It's not one of Eric S. Raymond's talking points, but the backwoodsman aspect of hacker culture seems really important, and also, probably, fatal to its long-term spread.
Well, first of all it's not a geographical description. The nature of "hacking", which is a self-reliant activity of producing provisional solutions, has a lot in common with the ethos of life in remote areas or on a frontier. Even the word hacking evokes chopping firewood or doing some other woodwork task in a rough, ad-hoc way. This is combined with a sense of mutual aid which is often present even in (maybe especially in) thinly-populated areas. Gabriella Coleman might be a good source for more insight into this. Just why hacker communities behave as if they are isolated even in an urban environment is not something I understand, but from personal experience they are self-selected groups of people with particular traits, who often have difficulty being accepted by mainstream culture, or who scorn the mainstream.
