STDIN

One attribute that is often hinged to the meaning of hacking is pleasure, a word that I think everyone knows what it means, but of course, can mean so many things! We are going to address pleasure various times throughout the semester with the help of Mr Nietzsche, who thought of the depths of pleasure, pain, evil, and morality like no other philosopher and with the help of a more current philosopher, Martha Nussbaum in this piece which explores pleasure in Aristotle and Mill.

The following definition found in Steven Levy's classic account of the golden age of hacking, is one that aptly captures the importance of pleasure in hacking:

"and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a 'hack.' " p. 23 Hackers Steven Levy.

And here is a nice example in action

One of the great ironies to mark hacking is the fact that mainstream public perception of hackers is based on the idea that hacking is totally immoral and yet the actual history of hacking shows that many hackers are in fact quite obsessed with ethical questions and with what Steven Levy defined decades ago as the "hacker ethic."

But what if the question of ethics is simply the wrong question to be asking? This is what Brian Harvey suggests in this old but thought provoking piece, which we read last week, where he argues that:

"Steven Levy, in the book Hackers, talks at length about what he calls the ``hacker ethic.'' This phrase is very misleading. What he has discovered is the Hacker Aesthetic, the standards for art criticism of hacks. For example, when Richard Stallman says that information should be given out freely, his opinion is not based on a notion of property as theft, which (right or wrong) would be an ethical position. His argument is that keeping information secret is inefficient; it leads to unaesthetic duplication of effort. "

I think he raises some important question about what we mean by ethics in the first place as well as about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

An older, Greek, definition of ethics as virtue did not separate aesthetics and ethics so starkly in so far as Greek philosophy emphasized ethics as the virtuous and good life, rooted in the fulfillment of excellence. But even if you separate these two domains, one interesting question remains, when might the aesthetic become the ethical?

One can argue that the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in hacking concerns the broader issue of productive autonomy: the constellation of institutions, social norms, legal devices, and moral codes that hackers have created and draw upon in order to autonomously improve on the work of peers, refine their technical skills, and extend engineering traditions. Their actions, their guidelines, their norms however strike as ethical not for any inherent reason but because they sit in tension with mainstream proprietary models of knowledge in general and software in specific. So if we take a relational instead of ontological view of ethics, we can see how hacker aesthetics commitments are also ethical ones.

I have always wondered in fact whether Levy in Hackers identified the hacker ethic when he did and as he did (he noted that hackers did not themselves talk about ethics; he interpreted their actions as ethical) because this was a moment of crisis—a crisis of social reproduction to be specific—among the MIT hackers.

That is, the early 1980s was just the time when copyrights and patents were creeping into the world of software, when lucrative companies were hiring programmers, when NDAs were becoming more common, when in short, the aesthetics of hacking was forced to move into ethical territory. Stallman reacted to the evisceration of his MIT hacker community with what was clearly an ethical response: he established the idea and institution of Free Software aimed as cultural preservation and political advocacy. Perhaps it was just this crisis, these set of responses, that allowed Levy to identify the ethics of software freedom.

One cannot address hacker culture and politics without thinking seriously about journalism and journalistic representation. Whether it was Steven Levy for the university hackers or Bruce Sterling for the so-called hacker underground, these journalists gave substance and form and eventually widespread circulation to what existed far below public view.

Another key player in this story of hacker representations in the media was Stewart Brand, the first editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the founders of the WELL. Last week in class, we read one of his early pieces on hackers, a Rolling Stone article, Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. If you have not read it, I recommend it. Like many journalists writing about hackers and computers, the tone and style is a little over the top and dramatic (which is why it is fun to read) and one is transported back to the past when computers were a scarce resource.

His representation of hackers is slightly different than the other authors mentioned above. He did not quite capture the full meat and pulse of hacking in any depth but instead used them as important tokens and examples for reshaping the broader meaning of computing. He turned to hacking as a way to disassociate computers from their close association with military/bureaucratic institutions and endeavors and represent them anew, in a fresh, exciting light: as a tool for individual empowerment (though, as Fred Turner's wonderful book on the topic argues, Brand's vision still incorporated some elements of military thinking, such as cybernetics).

A number of students picked up on the fact that Brand's representation of computing, however influential in terms of building mainstream representations of personal computing, did not completely map onto the hacker experience, especially at the Homebrew Club where there was still a very collective sentiment brewing in the air though of course idioms of personal empowerment and individuality were also visible and strong. This was a time also not only when computer technologies became more accessible, leading to a considerable expansion in the hacker population, but when we start to see some of the first fault lines among hackers (notably over the role of intellectual property law). Growth always entails diversity in other words.

There are two parts of the article that really caught my attention. First, was Brand's very apt characterization of hacker projects into two categories: the low rent and high rent, which he put in the following terms:

A distinction exists between low rent and high rent computer research, between preoccupations of support group-(hackers) and of research group. The distinction blurs often. Les Earnest: "Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between recreation and work, happily. We try to judge people not on how much time they waste but on what they accomplish over fairly long periods of time, like a half year to a year." He adds that Spacewar players "are more from the support groups than the research groups. The research groups tend to get their kicks out of research." Spacewar is low-rent.

And perhaps mos surprising was part the way he foreshadows all sorts of uses for personal computing before the PC was even invented (like file sharing):

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form).

Indeed, so much for the record form...