American Hacker Culture is Weird...

...at least according to my impressions

There was DEF CON this week in Las Vegas, which led me to notice a few things about American hacker culture.
Granted, I grew up in the German hacker community, which places a lot of value in integrity and holding people, state actors and companies accountable for their action. With that comes a healthy level of distrust in corporate actors and an embrace of quite a lot of social things.

This seems to be quite different in the US, though, when looking at DEF CON: In my opinion, part of hacker culture should be an openness to all, be that rich, poor, a hobbyist or a professional, because all of those are people that who have important opinions, skills and voices that should be heard and embraced. And with that comes an obligation to try and enable those groups to attend functions like DEF CON. What definitely does not help with that, though, is a price tag of 460 USD without any social system to help those who cannot afford attending at such prices to buy cheaper, subsidized tickets. How the CCC manages to do that is by asking business attendants to pay higher prices than private ones as well as asking anyone who can afford to to give more than the base ticket costs. That is how people like students without much money to depend on can afford to attend conferences like the Chaos Communication Congress.
A price point of 460 usd no matter your situation definitely does not help with that imo. Sure, Las Vegas is expensive, but that just makes it a lot more important to try and enable financially disadvantaged groups of people to attend and afford attending. A month's rent payment for a ticket does not accomplish this in the slightest.

A different pain point of mine is that while DEF CON might not have any explicit sponsors, it does tend to feel a bit uncritical of them at times. Take the appearance of CrowdStrike's CEO to receive this year's Pwnie Award, for example: What should count in such situations should be actions and not apologetic words from the company's CEO. A 10 USD Uber Eats Gift card just does not cut it and I do not think that the CEO should even be given a stage to speak and be openly accepted and applauded for that. Something like this would have been unthinkable at a CCC event.
Another thing are the vendor booths, which also house corporate sellers, or for example corporate representatives holding talks and such.

All this just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when looking at it from the outside. It just seems to miss looking at corporations critically, without any conflicts of interest and holding them accountable in actions and not meaningless words. That it is also neglecting its social responsibilities as a hacker convention does not help the case.

Now is this very one-sided and polarizing? Sure. But this was my main impression from looking at it from the outside this year. And you gotta leave it to them that they are a lot more of a hacker con than the corporate BlackHat is that happens right before it.