1.  The internet started in academia.  Everybody trusted each other and
   there was no security and no systems compromise.  The word 'hacker'
   came into use to mean a very skilled engineer.
   2.  The internet became commonplace and children started using it
   everywhere.  These children came to know it better than almost anybody
   else.  A widespread culture grew of people who would control computers
   to accomplish tasks nobody else could do.  This culture had a
   subculture of people who would break into the systems of others, mostly
   to show off their skills than accomplish anything else in particular.
   3.  The internet became the way to do things.  Businesses and
   governments started using it for everything; mostly inexperienced
   people who didn't understand how it worked.  A group of skilled
   professionals were responsible for keeping these operations safe, and
   they mostly did this by personally watching them as they ran.
   Regarding systems compromise, the professionals and skilled individuals
   broke themselves into groups unfortunately called "blackhats",
   "greyhats", and "whitehats".  They mostly identified as white men, so
   there may have been a little racism.  How dark the color was related to
   how much time was spent doing things that seemed a little wrong.
   Spying or changing data.
   So in my inexperienced opinion, a whitehat may still compromise the
   system of another, but they are going to be the people surreptitiously
   removing the viruses from other's systems to calm situations down,
   rather than the people directing those viruses.  A blackhat was the
   kind who would break something, but many did so in order to help the
   public understand the severity of the problems with digital security.
   Most viruses around the start were things made for fun.  They might
   spread or destroy things, but again they were mostly just people
   showing off, because computers weren't running anything important yet.
   The cultural norm was that your skill as a hacker was how your system
   was defended.  If your system wasn't defended well, it was your fault
   and the intruder was helping shore your defenses up.  This is because
   most of these people were childhood computer wizards with lots of free
   time and incredible ease finding a job, not people struggling to make
   things work.
   3b.  It was well-known that students and new hires had far more skill
   at computers than their teachers or bosses.  However, academia and
   business wanted to get on the technology bandwagon fast, and started
   offering degree programs and careers around hacking.
   Unfortunately, the people running these things were far behind the
   education curve, as they were pushing out graduates and selling
   products, and in order to save face had to claim they were experts.  So
   a lot of professionals were churned out who simply believed things that
   were false, unfortunately, and these professionals then trained other
   people.
   4.  As governments and businesses got more involved in hacking, they
   ended up hiring, imprisoning, disrupting, and hounding into hiding the
   hackers, severely changing things.  Policies and economics changed to
   reduce the personal power held by hackers, of any whiteness or
   blackness.
   One thing I've noticed is a sense of military spy agencies still using
   that chest-beating "gotcha" regarding system vulnerabilities, but
   hounding people out of their careers and homes instead of _helping_
   them secure their systems, the latter of which was the norm.  It
   reveals that groups have been hired to pretend to be hackers in order
   to destroy them, because they don't understand the reasons for the
   chest-thumping.
   The pattern of reflecting disrupting behaviors on people, that people
   have expressed towards governments and corporations, is a common and
   highly effective one, because individual people do not have the
   resources of a government or corporation, and feel bad when they
   experience harm at the behaviors they may have engaged in themselves.
   It additionally ends up being inhuman, because such people can suffer
   so much.
   In the 80s through 2000s, one of the most exciting things systems
   people tried to enter was schools, governments, and banks, because
   these things could give them so much power, and doing so was easy in
   the early days because the people running them could never cognitively
   compete with people who had spent their whole lives learning their
   internals.
   These disruption left governments and corporations with a lot of fear
   and a lot of injury, that likely stimulated the harsh lashbacks over
   the past couple decades.
   The thing to remember is that hackers know how to secure systems, and
   are trying to make them all be secure, to protect everyone: but rather
   than learning these things, the people whose systems were compromised
   have persecuted them via the crackers' own techniques.  The cracker
   culture didn't originally understand how scared people felt when these
   things happened, because they were used to cracking other hackers, not
   normal kind people.
   "cracking" means compromising the systems of others
   "hacking" means very skilled engineering, usually of software or
   electronics
   5.  Now most cracking looks like it is done by international groups
   with ties to governments and corporations who can defend them.  I think
   of them as military spy agencies, but I don't really know anything
   about them.
   Somebody who has to work a job, isn't going to have as much skill as an
   old hacker had.  But if you're the only people doing it, then you're
   basically in charge.  Luckily, all of hacking is derivable from
   engineering and there are many disciplines studying it.
   Unfortunately, we have a situation now where everything is incredibly
   insecure, because the people who understood security were attacked when
   they tried to talk about it in the language they knew, for many years.
   Back to 3 and 4:
   The way to make something secure is honestly to spend weeks completely
   understanding and developing it in your basement because it's what you
   do for fun.  This takes a lot longer than corporations want to pay for,
   and often is done best by people who don't know how to smile or wear a
   tie.
   So, since marketing makes so much money, products were made that were
   known insecure, marketed as secure, and dispersed everywhere, and this
   is still done today.  If you bring a computer to a repair center, they
   will make it work, usually ignore the underlying cause of the issue,
   and give it back to you quickly, which makes them more business when
   you return.
   6:
   That's a good chunk of what I've got, starting to have my psychotic
   amnesia again now.  Thanks for reading.
   I infer the norm of this list was to ask people to learn to be a hacker
   in order to really get involved.  I also infer that people have so much
   security need now, compared to the time needed to learn to be a hacker
   yourself, that something else will develop.
   With strong AI out there, it's hard to know what is needed, and in what
   way.