Article URL: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/03/punk-or-why-i-dont-stream.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859671 Points: 104 # Commen…

What killed the hacker culture I grew up in was spectacle. You can consume it without participating, and even worse it has signaling value. I never did CTFs to put them on my resume. I don’t even have a resume I take seriously. Just a battle between me and a machine and the glorification of my ego, sometimes public, but never performative. There was no purpose beyond the thing. The streams by their nature became no longer any truthful reflection of self, just a prediction of what you want on them, and you can’t stop this because we are permeable. I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person. There are no rough edges, it’s basically marketing copy. Reflected back and forth in their heads with this “society” mirror so many times that there’s no identity or coherence left, just a mush of diffuse monochrome light. The streams are wireheading, aka ‘felt completion without world contact.’ You watch and you feel a version of what I feel. But the difference is that you didn’t do anything. And in so much as there is a you, it isn’t steering. Now I realize that the non steering you is everywhere. I’d say they still claim they are people, but I’m not totally sure they would. AI is making this all so much worse. When you are prompting you feel like you are steering, but are you really? Would you know if you weren’t? I love analysis YouTube videos but it’s really the same thing and I need to stop. Your food is prechewed for you. The caged tiger prefers a pot of meat slop to an antelope they have to chase. And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world. Isolation is basically impossible because the Internet follows you everywhere. And it’s perfectly uniform, there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese. I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app. You can’t isolate in that old world, because the old world doesn’t exist. It was outcompeted. The normal strategies you have against this won’t work. They didn’t take away the thing, they built an awful cancerous version of it that outcompetes yours. The early pickup stuff was so good, then you get the transition with Roosh and now you all get the Andrew Tate you deserve.