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Last week I looked at Programming is Forgetting: Toward a 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" that inspired me when I was in middle school.
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:
- what being a "hacker" means
- our assumptions about learning, knowing and society
What "Hacker" Means
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
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.
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
Parrish's Hacker Ethic Rewrite
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 Mike Nolan 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.