The Cult of the Cool Coder: How We Went from Hackers with Ethics to Hustlers with Hoodies

A while back, being a “tech rebel” meant something. You might have been soldering cables in your parents’ basement, tunnelling into a university mainframe, or convincing Congress that the internet was one lightning storm away from collapse. You wore black not because it looked cool in a keynote, but because you hadn’t seen sunlight since Windows 95. You believed in weird things, like freedom, transparency, decentralisation, and you were willing to break a few laws (and a few modems) to prove it. The early hackers weren’t glamorous; they were the kind of people who replaced sleep with code and authority with curiosity. They didn’t “change the world” by saying it into a microphone, they did it by writing code that still quietly holds the world together.

Fast-forward to today, and the cult has new priests. They still talk about “revolution” and “democratisation,” but now the sermons are held on X, the vestments are branded hoodies, and the miracles involve raising a Series D round. Where the old guard broke systems to understand them, the modern tech bro breaks them to monetise them. You no longer need to hack a server to feel subversive, just tweet something vaguely libertarian between product launches. The hacker once risked prosecution; the founder risks a slight dip in follower count. Yet both will claim, with an absolutely straight face, that they’re fighting for the freedom of humanity.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the transition happened, when the anti-establishment geeks who built the web were replaced by men who own the web and still pretend they’re underdogs. Somewhere between Aaron Swartz downloading academic papers in a library basement and Elon Musk buying Twitter “for free speech,” the hacker ethic got traded for stock options. The old generation wanted open access to knowledge; the new one wants exclusive access to culture. For them, rebellion isn’t a risk, it’s a marketing strategy. They’ve rebranded defiance as a subscription service.

The result is a strange, self-referential performance: a pantomime of rebellion acted out by billionaires. We’ve reached a point where Larry Ellison can sponsor Iron Man to make himself look like a superhero CEO, while Mark Zuckerberg spars in a jiu-jitsu to convince us he’s still “one of the guys.” These are not the misfit visionaries of the early internet; they’re venture-backed method actors rehearsing the role of “visionary misfit.” The hacker once said, “Information wants to be free.” The modern tech bro says, “Freedom wants to be monetised.” And somewhere in between, the cult of the cool coder forgot that being countercultural isn’t something you can expense.

The Original Cool: The Hacker as Outsider

Before the word “disruption” was ruined by marketing departments, it meant something closer to anarchy, a refusal to accept that things had to stay broken just because someone in a suit said so. The early hackers were not entrepreneurs in waiting; they were tinkerers, idealists, and social misfits with more access to caffeine than social capital. They didn’t just want to understand systems, they wanted to liberate them. To open the locked drawers of digital bureaucracy and let everyone have a peek inside.

In 1998, a group of hackers calling themselves L0pht Heavy Industries sat before the U.S. Senate and calmly explained that they could take down the entire internet in about thirty minutes. They weren’t there to gloat or threaten; they were there to warn. To tell the powerful that the shiny new digital world was being held together with duct tape, chewing gum, and misplaced optimism. It was an act of civil service disguised as cyberpunk theatre, the moment the establishment briefly realised that the nerds could end civilisation from a cluttered Boston loft if they got bored enough.

People like Aaron Swartz embodied that same impulse, the hacker as moral agent. He wasn’t trying to build an empire; he was trying to build a fairer internet. Swartz saw paywalls as fences around human knowledge and treated them accordingly, something to be climbed over, not admired. His work on RSS, Creative Commons, and open access wasn’t just technical innovation; it was cultural insurgency. He believed that the internet was meant to be a commons, not a shopping mall. For that belief, he was hounded by a legal system that couldn’t tell the difference between curiosity and crime.

Even the older generation of tech pioneers, Wozniak soldering his way through Apple’s infancy, or the MIT hackers of the ’70s feeding punch cards into the night, carried that outsider energy. They weren’t cool in any conventional sense; they were too busy reverse-engineering the future to worry about personal brands. Their rebellion wasn’t stylised. It wasn’t livestreamed. It was messy, awkward, and gloriously human. They built things not to impress investors but to see if they could make the impossible work, a kind of technical mischief that felt less like business and more like art.

The early hacker’s currency was curiosity, not clout. Their reward was discovery, not disruption. They didn’t need a TED Talk to explain their philosophy, the code was the manifesto. And that’s what made them cool in the first place: not the optics, not the arrogance, but the sheer refusal to accept that systems should stay closed, secrets should stay secret, or power should stay concentrated. They were rebels with a cause, even if they sometimes phrased it in Perl.

The Rebrand: From Geek to God

Then came the great aesthetic shift, the moment when the scrappy hacker stopped being a nuisance to power and started being its favourite son. The geek was no longer an awkward outsider tinkering in the dark; he was recast as a prophet of light, a visionary entrepreneur who could see the future (and, conveniently, monetise it). Somewhere between the dot-com boom and the iPhone keynote, curiosity was replaced with charisma. The messy desks and soldering irons were swapped for minimalist offices, artisanal coffee, and Keynote slides about “changing the world.”

The myth of the visionary founder took root, part rock star, part guru, part cult leader. Steve Jobs perfected the template: barefoot mysticism meets supply-chain exploitation. He sold the idea that you could be a rebel by buying the same product as everyone else. From there, the floodgates opened. Every startup CEO began quoting Jobs’ Stanford speech as though it were scripture, and “disruption” became a holy word. To disrupt was to destroy without guilt; to innovate was to moralise greed. If your company caused chaos, it wasn’t negligence, it was vision.

By the late 2000s, Silicon Valley had fully converted to its own religion. Its commandments were simple: code fast, scale faster, and pretend it’s for the greater good. “Don’t be evil” was rewritten as a business strategy, not an ethical position. The founders stopped seeing themselves as engineers and started acting like demigods, benevolent dictators of the digital world. They weren’t content with building products; they had to build movements. They didn’t just make software; they made believers.

And like all good cults, this one came with its own iconography. The black turtleneck. The hoodie. The stage-lit sermon about “making the world a better place.” It didn’t matter if your company was gutting journalism or harvesting data like a Victorian coal mine, as long as you threw in a line about empowerment, the crowd would cheer. The language of rebellion was co-opted, rebranded, and resold at a markup. The hacker who once demanded transparency was now a CEO promising “trust.” The anarchist spirit had been focus-grouped into a business model.

The transformation was complete: the geek had become a god. He no longer needed to fight the establishment; he was the establishment, only dressed in a slightly trendier font. The code was still sacred, but now it served a different purpose, not to open systems, but to lock users in. The hacker had sought to liberate knowledge. The founder sought to own it, patent it, IPO it, and then give a TED Talk about “democratising access.” The irony would be funny if it weren’t still updating itself in real time.

Iron Man Syndrome

Somewhere around the time Robert Downey Jr. first quipped his way through a billion-dollar suit of armour, the tech elite collectively decided that this, the swaggering, misunderstood genius-billionaire with a moral conscience and an ego the size of a data centre, was the ideal man to be. Silicon Valley didn’t just watch Iron Man; it saw itself reflected. It was, frankly, love at first narcissistic projection. The result was a generation of CEOs suffering from what can only be described as Iron Man Syndrome, the belief that wealth and wit automatically equal wisdom, and that being a “visionary” is an acceptable substitute for being right.

Elon Musk was the most enthusiastic convert, of course. He didn’t just identify with Tony Stark; he tried to be him, right down to the smirk and the questionable ethics. He bought a rocket company, built flamethrowers for fun, and even made a cameo in Iron Man 2. Musk wasn’t building a business empire so much as method-acting a comic book fantasy, and the world, ever gullible, applauded. Larry Ellison took a slightly different route, sponsoring product placement in Iron Man films to prove that, yes, billionaires can in fact be cool if they just spend enough money trying. And somewhere off to the side, Mark Zuckerberg started training in MMA, apparently to prove that he, too, could punch critics in the metaverse.

But the cosplay runs deeper than midlife crisis theatre. These men built entire corporate identities around the mythology of rebellion. They wear disruption like armour, a way to deflect criticism, to frame every PR disaster as part of some misunderstood master plan. When Musk tanks Twitter, it’s not failure; it’s “iteration.” When Zuckerberg launches another privacy-eroding product, it’s “connecting the world.” When a founder behaves like a Bond villain, we’re told it’s because “he’s just wired differently.” The myth of the tortured genius conveniently turns cruelty into charisma and recklessness into “innovation.”

What’s striking is how deliberate the image-making has become. The hacker used to shun the spotlight; the modern tech messiah has a personal media team to adjust the lighting. They don’t just build products, they build personas. Every podcast appearance, every viral tweet, every photo of a CEO pretending to eat in a canteen with the staff is meticulously staged rebellion. It’s a pantomime of authenticity, a way of saying: See? I’m still one of you. Just with a private jet and a holding company in Delaware.

And yet, the public buys it, because we’ve been conditioned to equate arrogance with genius. The billionaire who sneers at regulation, empathy, or gravity itself becomes a folk hero simply by insisting he’s “breaking boundaries.” It’s performance art for late capitalism: a handful of powerful men playact rebellion while maintaining total control. The only thing they’ve successfully disrupted is the concept of humility. The hacker once wanted to tear down walls; the modern tech bro just installs glass ones and calls it transparency.

The New Hacker Ethic: Optics Over Ethics

The hacker ethic was once a beautifully naive idea: knowledge should be free, authority should be questioned, and curiosity should never require permission. It wasn’t a business plan, it was a philosophy, often written in bash scripts and moral conviction. Today, that same ethos has been stripped for parts, painted neon, and repackaged as “personal branding.” The new creed isn’t access to information, it’s access to influence. Modern “hackers” aren’t cracking systems; they’re hacking algorithms for engagement. The only thing they’re freeing is their newsletter subscriber count.

What used to be an act of rebellion is now an aesthetic. “Ethical hacking” has been reduced to corporate compliance exercises. “Digital freedom” means whatever a billionaire says it does this week. Open-source communities still exist, but they’re overshadowed by influencers selling “10x developer” courses and LinkedIn gurus explaining how to “disrupt the disruption economy.” The counterculture that once thrived on collaboration has been gentrified into content, a feed full of men explaining passion projects like they’re IPO pitches.

Activism, too, has become brand-compatible. Where Aaron Swartz risked his life for open access to research, today’s founders risk absolutely nothing to post a lukewarm “we need to talk about digital rights” thread before returning to their stock options. The idea of moral courage has been replaced by social media performance, activism with a returns policy. Companies release “transparency reports” written by PR teams; CEOs meditate on empathy in podcasts recorded from luxury bunkers. It’s all perfectly inoffensive, perfectly packaged, and perfectly meaningless.

Even rebellion itself has been commodified. You don’t fight the system anymore, you subscribe to it. You “hack” your morning routine, “hack” your productivity, “hack” your health, not to question the machine, but to optimise yourself for it. The hacker’s curiosity has been reduced to a lifestyle choice with affiliate links. The old anarchic joy of exploration has been replaced by efficiency metrics. “Move fast and break things” now means “move fast, break nothing important, and make sure it trends.”

And yet, amid all this branding, the term “hacker” still carries a faint whiff of danger, a residual glamour borrowed from a time when it meant something risky, something real. The corporations know this, of course, which is why they co-opt it constantly. A trillion-dollar company will call itself a “startup.” A billionaire CEO will call himself “scrappy.” It’s rebellion by press release, the aesthetic of resistance without the inconvenience of consequence. The original hacker ethic was about freedom; the new one is about framing. Ethics are optional. Optics are everything.

The Irony: Rebellion as Establishment

The ultimate plot twist of the digital age is that the rebels won, and immediately became the new emperors. The same people who once ranted about decentralisation now run centralised empires so vast that nation-states negotiate with them like rival kingdoms. The garage startup became the global infrastructure. The anti-establishment spirit didn’t die; it IPO’d, acquired three competitors, and now charges a monthly subscription to experience it.

There was a time when governments feared hackers because they could expose secrets. Now governments outsource their secrets to tech companies for safekeeping. The rebels who once infiltrated systems to prove a point now build the systems everyone else is trapped inside. Google began as a manifesto against corporate search engines. Facebook started as a social experiment in connection. Both now sit comfortably in the same pantheon as oil barons and telecom monopolies, except with better hoodies and worse accountability.

The irony is almost admirable in its efficiency. Tech founders still posture as outsiders, tweeting about “fighting the establishment” while literally being the establishment. Elon Musk can claim to battle censorship while owning the platform he censors people on. Mark Zuckerberg can talk about “community” while building digital surveillance that would make East Germany blush. Even the language of innovation has become circular: they’re “disrupting industries” they already dominate, “democratising access” to systems they privately own. It’s not hypocrisy; it’s just exceptionally scalable irony.

And society, somehow, keeps playing along. Journalists still call them “mavericks.” Politicians still call them “visionaries.” Investors still call them “geniuses.” It’s as if the cultural imagination can’t let go of the hacker myth, so it keeps reanimating it, like a zombie version of counterculture kept alive by TED Talks and tax breaks. The truth is, rebellion isn’t threatening anymore because rebellion is the business model. The system learned to monetise dissent, and the tech elite learned to perform it on cue.

The old hackers fought the establishment to make systems open. The new ones fight openness to protect their systems. They claim to be the torchbearers of innovation, but what they’ve really perfected is enclosure, the quiet consolidation of power dressed up as disruption. The establishment didn’t crush rebellion; it branded it, funded it, and turned it into a keynote slide. The only thing left of the revolution is its merch.

What’s Left of the Hacker Spirit?

Despite the noise, the brand deals, and the endless parade of billionaires cosplaying as rebels, the old hacker spirit hasn’t completely flatlined. It’s just retreated underground, back to basements, mailing lists, and obscure corners of the internet where curiosity still outranks clout. You won’t find it on the main stage at Web Summit or in a VC’s thought-leadership thread. You’ll find it in anonymous developers maintaining open-source projects for free, in privacy activists patching holes the tech giants leave open, in cryptographers quietly ensuring that our messages remain ours. They’re not changing the world for applause; they’re just keeping it from breaking entirely.

The irony is that the most genuinely radical people in tech today are the ones you’ve never heard of. They don’t keynote conferences or get profiled in Forbes. They’re the volunteers running Tor nodes, the archivists saving digital history before it’s deleted, the digital rights lawyers keeping governments and corporations honest, or at least, mildly inconvenienced. These people still operate under the original hacker principle: that access, knowledge, and freedom aren’t privileges to be sold but public goods to be defended. They are the spiritual descendants of the hackers who once told Congress, “We could take the internet down in 30 minutes, we just don’t.”

Meanwhile, the public stage belongs to the hustlers. The ones who talk about “the future of humanity” while selling subscriptions to it. The hacker dream of an open, decentralised internet has been strip-mined into a digital shopping mall where every thought, image, and click is monetised by someone pretending to be your friend. The tools of liberation have been absorbed into the infrastructure of surveillance. But every now and then, a little act of resistance slips through, a whistleblower leak, an encrypted protocol, a kid who learns to code not to make money but to make trouble. The signal is still there. You just have to tune past the noise.

Maybe that’s the quiet victory. The establishment may own the platforms, but it can’t quite kill the instinct to tinker, to look under the hood and wonder, what if this could work differently? For all the hype and hubris, technology still attracts the curious, the stubborn, the morally inconvenient. Somewhere, right now, a teenager is writing code that will terrify a politician in ten years. And that, perhaps, is the most enduring legacy of the hacker spirit: the refusal to sit still, shut up, and accept the interface as-is.

Because in the end, rebellion doesn’t die. It just gets firewalled for a while.

References:

Brand, S. (1987) The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York: Viking Penguin.

Himanen, P. (2001) The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York: Random House.

Levy, S. (2010) Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

L0pht Heavy Industries (1998) Hackers Testifying at the United States Senate, May 19, 1998 [YouTube video], 19 May. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJldn_MmMY (Accessed: 8 November 2025)

L0pht Heavy Industries (1998) Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs: Weak Computer Security in Government. 19 May. Washington, D.C. Available at: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/17876-document-01-senate-committee-governmental (Accessed: 8 November 2025).

Swartz, A. (2008) Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Internet Archive. Available at: https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto (Accessed: 8 November 2025).

Doctorow, C. (2023) The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. London: Verso Books.

Marvel Studios (2010) Iron Man 2 [Film]. Directed by Jon Favreau. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures.

Naughton, J. (2015) ‘Aaron Swartz stood up for freedom and fairness – and was hounded to his death’, The Guardian, 7 Febuary. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/07/aaron-swartz-suicide-internets-own-boy (Accessed: 8 November 2025).

Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.