<nettime> hacker culture

[Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>]

MWP wrote:

>I can't imagine anything more oxymoronic than the notion of a hacker
>"culture." Culture serves to circumscribe a common ethos within society.
>Hackers are by nature antisocial and anti-groupthink. (Not all, but
>many.) Magazines like 2600 strike me as being intended less to create
>secure social bonds between like-minded individuals than to pass along
>various tricks of the trade such as how to crack a payphone or
>something.

2600 and the like have lots of techie tricks, to be sure, but there's tons
of political concerns, too -- people are plenty concerned about the RIAA
and the MPAA, just as they used to be very concerned about Kevin Mitnick.
Hackers do form social bonds due to their activities, whether they meet
others at conventions or on IRC.

We're edging into dangerously semantic territory, but hackers definitely
seem to have culture to me. Most particularly, there are a number of
common beliefs that become apparent if you spend time with a bunch of them
at once, at, say, a "computer security conference":

- Exhaustive rigor in analyzing and criticizing arguments, disregarding
the emotions of the people involved in the discussion

- A strong trend towards libertarian political beliefs

- An extremely high value placed on technical and conceptual understanding

- that "Information wants to be free"

... not all of these traits are positive. (For one thing, the fact that
hacker culture tends to be very white, suburban, and male bugs me to no
end.) But it seems like a culture to me, and even one that can possibly
have an impact on society as a whole. Lots of non-hacker types have now
heard the idea that "Information wants to be free."  But who said it
first?

Technology itself bears a cultural weight. Even without involving
computers: Traditional Japanese book-binding techniques, for example,
portray a different way of relating to the world than western book-binding
techniques. What message has been communicated to young computer users now
that p2p networks have given them a glimpse of file-sharing? Are their
opinions of the RIAA different than they would've been 10 years ago?

Or take command-line Unix, for example. If you don't know it well, then a
line like

ls -lS | grep "Aug 1" | more

might seem like complete gibberish. But there are a number of ideas
embedded in Unix that aren't present in other OSs. I once read somewhere
that the Unix way is to make a number of small, highly independent tools
("ls" lists files, "grep" searches for text, etc.)  and then provide a few
dependable ways for those tools to talk to each other (the "|" character).
It betrays a certain desire to isolate actions in order to enhance
rational thinking. (It might also be related to the fact that many hackers
are libertarians.)

I would agree that hacking doesn't necessarily have much force as social
protest -- not every culture will do that. In particular, the strong
tendency towards individualism can make that difficult.

>Hacking has already
>become somewhat of a mainstream cultural activity, with large
>corporations even hiring hackers to ferret out internal weaknesses,
>sabotage copyright violators etc. Hacking hardly threatens the social
>order in any big way anymore (if it ever did). At worst a few hundred
>credit card #s might get pilfered now and again, causing capitalism to
>burp slightly in releasing the gas of greed that has been building up
>inside of its toxic bubble. Art, by contrast (borrowing Blanchot's
>distinction), remains a force that lies astringently outside of culture,
>threatening to undermine it by exposing its contradictions and defining
>where it is most self-destructively undermining itself. I know of no
>other way to do this, other than through political violence. That even
>the most intransigent of art inevitably reverts back to culture over
>time is not a strike against it, but an acknowledgment of its abiding
>potency and value. Art lives on, indeed prevails, if only because
>culture keeps refusing to believe in it.

So no artist has ever worked for a major corporation?

If hacking hardly threatens the social order any more, why do we keep
sending hackers to jail and passing more federal laws to send even more
hackers to jail?

Most art is useless, self-indulgent crap. So is most hacking. Beyond that
I'm not sure how much broad comparisons of either are useful.

Francis
-- 




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