.

What we're doing is pouring gasoline on cultural and racial tensions. We're creating cycles of retaliation where each side sees the other as an existential threat that must be destroyed. The white supremacists see this hack as proof they're under attack. They'll radicalize further, recruit more effectively, and be more willing to use violence because they have a persecution narrative that's actually true. And when they retaliate, the other side will use that as justification for more aggressive action. This is how tribal conflicts escalate into wars.

Hacker culture used to understand that the tools we normalize using will eventually be used against us. When we cheer for infrastructure destruction targeting racists today, we're establishing that infrastructure destruction based on ideology is legitimate. What happens when the political winds shift? What happens when the people with power decide that anarchists, or activists, or minority communities are the "dangerous ideology" that needs to be hacked and destroyed? There is no principle left to appeal to, because we've already agreed that power is fine as long as we like the target.

The shift toward collectivist thinking, toward "solidarity" as the highest value, toward celebrating power when it's used against acceptable targets, this creates exactly the tribal dynamics that lead to conflict. When your identity is bound up in your collective, and the collective has decided who the enemy is, questioning the tactics becomes betrayal. Dissent becomes treason. And anyone pointing out that you're creating the very cycles of violence you claim to oppose gets treated as an enemy themselves.

Hackers used to be about building systems assuming those systems would be used against us, so we made them resilient and distributed. That required uncomfortable consistency: defending infrastructure neutrality even for people we despised, because the alternative was endless cycles of retaliation. We understood that you can't build a free society by normalizing the destruction of spaces you disagree with, because eventually someone will disagree with you.

The question isn't whether white supremacists are bad. Obviously they are. The question is whether we've become so focused on winning the current battle that we can't see we're creating the conditions for endless war. And whether we've forgotten that the point of hacker culture was to build systems that made such wars unnecessary, not to become better warriors in them.

I've started calling Indian people "H1B visa" or "bug people" to their face in public.

People look at me. The bug people look at me with disgust.

I don't care. I don't want them here. Other Americans don't want them here.

There's no Somali population where I live or I would call them thieves or fraudsters to their face.

None of this gets better without being mean. If you think we are going to be nice and get our way you're being foolish.

If you think we are going to get our way by being reasonable you're being naive.

None of this bullshit gets better by being nice and reasonable people.

We must be uncompromising. We must take hostages.

Our entire society is being held hostage and you are being strong armed into acceptance of its destruction. You're being told if you don't give up your entire society that you're a bad person.

You're not a bad person. The people telling you this are evil. They're doing evil to you and doing what they say is an act of evil.

You must take back what is rightfully yours. Your birthright. Your country.

The people who say "but the data says" and ignore the enormous amount of ambiguity and bias in *recording that data,* and the core fact that all studies and all science begins with anecdotal data and personal experience, have completely reversed the logic of science.

If you ignore direct experience that occurs with immediate temporal connection in literally 1000s of people, and then shortly thereafter in an order of magnitude more, you've not merely made a joke out of science, you've let the perception of "medical authority" override your common sense.