Hacker Ethic in a Networked Society

This document uses the GNU Free Documentation License (v1.2 or newer).

PSI 2007Kaido Kikkas

Enter the Hacker

hacker vs cracker

mostly (but not necessarily) a computer professional with innovative mindset and a passion for exploration

Sharing 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. - Hacker-HOWTO

Roots

1946 - MIT TMRC

Signals & Power Subcommittee

1959 – first courses in CS on TX-0

1961 – PDP-1

Creativity separated from bureaucracy

playful cleverness, no business

~ 1980: end of the era. LMI vs Symbolics

Gnu and penguin

1983 – Richard Stallman starts GNU, birth of a new paradigm

1989/91 – GNU GPL

1991 – Linus Torvalds starts Linux

1994 – two U.S. hackers found Red Hat

90s - return of the hackers. BSD, LAMP, KDE, GNOME...

New century – wider spread of hacker mindset and ethic

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!

Compare to Eric Raymond:The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved"

No problem should ever have to be solved twice

Freedom is good

Boredom and drudgery are evil

...

2. All information should be free.

Early days: no business

Intermediate period: old hippie stuff

New century: the Net became the global version of the historical hacker labs

...

3. Mistrust authority – promote decentralization.

Not really against authority – but against unearned and misused authority

Corporate mindset is contrary to hacker mentality

...

4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.

Colour (and other treat) blindness12-year old Peter Deutsch in MIT lab

Text-only channels as a major reason

...

5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

Aesthetics – in programming and outside

Eric Raymond's points of style:music

wordplay and puns

martial arts

fantasy

Not so nerdy at all...

...

6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Not just computing. MIT lab worked withcomputer chess

computer music

Ping-Pong robot

games (Spacewar)

The Web as "the huge, shiny hacker toy" (Raymond) => hackers go public

Linus' Law (again)

Survival, social life, entertainment

Linus Torvalds: "What are people ready to die for?" both social life and even enter-tainment can pass survival in some cases

country, religion and families

can even risk with death to fight boredom (modern extreme sports fanatics)

Hackerly free contributions (e.g. writing Wikipedia) seem far less extreme...

Social context

Post-scarcity (Benkler, Barnes et al)

Theobald: immigrants to a new time

Peter Barnes: 3 'versions' of capitalism:

1.0 – early, shortage capitalism (demand exceeded supply)

2.0 – surplus capitalism (supply exceeds demand), artificial obstacles and scarcity

3.0 – future; artificial obstacles removed

Himanen on Hacker Ethic

Protestant Ethic

money

work

flexibility

goal orientation, result

accountability

optimality

stability

Hacker Ethic

passion

freedom

(hacker) work ethic

(hacker) money ethic

nethic (hacker network ethic)

caring

creativity

Friday or 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?

Final words

The ripples of Internet – from strictly technical, elite phenomenon to ubiquitous changes

Hacker ethos for networked society