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Hacker Ethos

What is a hacker? I had the enormous benefit of coming of age precisely in parallel withthe discovery and maturity of the concept: hacker. The original hacker was into

technology, no doubt. He (or she) was clearly an inheritor of the old nerd of chemistry

sets and insect collections, but was of a different breed entirely. Meaner, moreautonomous, more of an enthusiastic outsider. Che Guevera meets Carl Sagan? Sid

Vicious meets Thomas Edison?

The hacker started with code. Making code dance. More of an alchemist or magician

than an engineer. The object wasnt to make something but to make something

happen. To make the code do something that it wasnt strictly designed to do. To

invent. Part playful, part cruelty. To invent, but not for any particular practical purpose.More of an impulsion. A need to see your will reflected in the code. A sense of

empowerment. Self-help. And, obviously so utterly obviously the rules didnt

matter. Not the structure of the code, not the laws of the state, hell not the laws of

physics if need be. It was you and your abilities and your ethics.

It started in computers, no doubt. But the hacker isnt of computing or even oftechnology. It is an ethos, a way of being. Stravinsky was a hacker. Remember how the

people of Paris responded to his Hacks of Spring?

When you get a feel for it, you can begin to recognize the hackers. You begin to see theirinfluence everywhere. Everywhere the code has been made to dance. Everywhere

someone has stepped outside the bounds of what is appropriate and simply made

something come alive that has never been seen on earth before. Their fingerprints areeverywhere.

They are dangerous, these hackers. They certainly arent normal. Which doesnt meanthat they arent healthy. Better to be healthy in your beautiful abnormality than

unhealthy and normal. They are dangerous. But they are also absolutely necessary.

The world is racing headlong into a maelstrom. The children of today will inherit a future

that we cant even predict. They will be required to solve problems that we dont even

know are problems yet. None of the way that we do things now will work. Most of

education has already become all but meaningless. How can you teach people thingswhen the amount of new information produced last year is more than the totality of all

information produced over the previous five thousand years and is doubling year to

year? Clearly, you can not teach them things. You have to teach them capacity. Youhave to make them capable. You have to make them into artists and physicians of reality.

In a word hackers. Education must be hacked. And energy. And politics. And art.

And life. And love. And meaning.

And the hackers too will have to be hacked. There is a great deal of weakness in being an

artist. Sadness and bitterness, fear and loneliness. Just because you have power doesnt

mean that you have wisdom or the great health that is necessary. No one is born strong-

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enough for life. But you can get there. The hackers too can be made to dance, they too

can be made beautiful.

I cant wait to see what happens then.