We need to have a talk, and I’m having a really hard time having it with my awesome hacker friends, because everyone is super duper emotionally invested and is deeply hurt by it.

I hope you all aren’t - because it involves all of us and it’s important. It’s not about any of y’all individually or your hard community work.

The talk is about how to make all of our cybersecurity conferences and events and meetups more accessible and conformable for young hackers because I’mreallysosorry, we’ve somehow become Old, and the stuff that we are ingrained with as “hacker culture” like movies, music, and memes all were created before they were born - and they may or may not have any emotional attachment or enjoyment of them at all.

That’s the conversation we need to have and that we are all responsible for and I swear it’s not aimed at any conference or person because we are all in this filter bubble of watching the Matrix and listening to Prodigy and remembering the hamster dance and all of that stuff while awesome was like a quarter century ago.

Part of building a community is thinking about including everyone and their culture under a mantle of good ethics and goals. So we really, really need to start having a chat about when we lean on the 90s hacker aesthetic and memories to the exclusion of people under 30. I had a wake up call hearing some students complaining about it.