I don't think hacker culture is going away, I think it's just drowned out by software eating the world in a capitalist economy. It used to be that software and computers in general didn't pay any better than any other white collar job, and were generally more arcane and less familiar to people, so only those of us with an inherent interest were drawn to it. I believe there are more of us than ever, there's just orders of magnitude more people drawn in for the money and power.

I certainly feel some nostalgia for the old days, but while I'm not thrilled by a lot of directions the internet has taken, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a hacker in terms of tools available and what can be achieved by an individual or small group. Getting attention for your work is another matter, but distribution has always been hard, the internet making it easier to deliver bites just led to that much fiercer competition. The fact that there was a short-lived window where technical barriers favored hackers was just a coincidence of history, not a stable state that it makes sense to try to replicate.