The Hacker Ethic 70
| The Hacker Ethic | |
| author | Pekka Himanen, with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells |
| pages | 232 |
| publisher | Random House |
| rating | 8.5 |
| reviewer | timothy |
| ISBN | 0375505660 |
| summary | How The Hacker Way has and will influence ways of thinking about life, the Universe, and Everything. |
I admit it -- the first time I started to read this book, I made a mistake. I began not with Linus Torvalds' clever and funny introduction, or with Pekka Himanen's text (the central part of the book) but with the final section -- Manuell Castells' Epilogue, "Informationalism and the Network Society." Castells' piece, considerably longer than Torvalds' contribution, defines Informationalism ("a technological paradigm based on the augmentation of the human capacity in information processing around the twin revolutions in microelectronics and genetic engineering"), and both traces its rise and makes some predictions about its continued dominance for the near future.
Though Castells is careful to point out the distinction between information-dominated societies (which are nothing new, as he freely points out) and ones characterized by the more profound Informationalism, it took a second read of this section (after starting again from the beginning) to grasp his meaning more fully. It also took that second read to grudgingly accept Castells' inclusion of genetic engineering as an appropriate part of the shift to Informationalism.
The importance of complex, interactive and iterative information processing systems, though, is great enough that Castells seems justified in defining as a breaking point in history the emergence of such systems. Taken in context with the central part of the book, this final chapter is both less off-putting and more insightful than it seemed upon first visit.
The heart of the book, though, is Himanen's treatise on the broad implication of the work, play and life-in-general ideals which hackers have made famous both within and outside the computer world, and it's the most enjoyable part of the book.
First, be assured: Himanen uses "hacker" in the sense that nature intended -- curious, passionate inventors, many of whom happen to use computers as their primary tool of discovery -- rather than a word to mean malicious techno-vandals. Perhaps this book, already talked about in trade and general publications, will help erase the stigma of that word and replace it with the far more positive ideal of an outlook defined by creativity, fun and a desire for meaningful life experiences.
Readers will quickly discover that while The Hacker Ethic obviously has one eye on the tight triangle of recent history, present reality, and immediate future, the other scans a wide range of historical settings and ideas. The title is an allusion to Max Weber's famous work (and more famous idea) The Protestant Work Ethic, tracing back the idea of life centered around diligence and toil to the Protestant preacher Richard Baxter, and before that to the ordered and labor-centered life of the monastary. Bells (and now electronic clocks, timecards and even automatic sensors) decided when things should be done -- and more imporantly, things should be done! Idleness is against the Protest ethic, which holds steady work and its results as the ideals to strive for.
Himanen believes that the Protestant work ethic's replacement has arrived. Computer hackers happen to be the standard bearers, he says, for a whole new way of work, play and life, based around social networks, personal preferences for work environment and content, and a intermingling of work and play.
He points to a number of sources -- some of them may bring a smile, like Richard M. Stallman's Free Software Song, and the sometimes outrageous definitions in Eric S. Raymond's Jargon File -- to demonstrate the way that these non-traditional or even anti-traditional ways of thinking and doing manifest themselves among computer hackers. Hackers, especially the idealized hackers as mythologized in documents like the Jargon File but certainly not only these, tend to ignore social conventions of behavior, when those conventions get in the way of doing what they want. Because of the realities of cheap long-distance communications, electric lights allowing all-night hacking sessions, and other particulars of the electronic-dominated world which has been available to an increasing number of people for more than a generation, they've built their own rules about proper behavior on a computer, on a network, and in the real world. By so doing, they haven't created a world inhabited solely by selfish slobs -- instead, the world of the hacker has simply become one with a far more elastic (and less predictable) matrix of social and professional roles.
Computer hackers may have led the way to this, but Himanen believes that the widespread growth of Net culture is having and will have a permanent effect on the way work is looked at, and the way people approach leisure and work time. The more types of work that can be done by people collaborating and associating with each other (and the networking of the world means that more and more can), the less dependent people will be on rigid schedules, traditional workplaces and alarm bells to announce the end of lunch. In short, the hacker ethic has the potential to improve people's lives by removing the driving impulse to work unbound to real individual preferences.
That doesn't mean that life for hackers results only in advantages to them as individuals -- far from it. Throughout the book, Himanen refers the development of distributed projects, notably the Linux kernel. Despite its utterly voluntary nature, the freeform development of the kernel and of the GPLd software which made it useful resulted in a project involving millions of people. The idea that voluntary distributed actions can have such far-flung, elaborately evolved and evolving results puts the lie to the idea that only noses well rubbed by grindstones can create projects of meaning and substance. The hacker ethic is neither theoretical nor self-absorbed: it's more of a grand restatement of enlightened self-interest.
I did have one major point of contention with Himanen's central thesis, but one which did not really detract from reading the book. Throughout the text, the implication is both hinted at and stated outright that creativity is anathama to the Protestant work ethic. In chapter 7 ("Rest"), Himanen states outright:
While a lack of creativity may be widely associated with the Protestant work ethic, its absence hardly seems implicit to it. In social behavior, unlike mathematics, a single counterexample does not necessarily disprove a theory, but there are many individuals and even entire fields of endeavor predating the emergence of hackers (or an ethic for them to claim) which show the vast potential for creative human living even within societies living undeniably within that ethic. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, I think of as a great hacker of his time: he jumped smoothly from endeavor to endeavor, and in fact exhibited many of the same characteristics that Himanen points out as shared by modern day hackers. But Franklin undeniably ascribed to the Protestant ethic. Perhaps this is mostly a semantic issue, but it never stopped nagging me."Creativity does not feature prominently in the Protestant ethic, the typical creations of which are the government agency and the monasterylike business enterprise. Neither one of them encourages the individual to engage in creative activity."
How realistic is Himanen's assesment of changing work values? As someone who went from a relatively straight office job with timesheets, a regular desk, repetitive tasks and forehead-tightening deadlines to one with no timesheets, a desk wherever I have internet access and work that changes and flows with the day, the analysis struck me as personally insightful -- but nowhere near universally applicable, not yet. The Hacker Ethic has arrived, in fact, and to a startling degree, in certain specialized fields and among a few individuals. But offices, factories and retail stores aren't going away. Some enlightened employers have practiced (or attempted) for years to create just the kind of creative environment which would draw people to be simultaneously productive -- in whatever terms that business requires -- and passionate enough to continue for the sake of more than a paycheck.
Linus' introduction is icing on the cake -- Linus writes in the same way he does in emails to the kernel mailing list: wry, biting, self-effacing, quick. He even manages to abbreviate most complex theories of social behavior (remember Maslow's heirarchy of needs?) into just three basic human desires: Survival, social life, and entertainment. Sounds right to me.
After establishing that "survival" is usually taken care of by time one has a computer, electricity and the lower-order goods that make having a computer possible, he says (and you can remove "Linux" for a more universal statement), "The reason that Linux hackers do something is that they find it to be very interesting, and they like to share this interesting thing with others."
Linus' few pages will be just as fun to read, I think, even if his essay boils down mostly to just that single line.
A section of notes at the close of the book is a valuable addition: some of the pithiest explanations are found here, such as examples of hacker humor and a short but insightful historical overview of the development of hypertext.
And for a relatively short book, the bibliography is extensive and eclectic -- reading the list of cited works, of everything from Aristotle to Bill Joy, Plato to Max Weber -- will probably spark some reading lists to expand as well.
This book will be read, re-read and passed on -- if you're employed by someone else, I suggest reading it and (as applicable) giving your copy to your boss, former boss or future boss.
The Hacker Ethic
Preface
Prologue: What Makes Hackers Tick? aka Linus' Law, by Linus Torvalds
Part One: The Work Ethic
Chapter 1: The Hacker Work Ethic
Chapter 2: Time is Money?
Part Two: The Money Ethic
Chapter 3: Money As Motive
Chapter 4: The Academy and the Monastery
Part Three: The Nethic
Chapter 5: From Nettiquette to a Nethic
Chapter 6: The Spirit of Informationalism
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Rest
Epilogue: Informationalism and the Network Society, by Manuell
Castells
Appendix: A Brief History of Computer Hackerism
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
You can purchase The Hacker Ethic at ThinkGeek.
Survival, social life, and entertainment (Score:1)
Guy: So, I guess you have to make your own fun around here?
Gal: Everyone makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it's entertainment.
Overinflated sense of self-importance anybody? (Score:3)
What we're really seeing now is a revolution in the ease with which people are able to communicate. Yes, hackers have had a huge hand in this but so have normal shirt-and-tie professionals working in cubicles and offices.
How have hackers changed the lives and perceptions of normal everyday Joes outside of their contributions to the net? Not a bit as far as I can tell from looking out my window.
The full text of "Hackers" is available at (Score:1)
Just change the Chapter1.html to the proper chapter.
a nit with the "major point of contention" (Score:1)
Programming an alarm clock... (Score:1)
Just wait for Nanotechnology (Score:1)
Just wait for Nanotechnology.
Re:Sounds Good (Score:1)
Re:Sounds Good (Score:2)
That's really funny. Actually, he repeatedly points out that the "theories" he presents in his fiction [dictionary.com] do not represent his true beliefs. They are pedantic, serving only to convince the reader that all conspiracies are equally likely and therefore equally unlikely.
Some of his characters, however, are nutcase conspiracy theorists. Some others are nutcase conspirators. Got it?
If you love God, burn a church!
Spew! (Score:1)
The whole thing sounds deeply nauseating and glad I threw my copy of "The Hacker's Dictionary" in the bin some time ago.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
Re:I read an excerpt... (Score:1)
They share their music, just as well as we share our code. Most of them even write code too (like me).
And don't ever say the Hacker World was first with all these ideas, because thousands of Jazz-musicians will kill you for that. They shared their music loooong before code was even written.
wanker (Score:1)
It's a shame that you can't justify or support your beliefs in any way and act like violence is something for the casual ammusement of yourself and your equally dead brained freinds.
If you had any conviction in your totally objectionable beliefs you'd post under a registered name. Never has the anonymous *COWARD* tag been so apt.
t.
An interview with the author (Score:1)
The author was on the radio program Public Interest [wamu.org] March 5th.
Kojo Nnamdi, an excellent interviewer, hosted an hour with Dr. Himanen, who is in his 20's and is a professor at Berkley and Helsinki, and with a former senior presidential speach writer who also has a new book out. Here is the RA stream [wamu.org].
--
More about the Cathedral? (Score:2)
Years later, the cathedral builders may have given up a little market share to the bazaar (or, as in the case of IE vs. Mozilla, gained some at its expense). But the idea that free-floating collaborations are going to drive organizations out of existence should be laughable on its face.
At least this is better than the Salon piece about this book (ripped to shreds on Slashdot [slashdot.org]) where Andrew Leonard rhapsodizes for pages over an admin in his office who hoses his system while trying to install 2.4 and then wastes the next few days "hacking" to recompile KDE.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:Another book (Score:2)
Re:Another book (Score:3)
First chapter of the book (Score:2)
Ita a bit tooo wordy for me, personally.
Re:Conscience? (Score:1)
~cHris
--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
Re:Conscience? (Score:1)
Primalchrome
Very well written. (Score:2)
the _hybris_ of the technophile (Score:4)
When I was young, I discovered that in my school library's archive of old SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazines was an amazing treasure trove of investigative work done by amateurs in almost every field of natural and physical science. (I'm speaking of the "Amateur Scientist" column.) These investigations spanned the range from inquiries into the habits of hummingbirds to the construction of elaborate scientific apparata. I admire the people who did such things, if only because they gave the lie to the notion that science was exclusively the domain of professional men with degrees. It was not always so. But, well, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is more advertising than content now, and the "Amateur Scientist" is a shadow of its former self.
Were those amateur scientists "hackers"? At least they were interested in the real, observable universe--that's what science is all about. Computer hackers, though, work in their little artificial domain. I find it ironic that this topic should have appeared on Slashdot at almost the same time that the Napster story broke. Napster (and all its brethren in the music-piracy business)--now there's a tremendous misapplication of intellect. The energy which might have gone into the creation of something truly beautiful--or something truly useful--instead went into the institution of an intricate mechanism, useless to anyone not engrossed with that artificial domain--anyone who doesn't live and breathe computers, and would rather spend hours downloading and storing low-fidelity MP3 files than get up and visit the neighborhood music, or take in a concert. Why? because he'd have to stop "hacking" and spend a little less time away from his precious technology, that's why.
With computer mania sweeping the US, and the growing perception that it's more important to get schoolchildren in front of computers than to teach them about their language, their history, and their universe, it's no wonder that our children suck at math and science.
hyacinthus.
Re:Conscience? (Score:2)
Well, let's see, what are the credentials of this "mentor" guy -
THE MENTOR- Handle of Loyd Blankenship. Also known as the Neuromancer. Elite hacker and former member of the Legion of Doom, the PhoneLine Phantoms, the Racketeers and Extasyy Elite. Writer of the legendary "Conscience of a Hacker." He also used to work for Steve Jackson Games, where he wrote _GURPS Cyberpunk_. He is currently a freelance game designer/electronic musician. [Handle is from the Grey Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith.] (from the Hacker's Encyclopedia by Logik Bomb)
Hey! there is an interview with him here [renasm.de]. Let's see what they have to say:
Elf Qrin:How did you become a hacker?
Mentor: If you mean 'hacker' in the true sense, I think it happened when I started porting _Star Trek_. (NB - from PDP4 source code to Basic for a Compucolor) If you mean it in the 'breaking into computers', it started during that first summer when I found out the university had a PDP-4. I wrangled a guest password from a friend of the family, but it expired at the end of the summer. By then I had a pretty good list of user account pairs, and I hacked an account (something like [1,5], pw: games I think).
- - -
Elf Qrin: Why you quit the scene in 1990?
Mentor: When I put up _The Phoenix Project_, I knew I had to stop. I was running the highest-profile (and best) hacking BBS in the world. I knew I'd be watched. I was also at the point where a lot of the original challenge was gone -- LOD had control over pretty much anything we wanted to at that time, and I personally had finished taking over huge chunks of Autonet. Prime Suspect owned Telenet. Erik Bloodaxe owned pretty much anything he wanted (plug here -- Erik Bloodaxe was the best hacker I ever met). Our phone gurus owned every phone network in the country. There was nowhere to go but down.
Yep, looks like he knows nothing about being a hacker. He has been out of the business for over ten years, and never had a clue.
Right?
Less complimentary review (Score:2)
...and wrong in important foundational ways [long] (Score:2)
Reformation and Renaissance went hand in hand. Understand the Protest, and you understand much about Protestant ethics.
If you're looking for the source of monasterylike business, wouldn't it be obvious to start looking in a monastic culture, rejection of which was a significant part of the Protest?
If you're looking for dependence on a central authority ("government"), what better place to start than one of the biggest and most ruthlessly centralised governments ever: the papacy - rejection of which was a significant part of the Protest? Is Mr Gates half-jokingly called ``Pope Bill'' for his creativity?
You could also make a good case for the ``monasterylike'' business having arisen from the centrally-focussed Empire-style cultures of Britain and such as Napoleon.
Go back through the history of the time (1600s) and pick out successful inventors, artists and other technically creative people. Now consider the proportion who were Protestant (and so presumably subject to the Protestant Work Ethic) against the proportion of Protestants in the general populace. Amazing, isn't it?
It wasn't that the Medievel Church suppressed research or anything (as long as it didn't threaten to step on their theological toes) but that the PWE was absent from that culture. Another interesting comparison is the religious affiliation of countries in which inventive people lived vs the head-count of inventors.
The hacker work ethic has an advantage of sorts over both systems. The core operative process of the Medievel Church was unthinking submission to ritual obligations. Two key words there, ``unthinking'' and ``submission.'' Where thinking did happen, all too often it was along the lines of how to rort the system, and of course since the motivation was centralised and externally applied rather than distributed and internalised, opportunities were legion.
Another natural consequence of external motivation is that it quickly became drudge. You can easily make a person hate some activity that they previously loved, by forcing them to do it (conceptually at gunpoint). This completely undermines the motivation.
The equivalent core of the Protestant Work Ethic was the satisfaction of having diligently and intelligently represented your Creator in your life and work, and as long as it stayed that way it worked splendidly. However, as it became increasingly replace by lip-service, it increasingly mimicked the system it was supposedly fighting.
These days it is generally (yes, there are exceptions) quite difficult to separate Protestant and Catholic at a glance, because as the Protestant motivation becames more Medievel, so does the consequent behaviour.
Enter the Hacker Work Ethic. In some ways there are distinct advantages over the Protestant Work Ethic, in that the range of thinking is broader; in some ways there is lossage such as in the accountability department.
This is - in the short-term view at least - not always a disadvantage, since a lot of hardworking ethical Protestants were/are ruthlessly taken advantage of by government agencies and monasterylike businesses. The less-bound hacker and the not-at-all-bound cracker (who is a hacker only in the same sense - as Eric Raymond so neatly put it - as a car thief is an automotive engineer) do not so readily fall victim to such manipulation. In the longer term, hackers closer to the PWE are more reliable, more dependable from the POV of those considering using their work.
I'll enthusiastically take either in preference to the me-first me-too grab-everything-you-can world-owes-me-a-living attitude which so pervades society today.
Re:Conscience? (Score:1)
Re:Boy I feel old.. (Score:1)
>Secret Service for crimes I've long since
>forgotten.
If nothing else, Loyd was working for Steve Jackson Games when Operation Sun Devil went down.
I seem to recall something else involving stolen Apples in the mid 80's, but I can't remember any sort of details and I really wouldn't want to spread misinformation about it...
I don't know that he ever actually did any real time.
Haven't seen him in years, but I remember him being an interesting guy to hang out with.
-LjM
Not even close (Score:4)
So, let me take an example. Since the early 19th century, it was known that the planet Merucry did not orbit the sun in the manner Newtonian mechanics prescribes for it. So, here's my question. Did this 'disprove' Newtonian mechanics? If so, were the scientists of the time right or wrong in sticking with Newtonian mechanics until the 1920's? If they were wrong, what programme do you suggest the physicists of the 19th century should have followed that would have produced the same massive advancement in human knowledge and power?
Let me add another example from the social sciences: Child development theory takes as a given that children under the age of 5 are not able to judge whether two quantities are of different magnitude by counting them. This is the most consistent result found in child development acccording to authorities like Gallistel and Gelman and a wide variety of child development theories rest on this result among others. They include Piaget's theory of general development and more nativist theories like Pinker's, which seek to show that counting (as opposed to other behaviours like language) are not the product of biologically driven forces.
Now, I can assure you (although you need not take my word for it in order to use this example, just assume I'm telling the truth) that my little brother could make set comparisons by counting at the age of three years and two months and was able to do so for sets of up 70 items. My brother is a particularly gifted mathematician (a strange form of mental illness that explains why he's still unemployed.) Does this fact render null all of the child development research done in the last 50 years? Are we now compelled to say that no one knows anything about child development because a single child exists who defies the empirical results on which those theories are based?
Alternatively, can we view existing child development theories as incomplete but still viable bodies of thought?
Now, let me propose an alternative version of what a theory is. Theories are tools which mediate human interaction with the world. They are semiotic tools, rather than physical tools, but they work in much the same way.
Humans behave in goal-directed ways. For example, when you want to build a house, you have a goal: to have a house. To do this, you must interact with other bits of the universe: land, wood, nails, etc. To do this, you use tools. Furthermore, the kind of house you make - the structure, the composition, the design, even the uses - are in part determined by the tools you have on hand. With a cheap nails and a strong hammer, you build a very different kind of house than the way pre-industrialised people build their homes. (Go look at old homes in Europe or colonial era dwellings on the East Coast.) In fact, you see the problem of building a house very differently with modern tools than you do with other tools.
Furthermore, you judge one tool to be better than another tool by using it. If you buy a nail gun, it is because it makes it easier to build houses. If the nail gun was too heavy or bulky or was constatantly breaking and you couldn't depend on it, you would go back to using the old manual hammer and nails. In fact, the very existence of nail guns is predicated on people having certain tools, like automated, precision nail-making machines so that nails are uniform. Even tools are the products of tools.
And if you find something you can't build because you don't have the right tools for it, you don't abandon your tools and go back to making things with your bare hands.
Since we're on this topic... (Score:3)
Manuel Castells' The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture
Geoffrey Hodgson's Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is Not the End of History
Paul Ormerod's Butterfly Economics
Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist
Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day's Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart or Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction edited by Nardi.
These kinds of books are a lot more relevant to higher geek culture than the latest Python book, and I'm really glad to see some of this kind of thing on
Re:Poor quality (Score:1)
In short, it's wholly unfair to dismiss it due to lack of technical detail. That isn't the point of the work at all.
Re:The full text of "Hackers" is available at (Score:1)
far more problematic (Score:2)
--
Re:Buzzword Bingo (Score:1)
*grin* it appears that I was a little unclear here. the point I was trying to make is that the 'Protestant Work Ethic' wasn't, and what significances this had. I wasn't trying to comprehensively catalogue teh origins of the industrial revolution.
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
Hacker wins Nobel Prize (Score:1)
Re:Buzzword Bingo (Score:1)
~cHris
--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
Re:A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical (Score:1)
Re:Hackers don't have ethics (Score:1)
---
Re:Hackthic? (Score:1)
Poor quality (Score:3)
To summarize, this book is not for those in the high tech mindset. I found it to be a waste of time
I read an excerpt... (Score:2)
The input by the sociology expert should be very interesting, and hopefully give it an unusual angle.
It is good to see the hacker community analysed like this. I do really think that there is something fundamental happening here, among this community. Hacking is the first occupation that is closely connected with the online world, as it has been since the 1960's, and so it has built up its own ethos based on this, as it grew up around it.
Other interests and professions, like writing, music and so on, see the interenet as something of a threat, but I am hopeful that in the future we will see a similar ethos among musicians and writers, or at least a group of them, as we see now in the hacker community. The havker community was the first, so it is important not just for hackers, but for other groups, to have it analysed.
--
Sounds Good (Score:2)
There are some other books on the subject, such as Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising [newfalcon.com]. There is no direct mapping to the work you are reviewing, and it was written before the internet revolution, but it does say the same thing. In fact, so does any other work by Wilson or Dr. Leary.
If you love God, burn a church!
Re:I read an excerpt... (Score:5)
Holy crap! Someone just invoked sociology in a positive light on slashdot! I think I might weep. Long have I and my finely trained army of sociologist colleagues awaited this day.
Seriously, though, without having read The Hacker Ethic (BTW, Weber's book is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) maybe I can comment a little on the historical protestant ethic. Weber sought to explain why capitalism seemed to flourish uniquely in Europe and early America, far more so than in the rest of the world at that time. The factor he identified was the worldview that surrounded Protestantism: Hard work and strict accounting of one's deeds. The configuration of work and spirituality, argued Weber, was unique to the Western world, and fundamentally shaped the success of capitalism.
That said, I have to admit I'm a little skeptical of Himanen's claims that the hacker ethic will revolutionize work and play. If we believe Weber's construction of capitalism, we have to accept that it's based on a much "smaller" world, one inhabited for instance largely by Protestants--after all, that's why early America was so uniquely poised to propel capitalism.
I find it more likely that the products of the hacker ethic -- good hardware and software, for instance -- are what will continue to permeate daily life, rather than the ethic of those products' creators. (Just as capitalism now thrives where Protestantism does not dominate)
Unfortunately, the effect of that pervasive technology may be the opposite of Himanen's new work and play ethics. Modern home appliances aren't really all that liberating: Many scholars argue that home cooking and cleaning appliances really just bind more people to doing more work -- far from being liberated by the machines, we have the propensity to become too attached to them. (How many of you have programmed your linux box to wake you up by playing your favorite mp3s? You may like to tinker with that perl script, but the end result is that you're still waking up to an alarm clock!).
Anyway, that said, it sounds like an interesting argument. The cultural transformation that really could hook the hacker ethics of a product's production to its eventual use might be pretty neat. But I don't think I'll hold my breath.
-schussat
Re:A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical (Score:3)
A contradictory counter-example disproves a specific formulation of a theory. But often (usually?) a change can be made to the theory that takes the contradiction into account without significantly changing the basics of the theory.
Re:Conscience? (Score:1)
Ironic overinflated sense of self-importance (Score:1)
There's a lot more to the world than what is visible from your window.
Re:A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical (Score:1)
Bummer! I thought there were nine including Pluto. Now where's me lardybird book of astronomy?
cat
Re:Conscience? (Score:1)
I read The Conscience of a Hacker a while back on portwolf.com. [portwolf.com] I kinda agree with what the author is saying because most hackers are really bright kids who need an outlet to unleash thier talents.
Re:Poor quality (Score:1)
Re:Conscience? (Score:2)
You are correct.
quick research reveals that it was "Written on January 8, 1986" attributed to Loyd Blankenship (mentor@blankenship.com)and is also known as the "Hackers Manifesto". It was probably quoted in the movie.
Fascinating that it is so timely, and seems like it could have been written over that past year or so. It has stood up to the Test of Time (tm) very well.
NB - There is no blankenship.com website right now, but it does cross check with the above name nicely via whois, etc. This would probably be a good person to send a note of appreciation to.
Re:the _hybris_ of the technophile (Score:1)
And as for MP3's, the whole reason why they are so popular is that the 'friendly neighbourhood music' is way overpriced in the first place.
We're all amateur scientists (most of us
Re:Programming an alarm clock... (Score:2)
7 seconds! ( I type slowly )
crontab -e
0 6 * * *
Editing it to change times should take even less time
Re:A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical (Score:1)
The Finnish connection (Score:1)
I can't help but wonder if there would be more hackers (using the good sense of the word) in the world if there were free health coverage and low cost or free higher education.
- ordinarious
Re:I read an excerpt... (Score:2)
(sorry, couldn't resist)
--
Another book (Score:2)
Id like to take the opportunity to recommend to everyone this other book: Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution, by Stephen Levy.
I know it is not a new book, but having been out of print, it is now available again in paperback [amazon.com]. Im reading it right now, and it is really GREAT!
/Dervak
ethics (Score:3)
I don't think that such a loosly bound and large group can have a well defined set of ethics, but I do think that many share the same broad goals which kind of gives the illusion of that. I don't mean that anyone would want to go fork projects or take stuff and try to pass it off as theirs, but I think that if there is something else - that doesn't effect the open source community at all then it won't fall into any catagory of ethics of that group.
A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical (Score:1)
Re:unethical hackers (Score:1)
use strict;
my $insaneramblings = 1;
print "\nWhy did you post this here?\n\n"
unless $insaneramblings eq "0";
---
Re:Another book (Score:1)
The new working habitat (Score:3)
Re:A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical (Score:1)
That's precisely the point - a "theory" in this context isn't a formal statement of logic, it's a meaningful generalization.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Nice for the 0.1% of the world it applies to (Score:2)
Gee, ya think?!?
To take advantage of this allegedly new ethic, you need a job with certain very specific characteristics. Little direct interaction with customers, not tied to a specific physical location, and requiring a particular intellectual aptitude that is uncommon. So it's great that people like this are now being spoiled even more by their employers. But the notion that this is replacing the Protestant work ethic is so absurd that it's not even funny.
Try telling this to someone working in a sweatshop in a third-world country, or someone working three jobs to get by in America, or anyone who needs a union to protect their job. "It's not society's fault...it's your fault...you need a new work ethic!! That's all!" Yeah right.
In any case, this whole idea is not new, since for centuries it has been the standard way of working among academic researchers, who were among the few who had jobs that actually matched the criteria.
- adam
Re:Another book (Score:1)
Too many chiefs and not enough indians (Score:2)
Socioloists have noted that we invent (boosterism?) myths to explain or expound our tasks (and thus importance) to the outside world (e.g. Hollywood showbiz "glamour" when they are in the business of selling lies). Other scientific studies [tms.com.au] have tried to work out personal characteristics that explain why we work in particular sectors. For example, psychologists have noted that farmers tend to fall into only a limited subset of personality types (primarily stoic/ plematic) which may be a reflection of the mental toughness or indifference necessary to survive against the forces of Mother Nature (fire/famine/flood). Similarly the hacker ethic may be a self-protective device to glamorise what to others (e.g. marketeers) is a very mind-numbing attention-picking type of work and thus maintain its pool of suck ... errr ... recruits :-) via the call-against-oppression meme (see google on Windows by day, Linux by night). While the popular stereotype (cough*Napster*cough) of rebelling against the forces of evil (aka corporatisation) may appeal to a teenager's sense of drama, it is hard to sustain in the long term as hackerdom becomes mainstream and thus part of the establishment (e.g. witness SourceForge [salon.com]).
Fundamentally IMHO the hacker lacks professional self-reinforcing core/formal ethics such as the medical Hippocratic Oath or the lawyer's client-attorney priviledge. Short-term thinking is no substitute for building an ethos (system of customs and habits) that encourages creative critical thought. The project mentality harkens to the bunker/war-room type psychological stress and it has been noted (from a economic PoV) that it is very effective (if you ignore social side-effects like lack of a life). In fact the very sense of elitism and techno-jargon is probably driving away the better half of the population. Unless the appeal is to both genders, hackerdom is missing half the talent pool. The hacker work ethic may be a necessary survival mechanism in this type of work (continuous creative combinations of techniques to find the rare killer-app) but the major problem is that it (currently) is difficult to scale beyond a cottage industry or bazaar type collective.
Fortunately the world is big enough for all types and if someone who has been ostracised by mainstream society finds a fit within the hacker culture, then all to the better.
LL
Timothy has a head on his shoulders (Score:1)
A new world of fulfilling, creative work is an ideal to get excited about (and to work towards), but in need of some healthy skepticism. Nothing comes from nowhere, and there are few true sea changes in history, mostly slow changes that it takes our collective consciousness a while to figure out.
The 'hacker ethic' may just turn out to be a continuation of the long line of small groups of individuals who pursue the good life as they see it even when this is not socially respectable. Hopefully, doing this (and living reasonably comfortably) is becoming easier.
The other work of Manuel Castells (especially his Information Age trilogy) is good reading for natural skeptics who can't help themselves from getting excited about the way information technology might make a better world. Castells is smart enough also to be interested in how IT makes the world a worse place, and evidence that goes against his theories.
John Luke
Re:The new working habitat (Score:1)
I agree. When I started working in High School, I had to wear a 'uniform' (stationary store, not food service), I had to work a specific shift that was absolute. When I got my first real job (doing wire monkey stuff) they introduced me to the concept of salary. I found that I was working much longer hours, but if I wanted to come in late once or twice, it was expected. Now, I get to work in a very mellow environment, yet still manage to enjoy putting in 50-some hours a week.
Go figure...
-WSBuzzword Bingo (Score:3)
Re:Hackthic? (Score:1)
Conscience? (Score:2)
While you may not agree with everything in it (I don't) it offers as much insight as anything else into the culture and the mindset. What I see, among other things, is the waste of a young brilliant mind by a system tumbling towards the state of being cripple ware.
I greatly admire this bit hacker culture. It communicates (more than anything else I've read) what is going on
"The Conscience of a Hacker" by Mentor
(reproduced without permission.)
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.
"Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?
Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.
I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool.
It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.
Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world...
rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins,
an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak...
the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.
The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.
We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons,
and you call us criminals.
We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.
We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us,
you try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
I'm reading this at present... (Score:2)
oops, screwed up the link there (Score:2)
Here [linux.com]
--
Hackers Work Ethic (Score:3)
Hackers are the folks who will work 18 hour days until their coding project is done. If that's not nose-to-the-grindstone, I don't know what is. They're also one of the very few groups that require close cooperation to accomplish a complex project. (For example, to bring new elements into an open source project requires cooperation.) Compare this to a standard office worker, who shuffles paper & generally does projects alone, and leaves the job at 5 p.m. sharp. Although current folks like to think that the Protestants had no fun, this isn't true either. Generally, they partied hard as well. I remember reading about the post-barn-raising events... quite impressive. (after their work was done, of course.)
I do agree with the author that the focus on Information is a major shift. But I think the work ethic of most hackers quite closely parallels those of Protestant farmers of yesteryear.
Thalia