Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric S. Raymond

Rebellion is doing a lot of branding work here, and Raymond knows it. By framing “Berkeley hackers” as people who “liked to see themselves” as insurgents, he gently punctures the self-mythology without fully dismissing it. The phrasing suggests a double truth: the antagonism toward big business was real, but the romance of it was curated, a pose with a purpose.

The context is the late-20th-century Bay Area ecosystem where universities, counterculture, and defense-adjacent tech money kept colliding. Berkeley wasn’t just a campus; it was an identity factory. “Soulless corporate empires” is hyperbolic on its face, but it captures a genuine anxiety about what happens when computing shifts from playful exploration to managerial control: closed systems, proprietary software, and the idea that knowledge should be gated because it’s profitable. Hackers didn’t only dislike corporations; they disliked permission.

The subtext is that “hacker” culture depended on an enemy. A rebel needs an empire to push against, and corporate America was a convenient foil: faceless, legalistic, risk-averse. That opposition also functioned as moral insulation. If you’re fighting an “empire,” then bending rules looks less like self-indulgence and more like principled resistance.

Raymond’s line hints at the irony: many of those rebels would later build startups, take venture money, and professionalize the very ethos they claimed to oppose. The empire, it turns out, is a career path.