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The Hacker Ethic
from the work-play-think-reconsider dept.
| 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.
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.
Re:Another book (Score:3)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
The new working habitat (Score:3)
Buzzword Bingo (Score:3)
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