I don't think the article is saying that hacker culture is dead, just that the term is being misappropriated (again), but this time not from media referencing criminal acts correlated in any way with computers, but with capitalism trying to make big bucks out of computers (as you said, mostly the ad industry).
It's telling that a place where products that ought to make money are showed and discussed on a place called Hacker News, and that earnest attemtps at hacks-for-the-sake-of-it are usually met here with at least 4-5 commenters asking "What's the point of this? It's not profitable.'
But the hacker culture is alive and well. Take for example the TOR project, GNU, the EFF. They don't seem to be out for a buck, at least in my view.
> But the hacker culture is alive and well. Take for example the TOR project, GNU, the EFF. They don't seem to be out for a buck, at least in my view.
Depends on how you define "buck". The Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation both have explicit agendas and goals that they wish to be promoted.
In terms of DnD-style character alignments, folks like the EFF and FSF can be characterized as "chaotic/neutral good", whereas the hacker ethos is closer to "chaotic neutral". The article's Wikileaks and Anonymous both lean chaotic good/evil (depending on perspective). TOR is closer to that "chaotic neutral".
The differences among hackerdom, Valleydom, and crackerdom lie in these alignment deviations, too. Valleydom swings hard-lawful, while crackerdom tends to swing too far in either direction on the good/evil spectrum for it to really fall into the realm of hackerdom (which tends toward neutrality). The cases where crackerdom and hackerdom overlap (including the cases that the article describes, like "Cap'n Crunch") tend to share that "chaotic neutral" alignment; the differences between a grey-hat cracker and a hacker are often nonexistent in this particular sense (though differences may arise based on ingenuity; for example, a grey-hat cracker might not be a hacker if one relies heavily on existing information (i.e. a "script kiddie") instead of seeking to discover new things for oneself).
It's telling that a place where products that ought to make money are showed and discussed on a place called Hacker News, and that earnest attemtps at hacks-for-the-sake-of-it are usually met here with at least 4-5 commenters asking "What's the point of this? It's not profitable.'
But the hacker culture is alive and well. Take for example the TOR project, GNU, the EFF. They don't seem to be out for a buck, at least in my view.