In high school, my circle of nerd friends would pass around withered copies of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and dream of using our skillz to outwit The Man. Instead we sat around in the server room, eating Sno-Balls and upgrading the school’s copy of Adobe PageMill, but in our minds, we were just biding our time.

(The de facto leader of our gang once did score one coup, though, by using his expertise to subvert the school’s rule against TV/movies in students’ dorm rooms. He snuck into the downstairs utility closet, split the dorm’s cable TV signal, and wired the split through to unused terminals on the RJ45 Ethernet jack in his room. This remains one of the coolest tricks I’ve ever seen.)

The ultimate geek experience, we mused, would be to attend one of 2600’s biennial HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conferences at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Oh, to rub elbows with the greats of cyberspace counterculture! To be understood by our fellow villains! What rapture!

AP English finals being what they are, we never found the time to fulfill our dreams, so I don’t know firsthand what HOPE conferences were like when I was in high school. I suspect they were different than we imagined down in the library basement.

I bet, too, that the HOPE of the ’90s bore little resemblance to the present-day HOPE, which takes place in a world where the notion of “hacking” has been softened and legitimized. The list of talks for “The Last HOPE,” July 18-20 here in NYC, features household names like Steven Levy of Newsweek and Mythbusters’ Adam Savage. I doubt their publicists would have encouraged them to show up at a “hackers conference” ten years ago.

The Levy and Savage sessions appear alongside more cautionary embraces of the mainstream, e.g., “From a Black Hat to a Black Suit: How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder Without Losing Your Soul”:

You want it all. You can see the brass ring and you want to jump for it. But you’re scared. You don’t want to put on a suit and watch your soul shrivel like the spot price on RAM. There is another way. In this session, you will learn: why you want to do this to yourself, how to get the first job (which will suck), how to turn the first job into the next job (while still having fun), how to get the top job (sooner than you thought you could), and how to do it all without feeling like a corporate whore. You want to hack the planet? You’ve got to start somewhere.

Organizers say HOPE 2008 the final HOPE because the Hotel Pennsylvania is set to be torn down (although preservation efforts are being made, presumably by people who never had to spent a night there). Regardless of venue, it is time for HOPE to go. The hacker revolution is over—not because the hackers lost, but rather because they have become so integrated into tech culture. Almost every aspect of independent enterprise in the technology sphere could fall under the umbrella of “hacking,” and indeed, as you browse the HOPE schedule, you see that pretty much everything does.

My pack of office-chair rebels would have been disappointed to see hackerdom lose its “us against the world” edge. My slightly older self is gratified that a community has so successfully advanced the causes of free information, personal liberty, and individual innovation that the black-hat stereotype has become an exception to the norm. HOPE is dead; keep hope alive.