finished first draft of twards a new hacker ethic

blogContent/posts/open-source/towards-a-new-hacker-ethic.md

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-Last week I looked at *Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic* by 
-Allison Parrish for the second time. This was an amazing talk given by Allison Parrish
-at the Open Hardware Summit in 2016. The first time I was introduced to this talk a year ago
-my friend was trying to introduce me to the nuanced differences between
-"new" and "old" FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) cultures. Every time that I
-looked at this piece I get excited because it made me ponder what our community
-*should* be, and what it *could* be. I am very reminiscent about
-all the 80's hacker lingo and literature like the ["Hackers Manifesto"](http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html) that 
-inspired me when I was in middle school.
+Last week I looked at [*Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker
+Ethic*](http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/)
+for a second time. This was an amazing talk given by Allison Parrish
+at the Open Hardware Summit in 2016. The first time I was introduced
+to this talk was over a year ago by a friend that was introducing me
+to the nuanced differences between "new" and "old" FOSS (Free and Open
+Source Software) cultures. Whenever I listen to this talk I get
+reminiscent about all the 70's and 80's hacker literature like the
+["Hackers Manifesto"](http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html) that 
+inspired me when I was in middle school.   
 
 <youtube src="4kiXCeJwrMQ" />
 
-In Parrish's talk she examined the points that Levy make in his book 
-*Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution*. This talk picked out how aspects
-of Levy's hacker ethos are problematic and how we can work to change this Hacker 
-Ethic to be more supporting of communities.
+In Parrish's talk she examined the points that Levy makes in his book 
+*Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution*. This talk picked out how
+aspects of Levy's hacker ethos are problematic and how we can work to
+change this Hacker Ethic to be more supporting of diverse communities.
 
-However, before we dive into the breakdown of Levy's and Parrish's arguments,
-it is important to have a common understanding of these things:
+However, before we dive into the breakdown of Levy's and Parrish's
+arguments, it is important to have a common understanding of these
+things:   
 
-- what hacker means
-- the nature of knowledge and knowing
-- our assumptions about society 
+- what being a "hacker" means
+- our assumptions about learning, knowing and society
 
 
-## What Hacker Means
+## What "Hacker" Means
 
+<youtube src="msX4oAXpvUE" />
 
-## Nature of Knowledge and Knowing
+The mainstream definition of a "hacker" is a derogatory term to
+describe cyber-criminals; however, "hacker" in the tech world is a
+very positive and well appraised term. In the tech world, "hacker" is
+used synonymously with geek: people who love to tinker with computers
+at great lengths. Due to the vast differences in the interpreted
+meaning of "hacker", people have been recently avoiding it. For this
+article and in general when people typically talk about "hacker
+culture", they are referring to the positive definition of hacker.    
 
+## Assumptions on knowledge and society
 
-## Assumptions about Society
+Being the philosophy buff that I am, I believe that recognizing our
+assumptions about knowledge and society is quintessential to
+understanding Levy's and Parrish's understanding of the hacker ethic. 
 
+![Knowledge](media/ethos/paradigms.png)
 
+On the scale of knowledge, people fall somewhere on the scale between
+subjective and objective thinking. An objectivist seeks
+generalizations, favors statistical analysis, and views reality as a
+fact separate from human experience. A subjectivist views that reality
+is formed through personal experience and views knowledge as a working
+definition up for change. When discussing learning, an objectivist
+will try to find the **Truth**, where a subjectivist will seek to
+learn **truths**. In policy analysis, objectivists would favor
+quantitative methods where subjectivists would favor qualitative
+methods.   
+
+On the scale of social processes people usually fall on a spectrum
+between *radical change* and *improvement*.   
+
+Status Quo (Improvement)   
+
+- social order
+- consensus
+- actuality
+
+Radical Change   
+
+- power structures
+- radical change
+- modes of domination
+- contradiction
+- potentiality
+
+Although people don't always fall at perfect edges of these spectrum,
+it provides a good frame of reference for analysis. I'm going to argue
+that Levy's ethos falls in the *positivism* quadrant where Parrish's
+ethos falls in the *Critical Humanism* quadrant.  
+
+# Levy's Hacker Ethic
+
+![Levy](media/ethos/levy.png)
+
+
+# Parrish's Hacker Ethic Rewrite
+
+![Allison](media/ethos/allison.png)
+
+# Why the difference?
+
+Despite the rewrite, both hacker ethics still emphasize the following
+points:  
+
+- sharing
+- openness
+- free access to computers
+- world improvement
+
+The major difference between the two ethics is not in the fundamental
+message but on the philosophical perspective of the authors.  
+
+Levy's hacker ethic was written and interpreted using the
+incrementalism framework.  Computer hacking is the means of
+incrementally improving flawed technology moving towards the
+**Truth**-- a computer system that perfectly works.  
+
+Allison's hacker ethic focuses on how can we use technology to better
+**truths**-- multiple computer systems designed with different
+purposes to better support communities. 
+
+
+# Who is right?
+
+As a subjectivist I would argue that the debate over which one is the
+**True** hacker ethic is fruitless. Since Parrish did not radically
+change the Hacker Ethic, I believe that we should consider it as a
+valuable contribution to the Hacker Ethic. Moving forward with this
+improved working definition of the ideal hacker, I believe that it
+will better enable us to better support communities. 
+
+Positivism has long been the dominant perspective when it comes to
+politics and research. However, in recent years there has been a
+shift towards a mix of objective and subjective perspectives 
+in research. This is due to the fact that when you look at the
+objective **Truth** or average of a population you often ignore minorities
+and edge cases. In public policy, an objective viewpoint is useful
+when doing cost-risk analysis; however, subjective research is useful
+when identifying complex social issues that are hard to quantify with
+numbers. 
+
+# How did we get here in technology?
+
+During the [Future is Open
+Conference](https://fossrit.github.io/events/2019/10/26/the-future-is-open/)
+[Mike Nolan](https://nolski.rocks/) gave an amazing analogy that
+exhibits how we got here and why we need to have the objective vs
+subjective debate in FOSS and hacker culture. Nolan compared
+the beginning of technology to homesteading in the western frontier.
+In the  beginning, there was plenty of land for everyone and everyone
+got their own chunk of land. Everyone was happy and they maintained
+their land or software independently of each other. There was rarely
+an issues. However, as time went on you couldn't get your own plot of
+land. We now all live in large cities packed with communities,
+governments, and law affecting our every action. With all of these
+competing entities it is impossible to work on instrumental software
+without interacting with these entities. 
+
+The things that hackers make often start as a personal project. We as
+hackers are content with perusing these projects towards our own
+objective **Truth**. What started as a personal project may turn into
+a massive open source project that dozens of  communities depend on.
+This is the root of a ton of friction now in days: our objective
+**Truth** may not align with the **truths** or needs of the community.
+To alleviate this "friction", I believe that adopting Allison's
+subjective interpretation of the Hacker Ethic is a great way to start.