“Participatory narcissism”
Wednesday, Apr 6, 2005, 13:15 (updated Sunday, Apr 10, 2005, 04:02)
In Dabblers and Blowhards, his commentary on Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Maciej Cegłowski writes:
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.
Thank you, Maceij.
Predictably, it provoked a lot of commentary all over the web. (That is, I am linking these posts for the comments they got.)