Peter Thiel famously said that in the last 50 years, we made amazing progress in the world of bits but almost none in the world of atoms. I think that one of the main reasons why is that hacker culture is much superior to academic culture. One of the most important principles in the hacker world is that no problem should be solved twice. So, if you figured out how to solve something hard, none of your hacker friends should have to solve it again. It's your moral obligation to share your solution with the world, preferably for free.
How does it look in the academic world? I've heard countless times at my university to "never share a good idea with anyone" because it might be "stolen." One of my professors told me a story about when he went to a scientific conference, shared an idea with someone, and then that person conducted the experiment, proved the idea, published a study, and received some awards and recognition. My professor was furious and told me that he would never forgive him for that and that he stole his best idea. From my experience, this mentality is present everywhere in the academic world. Hackers have the opposite attitude; if I told someone my startup idea and he built it and became super rich—great for him, I'm very happy that I was able to help him. The reality is that ideas are worthless and execution is all that matters because it's 99.99% of the work.
Unfortunately, academia can't think that way because it's built on exclusion, gatekeeping, and making life harder. Keeping research papers behind a paywall, even though it was publicly funded, racing to claim as many patents as possible, excluding 99% of society from elite education and keeping it for the rich only, and so on.
Fortunately, hackers have one very big advantage — we work much harder. If I had to specify one quality that all hackers have in common, it would be the ability to work much harder than the rest of the population. That's why it's us, not academia, who build the most groundbreaking things and why we build, run, and control the internet. Because to build tech, you can't be lazy, and you can't fake work. So, if academia insists on keeping us out of its halls and the system they've built, I think we should agree to that and build our own education system. We will see which one is going to win.
Good luck academia 😘