“Participatory narcissism”

Maciej Cegłowski:

I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of shlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the “what is a hacker?” essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. […] But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

A response to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters.

Predictably it provoked a lot of commentary. Or… reaction, at least. See Shelley Powers and her comment section for example.