Hacker Rock and Roll: Visualizing the 20 Year Evolution of ShmooCon Research

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Presented at ShmooCon 2025 by

Greg Conti

Danielle Scalera

Wow, where did the past 20 years go? In this time, ShmooCon grew from the seed of an idea to an internationally respected hacker conference. This talk, inspired by Reebee Garofalo’s “The Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music,” analyzes and visualizes the 20 year evolution of ShmooCon talk topics. As part of this year-long research effort, we created a taxonomy of talk topics, dug into the archives of the internet to create a master list of all ShmooCon talks ever and then methodically categorized each talk. The results are interesting and enlightening. We’ll present analysis of how hacker community research has evolved and how these topics link to technological advances, world events, and changing hacker community norms and interests. To fuel future work, we’ll share both the taxonomy and the labeled dataset of talks, as well as the techniques we used to analyze and visualize the data. You’ll leave this talk with a greater understanding of the arc of hacker community research over time, the ability to perform similar analysis yourself, and a glimpse of where the hacker community is heading in the future.