Playful cleverness

History and Visions of New Media

IMKE 2007

Kaido Kikkas

Distributed under the Creatve Commons BY-SA license (2.5 or newer).

 Hacker...?
● “My website was hacked, blah blah”
● Typical image in most mainstream media:
ingenious yet malicious hi-tech vandal
● There are constructive and knowledgeable people
calling themselves hackers too
● http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/
H/hacker.html
● Controversy?
 Who to believe?
● Those whose achievements range from
clueless pranks to serious damage to
other people (from Anonymous Dork
to Kevin Mitnick)?
● Or those who do not have any deeper knowledge
about tech culture (most journalists)?
● Or those who have built a great share of today's
Internet infrastructure and left their distinct
footprints into the history of technology
(Stallman, Torvalds, Berners-Lee, Perens, de
Raadt, de Icaza, Lerdorf and many others)
 Definition in this lecture
● a hacker is (mostly but not necessarily) a
computer professional with innovative mindset
and a passion for exploration
● also a tech subculture deeply rooted in the history
of technology
● Hacker ethic worded by Raymond: "The belief
that information-sharing is a powerful positive
good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers
to share their expertise by writing open-source
code and facilitating access to information and to
computing resources wherever possible."
 The Forefathers: MIT
● MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, founded 1946
● The Signals & Power Subcommittee
● First computer science classes in 1959 (TX-0)
● PDP-1 in 1961
● Project MAC in 1963
● MIT AI Lab in 1970
● Foundation of the culture

● Recommended reading: Hackers by Steven Levy

 No business
● “Computer science” ~ “rocket science”
● Too few people to form a market
● Military undertones
● Software was machine-specific
● Also, management kept hackers apart from
managers and bookkeepers

● => Playful cleverness: original display of

creativity unhindered by market motives
 Subculture
● Sharing culture (programming into a drawer)
● Non-standard use of technology (music, chess,
games like Spacewar)
● Specific jargon (-P, T/NIL, MU!)
● Hacking of Chinese food
● Puns and wordplay (“Government Property
- Do Not Duplicate” => “Government
Duplicity - Do Not Propagate” (on keys)
● Also: MIT hack tradition (see
http://hacks.mit.edu)
 The early Hacker Ethic
● “1. Access to computers – and anything which
might teach you something about the way the
world works – should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!”
● "walk the walk, not only talk the talk"; a root of
later hacker ethic
 ...
● “2. All information should be free. “
● Historical undertones (limited resources) – yet the
base of sharing in its many forms
 ...
● “3. Mistrust authority – promote
decentralization.”
● Democracy rather than anarchy – it fights the
misuse of authority, not authority as such
● Decentralization has been a central feature of the
Internet (and all network-based development)
since its early days!
 ...
● “4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking,
not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or
position.”
● Equality! (Gender, education, race, worldview...)
● Peter Deutsch, 12
● Gender- and color-blindness of hackers -
a positive effect of text-only network
channels: all participants judged by the
quality of their input, not their personal
features! (suggested by the Jargon File)
 ...
● “5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.”
● Not so evident in early days – MIT hackers were
the first to define computer aesthetics
● Ct. current WordPress slogan: “Code is poetry”
● Raymond's “points for style” - hackers
are no nerds at all?
 ...
● “6. Computers can change your life for the
better.”
● New, non-traditional application (the ping-pong
robot)
● a root of today's free culture
 Decline and rebirth
● Early 80s: split in MIT AI Lab
● RMS, the Last of True Hackers (Levy)
● 1983 – GNU
● 1989/91 – GNU GPL
● 1991 – Linux
● 1992-93 *BSD
● ~1995 – LAMP and Red Hat
● 1996-97 - KDE & GNOME
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
● Set of essays by Eric S. Raymond, originally
from 1997
● Business reasoning of free models
● Open Source vs Free Software
● ESR as a colourful character
● Hacker-HOWTO:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
● Helped to develop a new generation of hacker
ethic
 ESR: main criteria
● attitude - "Do you identify with the goals and
values of the hacker community?"
● skills - "Do you speak code, fluently?"
● status - "Has a well-established member of the
hacker community ever called you a hacker?"

● All three are needed to be a hacker!

 Attitude points
● The world is full of fascinating problems waiting
to be solved
● No problem should ever have to be solved twice
● Boredom and drudgery are evil
● Freedom is good
● Attitude is no substitute for competence
 Skill points
● Learn how to program
● Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to
use and run it
● Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write
HTML
● If you don't have functional English, learn it
 Status points
● Write open-source software
● Help test and debug open-source software
● Publish useful information
● Help (to) keep the infrastructure working
● Serve the hacker culture itself
 Points for style
● Learn to write your native language well
● Read science fiction and go to science fiction
conventions
● Train in a martial-arts form
● Study an actual meditation discipline
● Learn to appreciate music, to play some
musical instrument or to sing
● Develop your appreciation of puns and
wordplay
 Motivation
● Linus' Law:
● survival
● social status
● fun
3
●
Ct. Wozniak's H = F
 Hackers of the new century
● GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, OpenCourseWare...
● See: Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen, also other
writings of Himanen and Manuel Castells
● Medieval vs Protestant vs hacker ethic
 Himanen on Hacker Ethic
● Protestant Ethic ● Hacker Ethic
● money ● passion
● work ● freedom
● flexibility ● (hacker) work ethic
● goal orientation, result ● (hacker) money ethic
● accountability ● nethic (hacker network
● optimality ethic)
● stability
● caring
● creativity
 Friday vs Sunday
● Friday as the day of Crucifixion
● but also as the last day of working week
● Sunday as the day of Resurrection
● but also as the day for rest and reflection
● Estonian pühapäev – lit. 'sacred day'
● In which day do we live?
 Conclusions
● The hacker culture and hacker ethic do have
respectable roots in history
● From the mindset of a dedicated techno-elite into
the hacker ethos of new millennium with a wide
array of new ideas and possibilities
● Might be the thinking model that our networked
society really needs!