The hacker ethic has a long, proud history, which other, more informed and talented writers convey quite well.

In support of my argument for widespread adoption of said ethic, however, I’d like to postulate that the hacker ethic is not really a novel thing, but rather an old thing forgotten and swept under the rug, submerged beneath an unusually casual acceptance of late of Machiavelli-that-ate-Darwin. It is a logical extension of uncompromising rational humanism.

Socrates wouldn’t have tolerated the dangerous informality with which our politicians sling their socioeconomic abstractions about; he’d have pointed out the gaping holes in the rhetoric and empirical lack of results in the system, forcing us to concede that either theory or politics (or both) is broken. Jefferson would have sensed violation of the laws of nature in man’s attempts to enslave that marvelous beast known as the idea as a mere cash cow–not to mention moral harm in the inequity of society’s benefit from such ideas. Thomas Aquinas and the Dalai Lamas would presumably point out that the best empirical standard of good is not property, but happiness and fulfillment–a measure in which it’s not clear first-world capitalism is making progress at all.

So now it would seem the torch passes to us. Not because we hackers are philosophically on level with these people, or for that matter in the same building, but because we’re the ones whose ongoing intellectual endeavors chanced to strike upon the buried wisdom. It falls to us to remind a WIPO-bound world that an “if-value-then-right” culture is a stamp-tax culture. That the first duty of government with regard to copyrights is to incentivize innovation and progress, not to babysit the monopolies of individuals.

Ignore for a moment the infeasibility of accurate pricing without a free market and try to picture something: a society in which Due Diligence and stock sales turned not on shareholder value, but contribution to global value. In which people vie for a piece of the action in whatever’s advancing the causes of the society and the species. I was pondering this very subject today, when I remembered I’d already seen the answer. That society is none other than the Bitchun Society of Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom. And while his sketch makes it clear there are some significant kinks to be worked out of the blogosphere before we try this, I don’t think it’s hard to see the immense positive potential in such schemes–schemes which the current generation of Web technologies are already well-positioned to begin to support.

(from Make Way for Hacklings: on Bringing the Hacker Agenda to the Masses)

These days, I sometimes wonder: are we even advancing? Has Lee Felsenstein’s revolt ground to a halt? The spread of computers continues unabated, and as Steven Levy’s book puts it, “Today, technology is cool.” But I’m not sure the Hacker Ethic is spreading with it as intended.

I have confidence that the United States will find the sheer intellectual prowess needed to run the show (after a fashion) in the 21st century. But will it find the ethical leadership to do so in an honorable way? To remain the proud social experiment it has been for two centuries, the guiding light of the modern world, etc. ad nauseam? And should it trust in that ethical leadership to get it where it needs to go, if not wedded directly to the aforementioned intellectual prowess?

I was a power achiever in high school. Life could have taken me in any of a large number of directions–I did very nearly go liberal arts–but it drew me instead, through what seemed many unrelated events but in retrospect are more like a single tide of inevitability, into engineering. Into computer geekdom. Into something resembling hackerdom. Now, more than ever, hacklings like myself are emerging spontaneously from a society which (on the average and in its offline incarnation, at least) makes little effort to produce them. But I, who remember what it was like before everybody knew about The One True Place for socially incompetant savants, whose generation was the beginning of the end of a special form of juvenile bigotry, am not satisfied by this subtle exponential growth. I want to do whatever I can to kick up the parameter and get things rolling already.

(The canonical answer to this question remains an impossibility to date. Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, eloquently portrays the fusion of strong AI and hacker mores in a Neo-Victorian setting, in which a young girl discovers what might be described as a magic book, to make little girls into magicians in their own right, saving her life and vaulting her to a position of power in the process. Hackers would love this solution, because most of them wouldn’t want to teach for their supper, and those who do, teach college students, who in many cases wouldn’t be in that classroom if they hadn’t already chosen a technical school. A computer scientist hates middle- and high- schoolers, they are the anathema of logic; nonetheless it is there that we will find the wellspring of future hackers and perhaps of a hacker-oriented society.)

The title of this story is meant to be provocative. Hacker culture is provocative, from its political teachings (heavily influenced by systems knowledge, and the desire for that knowledge to apply to optimizing human systems) to the manner in which it develops (an insatiable thirst for understanding that defies logic and sometimes property customs) and spreads (not unlike drug dealers giving customers a free first hit). And though I’m not even talking about the contingent of hackers who are criminals and malintents, who break into your computer and use its free cycles to crank out scam and spam, whom many do not consider to be Hackers at all, it seems to be agreed upon that hacking and its byproducts are in some way subversive.

Subversive–often said with an air as if meant exactly to creep the politicians out. This is not really the desired effect. But it does make sense, inasmuch as hackerism begets a shade of populism. Hackers intuitively grasp privilege, and the ways in which it can be escalated; they observe the presence of a privileged elite in our instruments of power. They know that, all other things being equal, this elite will serve its own best interests; and that this is all that is the sole prerequisite for corruption and myopia.

Hackers hack things apart to improve and reassemble them. In a digital world, this is made cheap and easy. In the realm of people, systems are rarely cheap to deconstruct or to put back together when tinkering’s done. Jobs and money and lives have been allocated, and the human/physical apparatus resists any attempt to shift such resources.

And, in most cases Hackers realize and accept that real-world inertia does and even should limit attempts to fiddle with things at runtime. But hackers also know, when a system is creaking and groaning and accumulating kinks from disrepair and faulty programming and constant use, or when it is strained by inexorable environmental changes that cannot be handled by the system in its current form, or when too many code patches have made swiss cheese of the original design metaphor, that it is time to tear things down and remake them. It is that insistence on remaking an inefficient, broken-down, loosey system that Hackers recognize as subversive.

Notes: 1. Should consider some surveying or quizzing of various student and adult populations to see the progress of the hacker vocabulary. 2. Intro should consider focusing on the Diamond age in place of Zinn. Should also work on being a bit more politically neutral than it was (though the rest of the essay needn’t be).

That is all.

…via a winxp box with no messenger and berserk site access filtering. Driving me f’ing nuts. I’m in the middle of nowhere, no recourse to a Starbucks wi-fi, and despite meeting their 18+ qualification I can’t access my sites properly.

Tightwads.

UPDATE: Fixed. I’ve moved my base of operations to the neighboring town’s public library. Anyway, the resort employees mean well, they just had their network set up by someone paranoid enough to install a content filter. Perhaps the higher-ups worried teenagers, bored by the utter lack of diversions elsewhere, would crowd out all the other users wasting machine time and bandwidth on media and messaging. Also they weren’t aware that while terminal access over at the library is time-limited, network access is not, thanks to a public wi-fi.

Also update: My laptop runs just fine here; no filtering. I have no idea what that means–is there a “censor the World Wide Web” option on the WinXP control panel or something?–but as long as I can use chat I don’t really care.